Aesop’s ‘The Second Skin’ is a sensory sanctuary during Salone del Mobile 2025

The beating pulse of Brera is not where you can usually expect to discover a slow-down sanctuary during Salone del Mobile. Yet in the sacristy of Brera’s Chiesa del Carmine, Aesop has created just that.

The Australian skincare brand’s installation, ‘The Second Skin’, opened to design-week-goers on Monday (7 April 2025) as an antidote to the noise of the city in its busiest week of the year. It invites visitors to take a moment of respite and reflection by indulging their senses through a series of scent interactions.

Billed as ‘an exploration of dermis and design’, the installation sees the launch of Aesop’s new woody and herbaceous Eleos Aromatique body cleanser and lotion, comprising cedarwood, patchouli and clove – a product that has been nearly eight years in the making and which is celebrated on every surface.

Aesop's ‘The Second Skin’ at Salone del Mobile 2025

‘There’s an opportunity at Salone to create a symbiosis of our product and our design expertise,’ Marianne Lardilleux, Aesop’s director of global retail design, tells Wallpaper*. ‘We wanted to engage our visitors with the ingredients that made our exceptional produce and so you have these three ingredients everywhere in different forms – liquid and texture – which awakens the senses.’

At the sacristy, from a first encounter with laboratory glassware holding the jewel-toned fragrances through to the cloisters where sinks to wash hands in the new scent – much like those in Aesop’s boutiques – await to help you rinse off the day, guests are immersed in the brand’s sensory world.

Standing on a long cedarwood table are moulds of torsos created by Parisian artist Victoria Punturere, in collaboration with the Aesop design team, that have been polished in Eleos. ‘We wanted to provide a meticulous way to smell it, and we often say at Aesop that it’s better to smell fragrance directly on your body than on a piece of paper,’ says Lardilleux.

In the sacristy, guests are invited to wander in near darkness around an installation of cedarwood panels rubbed in the new Eleos scent and videos featuring contemporary dance performances created in collaboration with Nayoung Kim, a dancer of the Tanztheater Wuppertal. To finish the journey, Eleos Aromatique hand and arm massages are offered in the Capsule of Respite, a recessed room furnished with Italian design icons in collaboration with the Morentz gallery.

It was, in fact, a Milanese icon that provided stimulus for the Milan Design Week 2025 installation, with Lardilleux drawing a metaphor between the skin's epidermis and the city’s signature entranceways.

‘These [entryways] are hidden, you need to know about them and push the door,’ says Lardilleux. ‘Pushing the door of the sacristy was a [similar] gesture and, of course, the entryways are a threshold between the exterior world and what is the intimacy of your home. Your skin is the same, it’s protection between the exterior and your interior.’

The result is an experience that feels – as intended – like an intensely personal moment suspended in time. ‘This is about understanding something from the intimacy of self and not expecting you to form a line or a category of sameness,’ shares co-founder Suzanne Santos. ‘It’s very easy to return something to people in a short space of time when you have an ambience like this. You can recompose yourself and walk out the door – feel like you’ve both had an experience but also you’re better for the experience.’

Salone is in many ways the perfect forum for Aesop to take centre stage as the official ‘Sensory Patron’ of this year’s event. Hailed as a gamechanger in the design-led customer experiences of its 400-plus stores around the world, the annual design event is famously democratic – it is open to all to enjoy, mirroring Aesop’s resilient pricing structure and straight-talking communication style.

‘What we find beautiful about Salone del Mobile is that it’s open to everybody; it’s not like a fashion show where you need to get an invite or you enter a space where you have to pay,’ says Lardilleux. ‘Here is a place where everyone is welcome [and] a generous place to be for everyone to come and be inspired.’

Aesop’s ‘The Second Skin’ is open to the public at Sagrestia of the Chiesa del Carmine, Milan, from 8–13 April 2025.

aesop.com