Six Days, 350,000 People, 2,000 Shows: What Makes Milan Design Week?

We've gathered the best designs and the best arguments of 2017 in one place.

In early April, the sun does not rise over Milan until seven in the morning, and it stays up past eight at night.

At six in the evening the Salone del Mobile — the Milan International Furniture Fair, out at the Expo grounds on the edge of town — shuts its doors, and visitors carrying every kind of tote bag, each stuffed with catalogues of new furniture, pour onto the metro in waves, bound for the Duomo, the Brera district, or the young, noisy streets of Lambrate. On certain days most of the shows in town stay open until ten. Well-dressed people head for club parties tucked away down side streets; young people in light clothes drift from showroom to gallery to bar with a beer or an ice cream in hand.

That, more or less, is Milan Design Week.

In 2017 the list included the Tom Dixon and IKEA collaboration that social media had been trailing noisily for weeks, the newest home pieces from Louis Vuitton and Hermès, the strange installation Studio Swine built for COS, the first project between the prankish Spanish designer Jaime Hayon and the stone company Caesarstone, Cassina's 90th-anniversary celebrations. In six short days at least 350,000 people found themselves unable to be everywhere at once, wishing they could split into five copies of themselves and get around the more than 2,000 shows, large and small, spread across the city.

Stefan Holwe, founder of the Berlin travel-goods company Horizn Studios, calls Milan Design Week the design world's Super Bowl. For most people it is closer to design's fashion week, with spring/summer and autumn/winter delivered in a single burst: every new taste and material, the best-known designers and the best-funded brands, all in one place at one time. If you are a designer, Milan matters the way Paris Fashion Week matters to a fashion editor.

Milanese now know that their city puts on a Design Week every year. But the name is still new to most of them. For much longer they called it the Salone del Mobile — the Milan International Furniture Fair, a 56-year-old trade show set up to display and sell Italian furniture, which grew into the largest home-furnishings fair in the world.

Milan Design Week in the full sense now has two halves, one inside the city and one outside it. Inside is the Fuorisalone, the loose mass of independent exhibitions and events. Outside, in Milan's Rho district, is the Salone del Mobile, where the furniture fair began and where the whole fair is now staged, in the Milan Expo halls.

It grew out of a furniture fair, but it changes and expands every year, and its structure is getting complicated.

That has everything to do with the big companies moving in. Electronics giants — Samsung, Apple, Panasonic — carmakers like BMW and Audi, internet companies like Airbnb, even fashion labels like Nike and COS have all put on shows here, displaying new products or design concepts.

At Milan Design Week 2016, Nike asked 10 designers to build an installation show about movement. PepsiCo used the week to launch its newest drinks-bottle design. This year Airbnb hired designers to lead visitors on tours through a 15th-century house, and Audi set two sound-collecting installations in the courtyard of a seminary to show off the artificial intelligence it has developed in-house.

Some people think this is a good thing. Marcus Fairs, editor-in-chief of Dezeen, wrote in praise of it last year: "These shows are enormous fun — in fact they are the best thing in the city center. These brands used to be unwelcome. Now they are making Milan so special, with a new kind of marketing and with experimental exhibitions."

Others think the tangle has left the furniture fair unsure of what it is. "Hunting down those exhibitions around the city is exhausting; you cross crowded streets for one small show on the edge of town," wrote the design critic Alice Rawsthorn in a piece for Frieze. "And most of it is shameless promotion with very little to do with furniture. Which is why the British designer Jasper Morrison once suggested renaming the Salone del Mobile — the Milan Furniture Fair — the Salone del Marketing."

Morrison may be exactly right, but people do not seem to mind that Milan Design Week has become part trade show and part platform for new ideas. It means everyone can find a spot in the crowd.

Tom Dixon and IKEA appear to read the change the same way. This year Multiplex, curated by Dixon himself, and the IKEA Festival in Lambrate both put ideas and sales in the same room.

Dixon took over a 1950s cinema and split it in two: installations upstairs, pop-up shops downstairs. The installation floor, a screening room plus several other public spaces, laid out the whole design concept behind the modular sofa he made with IKEA, along with the work he did with 75 students from Parsons in New York, the Royal College of Art in Britain and design programs in Japan on what modular furniture might become.

The ground floor was one wide corridor lined with temporary shops: Sonos, IKEA, the IOTA Project (which makes handsome woven goods and exists to create jobs for unemployed people around the world) and Tom Dixon lighting. These were not displays. They were real shops, where you could walk out with a Tom Dixon lamp, a handmade blanket, IKEA's newest sleeping bag or a Sonos speaker.

From the door of the Multiplex cinema you could pick up a shuttle bus straight to Lambrate, where the much-watched IKEA Festival was. IKEA had rented an old factory of more than 3,500 square meters and put its new products inside.

It was less an exhibition than a market with everything in it. Just past the entrance, the American designer Kevin Lyons — whose posters for IKEA's art event QDaily has written about before — was filling an enormous white wall with the little monsters he draws.

Farther in, the London artist Faye Toogood had made a show about play called Enfant Terrible, where you could grab an IKEA non-slip mat and take a turn down a slide. Elsewhere there was a sitting room with cello music drifting through it, a study laid out like a plant workshop, and drawing robots working from programs written in advance.

IKEA hid its own furniture inside all these themed events and set pieces. And whether it was a poster, a colored rug or a modular sofa, most of it could be bought on the spot — the exceptions being a few pieces not yet on sale, such as the VIMLE range made with Hay, which reaches stores after October this year.

Technology and the internet are changing Design Week too, and more smart furniture and lighting turned up at both the fair and the concept shows. But the words at this year's fair were "invisible technology" and "using technology to create a sense of luxury." Designers had started asking how to hide technology behind craft, and how to marry it more naturally to traditional materials.

Electronics Meets Crafts, which won this year's Milano Design Award for best storytelling, is one attempt at an answer.

The Japanese appliance brand Panasonic worked with GO ON, an alliance of long-established traditional craft houses in Kyoto, on the project.

GO ON's members include Masataka Hosoo of Hosoo, the Nishijin weaving house; Hosai Matsubayashi of the tea-ceramics kiln Asahiyaki; Tatsuyuki Kosuge of the bamboo craftsmen Kohchosai Kosuga; Takahiro Yagi of the tea-caddy maker Kaikado; and many other artisans. The group has been working together since 2012.

The aim of the Panasonic–GO ON project is to build appliances that reach the five senses and memory. Its first proper product line came out in September 2016.

The pieces shown in Milan included a speaker made with Kaikado in the shape of a tea caddy, its music controlled by opening and closing the lid; a "moon lamp" made with Kohchosai Kosuga, whose traditional Japanese bamboo weaving throws light and shadow in a natural rhythm; and, with the woodworking studio Nakagawa Mokkougei, a sake warmer for use on an induction hob and a wooden tub for cooling sake.

The jury's citation: "It turns the theme of the exhibition into a flowing history, in which the technology is hidden inside the story behind the craft tradition."

Bang & Olufsen did something similar. It launched BeoSound, a new wall-mounted speaker range, in a show called A New Way to Live With Sound, where you could hardly find a trace of anything high-tech — only geometric colored tiles on the walls.

"We want music indoors to be like sunlight or air — ergonomic and natural at the same time," said Marie Kristine Schmidt, B&O's vice president for design and marketing. "Modern luxury is not about making a lot of things. I think we are heading toward a moment where we don't need many things. We need the things that actually make us happy."

"I believe the real challenge for industrial designers in the future is to keep finding the balance between what new technology can do and what a product makes people feel," Claudio Luti, who runs the Milan furniture fair, wrote in the trend report the fair publishes each year.

Tony Chambers, editor-in-chief of Wallpaper, had already told QDaily at Singapore Design Week what made the theme of this year's Handmade project in Milan unusual. In a world this full of change and conflict, he said, people may want objects with some spiritual force in them.

He spoke for a good number of designers in Milan this year. One of them was Studio Swine, whose interactive sculpture New Spring, made for COS, had a queue outside it every day. It sat in a theater blacked out completely; in the middle of the space a glowing tree-shaped sculpture puffed out balls of white mist. The designers said they wanted a calming, restful installation as their answer to the "change and crisis" of the moment.

"We own far too much. Sometimes less is the real luxury," Alexander Groves, the British artist who co-founded Studio Swine, told the audience at the opening. "We're glad to have designed something that doesn't need to be sold. A designer can design an experience instead of more goods."

"This year's Milan Design Week is different," a staff member said at the pop-up shop Moroso ran this year with the publisher Phaidon. "Last year the mood was nothing like this. To celebrate our work with Ron Arad we painted the place pitch black to show his pieces. This year, as you can see, we invited a 16-year-old artist, Achilleas Souras. Moroso built this shelter with him out of life jackets collected from Greek beaches. We think Europe is changing. A lot happened last year, and we ought to be paying attention."

"The themes of this year's Milan Design Week are not a dramatic or wholly different reading of 2016," the CNN commentator Fiona Sinclair Scott wrote in an article on this year's trends. "Design is like art and fashion: very sensitive to changes in the world. So recycled materials, and the turn against material waste, will stay among the industry's main subjects from here on."

At the Triennale Design Museum, the Belgian company ECO-Oh! put on a show called Let's Recycle Life about what it has achieved in plastics-recycling technology.

"We sort the plastic — packaging film in one group, containers, bottle caps and plastic electronics in another. Then we wash it and grind it down," a member of the Eco-Oh! staff told QDaily. "Our technology turns those different plastics into hard, hard-wearing board. The whole process is 100 percent recycled plastic."

Three colleagues from the Danish textile brand Kvadrat set up a textile company called Really and developed a rigid material made from recycled cotton and wool, usable for furniture, book covers and more. This year Really staged a show in Milan, Really: Designing for Recycling, about what to do with the growing mountain of discarded clothes and bedsheets.

"We think recycling is bound to be one of the trends of the future," said Bemz, a Stockholm company invited by Tom Dixon to show at Multiplex this year. It is an independent online retailer that makes covers for every IKEA sofa. "We hope our designs make people less quick to throw things out. Sometimes a small change is enough to make you love something again."

Design Week is too big; in six days there were far too many shows we missed and too many events and talks we never reached. Below are a few of this year's important furniture exhibitions — our report back on some of the shows QDaily flagged in its Design Week preview.

Louis Vuitton: Objects Nomades

Once press day was over, getting into the Louis Vuitton showroom meant standing in line, at least for a while.

Much of the draw was the roster of designers, all names people know: the Campana brothers from Brazil, Tokujin Yoshioka, Marcel Wanders, Nendo, Atelier Oi. They added 10 new pieces to the fifth edition of LV's furniture collection on the theme of travel.

Walking through it is a pleasure in itself, especially in the mirrored room hung with Atelier Oi's lamps, where for a moment you think you have wandered into a blazing palace.

The other piece worth singling out is Tokujin Yoshioka's petal chair. To answer the travel theme, most of the furniture here comes apart and packs away by some clever means, and this small, likeable chair is no exception. It is a handful of curved, oddly shaped panels slotted together — a startlingly simple principle that produces a smooth kind of beauty.

Hermès

Hermès loves equestrian culture, and this year's show worked that aristocratic sport for everything it has. You would not guess leather, metal buckles and knotted rope could be put to so many uses.

The new pieces include tableware, tables, stools, small trolleys, coat hooks and scarves, grouped into seven collections and made in wood, lacquer, wicker, crystal and metal.

At the start of the show, the guide told visitors: "Leather has always been bound up with the horse. Hermès frees the animal from the harness that keeps it from moving as it likes, and lets leather bring a truer beauty into the home. There are two ideas in this exhibition: beauty, which you can see; and function, which means these things are always easy to carry and to use."

Hermès insists on its own craft and materials and designs and makes its furniture itself, but the studio also works with well-known designers and architects. This year the Pritzker Prize–winning architect Álvaro Siza designed a small triangular stool, the product design studio Barber & Osgerby a black low table, and the French designer Pierre Charpin a series of plates.

Jaime Hayon X Caesarstone

In his first collaboration with Caesarstone, Jaime Hayon stayed exactly as mischievous as ever, using every kind of stone to build a playground: cabinets shaped like clowns, tables shaped like birds, round seats that spin, a colored palace. He called it Stone Age Folks.

The palace, Hayon said, came from the Crystal Palace built for the 1851 Great Exhibition in London's Hyde Park. He mounted 40 stones, each a different color, transparency and shape, on a black iron frame. Under the lights, both the walls of the hall and the floor inside the palace threw back beautiful colored light, the way daylight comes through a church's rose window onto the flagstones.

Nendo

Nendo worked with the fashion brand Jil Sander this year, putting its studio's show in a two-floor showroom: the T-shirts the studio made with Jil Sander, furniture designed for Alias, Cappellini, Moroso and others, concept lamps for the lighting brand Flos. Taken together it read as a review of Nendo's work over the past two years.

None of which stopped the small showroom from becoming one of the hottest addresses in Milan this year — the line outside Nendo was longer than the one outside Louis Vuitton. Visitors came for the piece that was already famous before Design Week began: a set of transparent silicone vases.

The vases sit submerged in a glass tank. Their thin, faintly blue bodies are silicone, and they sway in the water like jellyfish. From any angle they make a strange and lovely picture.

Cassina 9.0

Cassina's 90th-anniversary celebration came in two parts. One was the showroom on the boutique street behind the Duomo, which held classics such as Gio Ponti's chairs alongside new sofa ranges by Patricia Urquiola and Konstantin Grcic.

The other was inside the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli building by Herzog & de Meuron, a long structure with a pitched roof. Cassina 9.0, curated by Patricia Urquiola, took the first and fifth floors of one corner of it.

The brightly painted walls and Cassina furniture on the first floor made an entertaining interior, and the brand and curator had added VR kit and other new technology, but the fifth floor was the high point of the show — partly because it is the highest point of the building, with all of Milan laid out below, and partly because Cassina had brought out its restoration of the Refuge Tonneau, designed in 1938 by Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret.

The idea for this tiny piece of portable architecture came from Perriand, a keen mountaineer; Jeanneret joined later and the two designed the interior together. The furnishings inside are stripped to the bone and entirely practical — a model of what a mobile building for extreme weather should be.

Rong (《融》)

Rong, in the Tortona district, is in its fifth year. In the past each edition was curated around a single material; this year the curator, Zhang Lei, a co-founder of the Hangzhou design studio Pinwu, gathered every industrial design the project has made with 50 designers over five years into one show — an overview of Rong as a whole.

By the exhibition's own count, it covers 51 Chinese handicrafts and nearly 500 traditional materials, falling into five families: bamboo, silk, clay, copper and paper.

The space is not large — three rooms — and because there is so much in it, the work is packed in tight: ornaments, chairs, vessels, clothing, art installations. The two largest and most arresting pieces are Ledi Garden, made by Pinwu co-founder Jovana Zhang from 15 giant paper-cuts, and Lake, woven by Christoph John, co-founder of the Rong Design Library in Yuhang, from very fine copper wire.

The other good part is that the show sets out many of the techniques step by step, along with the properties and uses of each material: how a lacquered wooden box with silver patterning is made, what separates one embroidery style from another. Even for Chinese visitors, much of this is new.

Cover image from Dezeen. Photographs without a credit were taken on site.