If your feed has been bombarded with artsy moments in Milan by everyone and their mother—moody installation shots, improbable flower arrangements, and at least one friend posing in front of something large and abstract—consider this your official download on all the things. Milan Design Week 2026 has come and gone, leaving in its wake a very full calendar of openings, a very strong case for the power of craft, and approximately one thousand photos of people standing next to lamps. Here’s what I spotted…

I. Thread Theory

Textiles had a serious moment this year, with tapestries and woven works moving firmly out of the grandmother’s-living-room category and into the realm of serious collectible design. No one made that argument more elegantly than Loro Piana, whose Studies exhibition announced itself as one of the week’s most technically ambitious presentations. Chapter I: On the Plaid is exactly what it sounds like, and so much more than you’d expect. Since the mid-1980s, plaids have been among the house’s foundational products, serving as quiet laboratories for material experimentation. For this first chapter, twenty-four unique plaids were presented as individual studies—differentiated by technique, construction, pattern, and finish—arranged with the kind of curatorial restraint usually reserved for fine art. Fiber and yarn were displayed alongside finished pieces, making the raw material part of the story. The plaid, it turns out, is not just a plaid. It’s a record of a practice.

Above: The Alcove by Urjowan Alsharif Interiors. Photography by Manfredi Gioacchini. Left: Photo courtesy of La DoubleJ, Milan Design Week 2026. Right: Restoration Hardware, Milan, The Gallery on Corso Venezia. Photo courtesy of RH.

II. Go Big or Go Bigger

Milan was not in a demure mood this year. The maximalist impulse was alive and very, very well, and nowhere was it better executed than at Artemest’s fourth edition of L’Appartamento, which returned to the gloriously frescoed Palazzo Donizetti for another round of high-drama interiors. This year’s curatorial theme: Italian Grandeur, structured as a love letter to the Grand Tour. Five internationally acclaimed studios—Sasha Adler Design, March and White Design, Rockwell Group, Charlap Hyman & Herrero, and Urijowan Interiors—each took on a different Italian city: Venice, Rome, Naples, Palermo, and Florence, respectively. Visitors ascended the palazzo’s monumental elliptical staircase (a staircase so epic it really deserves its own moment) into a series of rooms that felt less like an exhibition and more like a spellbinding novella with exceptional furniture. La DoubleJ took a different approach to grandeur entirely, and arguably the most unclassifiable one of the week. Its flagship was transformed by an installation titled Size Matters, inspired by René Magritte’s Les Valeurs Personnelles, in which everyday objects—a comb, a wine glass, a coffee cup—occupy a bedroom at the scale of furniture. The result was part surrealist fever dream, part showroom, part spiritual provocation. Anchoring the space were oversized homeware sculptures hand-crafted by Maestro Luca Bertozzi, the carnival artisan whose usual medium is floats the size of buildings. Woven throughout were pieces from the new Al Fresco collection, including weather-resistant Baba Poufs in the house’s signature prints and two-toned folding tables built for long lunches. The week also served as prelude to a newly announced partnership with Villa San Michele in Florence, a Belmond Hotel—a marriage of bespoke design and curated spiritual wellness, timed to the property’s reopening. Magritte would approve. Meanwhile, RH made its Italian debut on Corso Venezia—seven floors inside a restored neoclassical palazzo, introducing RH Estates, a new direction that reframes late-nineties California through a contemporary lens. More is more, and then some.

III. Let There Be (Sculptural) Light

The floor lamp has officially been promoted. This year, lighting crossed decisively into objet d’art territory, with designers treating the lamp more as a statement of intent. The most talked-about arrival came from a perhaps unexpected source: Aesop launched Aposē, its first-ever lighting collection—a trio of table lamp, pendant, and floor lamp, each derived from the silhouette of the brand’s iconic hand balm tube. Form follows familiarity, and it works. Kelly Wearstler also delivered new lighting for H&M, proving that the democratization of good design remains very much on the agenda.

Kelly Wearstler’s lighting collection for H&M. Photo courtesy of Kelly Wearstler.

IV. Nature, in All Its Forms

The natural world cast a long shadow over this year’s fair — sometimes literally. At Galleria Meravigli, Range Rover mounted Traces, a comprehensive exhibition of the craft and artistry behind the brand’s more rarefied offerings, overseen by Storey Studio. The star was the newly released Bespoke Pearl of Tay—a one-of-one commission with a duotone pearlescent finish, jeweled detailing, and shaded embroidery, but the real curatorial coup was the surrounding selection of contemporary Scottish crafts assembled by Bard, the Edinburgh store and gallery founded by James Stevens and Hugo Macdonald, under the heading Memory and Material. Sparkling, earthy, and deeply authentic, the pieces mirrored the Pearl of Tay’s obsessive attention to materiality and made a quiet but pointed argument for Range Rover’s ability to move freely in the same rarefied circles traditionally occupied by Rolls-Royce and Bentley. The effect was part car show, part poem. On the more exuberant end of the nature spectrum, Veuve Clicquot and British-Nigerian artist, designer, and architect of joy Yinka Ilori collaborated on Chasing the Sun, an immersive journey from sunrise to sunset, saturated in the house’s signature yellow. Hands protecting the sun, symbols of human connection, and the kind of joyful color theory that makes you feel, briefly, like everything is going to be just fine.

Range Rover’s ‘Traces’, an exhibition of the craft and artistry behind the brand’s more rarefied offerings, overseen by Storey Studio.

V. The Hand Is Back

In a moment when AI-generated imagery is everywhere and automated production is the norm, the handmade object has acquired a new gravitational pull. Milan noticed. JW Anderson unveiled a series of willow baskets made in collaboration with Eddie Glew, sculptor and master Yeoman Basketmaker—each piece handmade in England and woven from the finest British willow. It’s a pairing that places ancient weave structures in conversation with contemporary design thinking and, in the context of Milan’s relentless forward momentum, feels both timely and quite radical. Kohler and Flamingo Estate made a similarly thoughtful case with Return to the Source, an exploration of the tension between geometric brutalism and untamed nature. Four custom cast-iron pollinator baths, handmade in Kohler, Wisconsin, were placed throughout a garden installation, embodying the idea that design should honor the rhythms of the natural world rather than override them.

Top: JW Anderson’s series of willow baskets made in collaboration with Eddie Glew, sculptor and master Yeoman Basketmaker. Bottom: The Kohler x Flamingo Estate display at Milan Design week, 2026.

VI. The Dinner Party as Art Form

Natalia Criado and ceramics atelier Laboratorio Paravicini offered one of the week’s most quietly affecting presentations: The Invisible Table, staged in the 5VIE district. Their collection, Metalia, brings together hand-painted ceramic dishes and sculptural metal chargers, but the real provocation was in the installation itself, which arranged the works as a spatial composition rather than a conventional table setting. Domestic objects becoming ceremonial, everyday rituals reframed as something worth examining. 

Above: ‘The Invisible Table’, by Natalia Criado and ceramics atelier Laboratorio Paravicini.

VII. Reading the Room

Fashion’s presence at Salone is now wholly unremarkable, but this year, a handful of designers made genuinely interesting cultural moves that warranted a double-take. Miu Miu’s fourth annual Literary Club, Politics of Desire, explored sexuality, consent, and desire through the work of Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux and Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo. Conversations, lectures, live performances, and on its final day, gifted books. Meanwhile, Jil Sander, in collaboration with Copenhagen-based magazine Apartamento, staged a Reference Library in which sixty writers, designers, filmmakers, and thinkers—including Sofia Coppola, Celine Song, and Mona Chalabi—each nominated a book that shaped them. In a week full of sensory overload, a room full of books felt quite radical.

Top: A staged Reference Library by Jil Sander, in collaboration with Copenhagen-based magazine Apartamento. Bottom: Miu Miu’s fourth annual Literary Club display at Milan Design Week, 2026.

VIII. The Architecture of Objects

Lina Ghotmeh’s labyrinthine pink installation at Palazzo Litta offered a preview of the “archaeology of the future” philosophy she’ll bring to the British Museum’s Western Range Galleries in the years ahead. And Hermès, in a presentation designed by architect Charlotte Macaux Perelman, turned a field of beechwood volumes into something resembling a low-lying city, featuring objects placed on plinths like coordinates on a map, the centerpiece being a marble table by Barber & Osgerby shaped in a soft figure eight. The invitation was to slow down, move through, and let the relationship between objects reveal themself gradually. This was a masterclass in restraint and letting objets speak for themselves.

Top: Lina Ghotmeh’s labyrinthine pink installation at Palazzo Litta. Bottom: A presentation by Hermès, designed by architect Charlotte Macaux Perelman.

Credits:

Written by Cara Gibbs | @caraagibbs