The Surface Event
Milan Design Week turns the city into an amusement park. What stays when the rides stop?
After more than five years living in Milan, I finally saw Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. I didn’t plan it, but because a symposium was taking place next door and the ticket included a guided visit, at night.
The symposium, Prada Frames, had come to the complex of Santa Maria delle Grazie for the first time, under the title In Sight: now in its fifth edition and the intellectual kick-off for Salone del Mobile and Design Week with a subtle but powerful branding agenda, three days of lectures and conversations about image-making, AI and the analogue, how images circulate, whether they can still carry truth. Paola Antonelli, senior curator at MoMA, opened day one by asking how mediated images construct our spatial experience. The setting was a Renaissance sacristy attributed to Bramante, with 16th-century biblical scenes inlaid into the walls. The conversation was about AI-generated imagery and the collapse of the real.
Next to the room where Leonardo’s mural survives in its damaged, irreplaceable, entirely non-curated state, people were photographing it for posts tagged with the Milanese fashion house instead of looking at it. Nothing new, perhaps. But here the painting was a backdrop and the Instagram moment was the subject.
This is Design Week in 2026. Over 500,000 visitors moved through the city across seven days. Record passenger numbers at all three Milan airports. Hotels running near capacity, prices per night skyrocketed. The metro running well above its annual average. Fun fact: Pornhub recorded a 21 percent drop in traffic on Sunday evening, when the opening parties began. The city was, measurably, elsewhere. Milan has become the world's most stylish sellout.
The most talked-about moment was a red-carpet opening for the Californian furniture company RH entering the European market, an event that reportedly drew an unusual number of private jets to Linate. It was covered like a film premiere with a guest list to match. Someone called the whole week the new Coachella. The comparison is accurate, the difference is that at Coachella there are still, technically, good concerts and artistic entertainment.
To be fair to the week: there were fantastic projects in private apartments, historic palazzi, and independent spaces across the city. Milan's architectural depth and its design force are real, and Design Week surfaces them in ways that would otherwise stay invisible to most visitors. There's something genuinely good about walking the streets and seeing the city this alive, this international, this open.
The fashion industry is fully folded in now and seems to be substituting Fashion Weeks. A giant inflatable octopus wrapped around the facade of 10 Corso Como, fun! Fashion brand Marni redesigned Pasticceria Cucchi, an institution since 1948, down to its sugar packets, sweet! The Fuorisalone platform listed 1,300 activations citywide. Hundreds of creatives, studios, PR agents, catering companies and collaborators moved through the city for a week, producing work, generating content, mixing drinks, sending invoices to brands. I hope for them.
The big question running underneath all of it, what is real and what is artificial, turned out to be surprisingly physical. The inflatable octopus was real, the Negroni Sbagliato at the opening were real, the 16th-century frescoes were real. What felt less certain was the reason everyone had gathered around them.
What the events of design week leave behind, beyond the documentation and the invoices, is genuinely hard to locate. Design, at its most useful, is intelligent planning: a city that works better, a street that’s safer to cross, a public space that belongs to everyone. The city was a backdrop and the activations were the subject.
The city absorbed all of it, as it does every year. Milan is thriving, and design week generates €255 million for the local economy. But the city hosting the world’s largest celebration of design remains car-dominated, under-cycled, and infrastructure-strained. Milan is moving in the right direction, slowly. It has the designers. What it’s still waiting for is the will to design itself, rather than just collaborate on the next project.
Design is not surface. The version that looks best on a phone screen is the version that requires the least intelligence to produce. I’ll take the version that looks better and feels better in real life. The one that makes a city more walkable, more breathable, more genuinely public. That one is harder to photograph.
If you happened to be in Milan, what were your highlights and what didn’t you like? Hit me up.
*Moritz