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Every April, fashion takes a detour. Salone del Mobile lures the industry away from runways and into palazzo courtyards, boutique basements, and former industrial buildings. Proof, if any was needed, that the best fashion and luxury houses have always understood that the clothes are only one part of the picture. This year’s Milan Design Week saw a quietly impressive showing from the industry: some brought furniture, some brought art, one brought baskets. Here’s what was worth paying attention to.
Chloé × Poltronova
Chloé’s re-edition of the Tomato chair, originally designed in 1970 by Christian Adam, is the kind of project that makes complete sense in retrospect and yet somehow nobody had thought to do sooner. Under Chemena Kamali’s creative direction, the house has been reclaiming a certain vocabulary of organic softness, and the Tomato chair, with its rounded, almost tactile form and its refusal to sit up straight, speaks that language fluently. Produced in limited quantities during the 1970s and long sought-after by collectors, it’s been reissued in collaboration with Poltronova, an Italian manufacturer with serious radical design credentials, in naturally tanned leather across four colours: cream, cognac, sand, and black.
JW Anderson × Eddie Glew
Jonathan Anderson has never been particularly interested in the expected, and his Salone contribution this year leaned fully into that. Rather than a furniture collaboration or an installation with a concept statement, Anderson commissioned master basketmaker Eddie Glew, a Yeoman Basket Maker based in Staffordshire who learned the craft from his late father, to produce four hand-woven pieces: a Blanket Basket, a Log Basket, a Laundry Basket, and a Basket Bag. Each is made from British willow using techniques that trace back through generations, with structural references to medieval storage chests. The accompanying film, narrated by art historian Dr. James Fox, documents Glew’s process with the kind of attention it deserves. During Salone, Glew hosted live demonstrations at the JW Anderson Milan flagship, carving flowers from single pieces of wood using only a shave horse, a draw knife, and his hands, a Romany tradition passed down through his family. Guests left with one. It’s the most quietly radical thing Anderson could have done, and it worked.
Tod’s — Icons by Icons
Tod’s used Salone to do what it does best: tell the story of Italian making. The project, Icons by Icons, takes four landmarks of 20th-century Italian design and translates each into a limited-edition reinterpretation of the Gommino loafer: Joe Colombo’s Elda armchair, Gaetano Pesce’s Crosby chair, Michele De Lucchi’s Kristall table for Memphis Milano, and the Brionvega RR226 Radiofonografo by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni. And it’s genuinely, unapologetically fun: a loafer wearing the Kristall table’s graphic black-and-white pattern with a yellow sole, another channelling the Brionvega’s warm wood and perforated panels in deep burgundy leather, Pesce’s Crosby chairs grinning in the background like they’re in on the joke. It sounds like it could be a marketing exercise, but the results are sharp and full of personality. There’s a long-form conversation between the brand’s craft heritage and Italy’s design canon happening here, and it’s handled with both intelligence and a sense of humour. Presented at Via Savona 56, with Tod’s artisans on hand to demonstrate the Gommino’s signature hand-stitching. The limited editions launched exclusively at the Milan Montenapoleone boutique and on tods.com.
Valentino Beauty × Tabboo!
Valentino Beauty brought Tabboo!, the New York painter, performer, and drag artist who has been making work since 1982 and whose paintings live in MoMA and the Whitney, to Porta Nuova for a pop-up built around the Born in Roma Purple Melancholia fragrance duo. His graphics dressed the space in characteristic colour and energy, which is the right call for a fragrance that frames melancholy as creative fuel. Not the most design-forward activation on this list, but one of the most fun.
Dior Maison × Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance
Dior’s ongoing dialogue with French designer Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance has been one of the more genuinely interesting creative partnerships in luxury design in recent years, and this year’s Salone instalment didn’t disappoint. New iterations of the Corolle lamps, the collection’s centrepiece, arrived in two material registers: mouth-blown glass shaped by Murano craftsmen, its surface catching the fluidity of folded fabric, and woven Madake bamboo fibres arranged into the kind of geometric precision that makes you forget a human hand made it. Both feel like objects that live somewhere between couture and sculpture, which is exactly where Dior Maison operates best. A selection was available exclusively at the Dior Montenapoleone boutique during Design Week.
Moynat — The Trunk
Moynat opened its first Italian boutique at 3 Via Monte Napoleone and marked the occasion with an exhibition, The Trunk, commissioning three artists to reimagine the house’s foundational object. One of the artists is Hall Haus, the Paris-based studio founded by Abdoulaye Niang, Sammy Bernoussi, Teddy Sanches, and Zakari Boukhari, whose practice is shaped by diasporic Parisian culture and a genuine commitment to making design less exclusive. They turned the trunk into a sound system tower, merging the house’s M monogram with their own Olympic logo in a work that evokes block parties and collective gathering. Marianna Ladreyt made Parkour, modular foam blocks covered in upcycled beach inflatables that invited visitors to sit and rearrange, treating Moynat’s archival trunks as body-scale playgrounds. Michael Samuels assembled towers from 1960s laboratory cases and storage trunks from the now-defunct London Museum into near-monumental sculptural forms, objects of travel repurposed into architectures of memory. It’s a genuinely strong three-part show, and a confident statement from a house that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves.
Jil Sander × Apartamento — Reference Library
The most restrained and arguably the most considered thing at Salone this year. Jil Sander and Apartamento magazine brought together 60 books chosen by 60 contributors; writers, designers, architects, filmmakers, thinkers. and presented them at the Jil Sander showroom on chrome lecterns, each lit by a reading beam, mirrored wall carrying their reflection back. Entry by timed registration; visitors given white gloves on arrival. The gloves to keep. The books to stay. The title: Reference Library. In a week when most brands were competing on spectacle, Jil Sander and Apartamento made a case for slowing down. which, given the show’s explicit framing around the decline of reading and the attention economy, felt like more than set dressing.
Bottega Veneta × Kwangho Lee
Bottega Veneta’s third collaboration with Korean artist Kwangho Lee under Louise Trotter’s creative direction produced Lightful, a site-specific installation at the Via Sant’Andrea store combining Lee’s characteristic suspended woven forms with new light sculptures woven from Bottega’s leather fettucce strips. In black and green chosen by Trotter, each sculpture holds an organic shape that reads as both architectural and alive. Lee visited the Bottega atelier in Montebello Vicentino during the development process, and it shows in the intimacy of the result. A house that has always built its identity around weaving finding an artist whose entire practice is about what happens at the moment materials meet: it’s a natural pairing that keeps getting better.
Dolce&Gabbana Casa
Dolce&Gabbana Casa continued building out its interiors universe in collaboration with Luxury Living Group, presenting new collections across indoor and outdoor furniture at Via Durini 23. Soft lines and sinuous geometries define the interior Moss and Gardenia collections; the Saint Jean outdoor line expands with the house’s signature prints — Leopard, Zebra, Sicilian Cart, Blu Mediterraneo majolica tiles — applied to sofas, loungers, and round tables. At Corso Venezia 7, the window displays were given over to The Italian Lunch, an act of love, a live performance running twice daily through the week: the table as theatre, Mise en Place as gesture. Maximalism done right.
Level Shoes — Sounds of Design
The Dubai-born footwear retailer made a quieter but no less considered mark. Sounds of Design, curated by Golden Side at a historic Milanese building in Brera, a former site of musical production, brought together objects from international designers and brands around a central question: what does design sound like? Artist Neuf Voix contributed original sound compositions derived from the production processes of the featured works, activated at intervals throughout the day. For a brand rooted in Dubai and built around movement between cities and cultures, choosing Brera as the site of a reflection on sound, space, and material was a considered choice.
