schön! selects | the highlights of milan design week 2026

And just like that, another Milan Design Week comes to an end. This year, the Lombard capital turned itself inside out, with Salone del Mobile 2026 landing like an urban experiment that finally stopped pretending to be a furniture fair. While the Rho Fiera fairgrounds tracked the evolution of the kitchen, the real energy lived in the streets, where heritage houses and independent disruptors treated the pavement as an open-source laboratory. Hermès reconfigured urban spaces with palladium-plated metal and leather accents, while Bottega Veneta turned its stores into light-filled sculptures of woven leather alongside Korean artist Kwangho Lee. Saint Laurent collaborated with the Gio Ponti archive to resurrect iconic 1950s tableware, showing that looking back can be as radical as any new technology. Schön! navigated the madness to find the moments where the boundary between a domestic object and a wild idea completely dissolved, tracking a new landscape defined by everything from seafaring carbon fibre to AI-generated poetry. Nike. Nike took over the railway tunnels at Dropcity to establish the NikeAir_Lab. Global designers gathered to view prototypes like ‘Air Liquid Max’ and ‘FlyWeb’ while exploring the history of the brand’s obsession with air. Aerospace engineer Frank Rudy saw his early... Read more »

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