O Milano! Design's epic annual spectacle in photos

Milan Design Week started life in 1961 as a furniture trade fair, the ‘Salone del Mobile’. And, though the trade fair itself is still a vital component of the event, the week is now a riotous, cacophonous, global celebration of cultural activity, matching our broadened appreciation of design as a tool for progress, more than a process for making furniture.

Precise data is still being crunched, but rumours circulated of close to half a million visitors to Milan over the course of this 63rd edition. There were 2,100 exhibitors, with 37 countries represented at the fair alone, and around 300 events in the city beyond. The days are long gone when a handful of larger commercial brands would dip their toes into proceedings with carefully orchestrated sponsorship of installations. Today, it feels like any brand keen to demonstrate its relevance must show up: tech, cars, fashion, beauty, architecture, art, craft, food, hospitality; from megabrands to brave students, government-sponsored to parent-supported. All were there. For a single week in a single city, Milan gives us a glimpse of our immediate present and possible future.

Even the most innocuous new table in a furniture brand’s showroom might demonstrate a decade’s worth of R&D into repurposing some form of waste material into a circular solution with significant potential impact far beyond its aesthetic credentials. Stories of extraordinary endeavour and ingenuity abound. The experience is overwhelming for all involved. Attending Milan Design Week is as punishing as it is inspiring. Visitors arrive springy like dry sponges, and limp out of town at the end of the week, saturated and sodden to the point of collapse. The departures lounge at Linate airport smells of Bar Basso.

Many local residents evacuate the city, making handsome profit from subletting their accommodation at upwards of ten times the amount they might ordinarily claim throughout the year. The estimated revenue for the city in 2024 during design week was €275m, up nearly 14 per cent compared to 2023.

We nod sagely in salons discussing healthier futures with better connected systems. We wolf down pasta in twice the time we really should. We stroke the backs of a thousand bouclé-upholstered sofas. We listen to sanguine responses about new tariffs in key markets. We stand in queues pre-registering with two per cent battery life to enter an exhibition about the need for analogue engagement. We wonder if aperitivo can count as dinner and if it’s madness to cross the city at midnight to join the group of friends we haven’t seen for five years. We do anyway, and it is totally worth it, even if it feels like the next day begins before the last one has ended. Nobody really sleeps during Milan Design Week, and the sooner you give up resistance and give into the fever dream, the more you tend to enjoy it.

A narrative has emerged in recent years that Milan Design Week is over: the city is too small; the logistics are unmanageable; the industry is broken; the carbon emissions are unconscionable; the queues are not worth it. There is some truth here, but it’s not the whole story. Armchair critics claim you can digest it more efficiently from a handful of Instagram accounts, but this misses the point entirely – it’s a wholly visceral experience, and risotto alla Milanese is really hard to make at home.

This year we set out to counter the instant coverage of the week via a thousand social media posts, and celebrate the glory of the week’s proceedings in its chaotic beauty and cinematic surreality. If, as we confidently proclaim it to be, Milan Design Week is the greatest show on earth, then it deserves to be seen in all its outrageous, multisensory splendour to be believed. Thank you, Milan.