The Fashionization of Milan
From Range Rovers to Rothkos, fashion’s takeover of Milan's design week, plus auction highs and lows, and Philippe Starck grumbles.
A quick note for new readers: TDR started in 2017 when my co-founder, Leo Lei, and I (Julia - hello!) couldn't find a source for design exhibition listings while working in NYC and traveling internationally scouting new talent for a furniture fair and Leo’s store, Leibal. With our third founder Zack, we've built what we wished existed then - a platform tracking collectible and independent design shows globally. Having come up in New York's design scene, we know seeing exhibitions and meeting the community firsthand is how design lovers become design insiders, and we hope TDR becomes your go-to guide for navigating the global design landscape.
Below you’ll find exhibitions that have caught my attention, news, stuff I like, and my commentary! I hope you enjoy.
Hello Friends,
Happy May! There are so many wonderful events happening this month, including NYC Design Week (or NYCxDesign if you work for Sandow), and for those of you interested in seeing what’s happening, head over to our calendar. We will continue to fill it up until the last moment, and don’t forget to submit your events as well.
This issue is dense, so I’ll be publishing a standalone NYC Design Week guide as an In-Sites exclusive this month. I’ll aim to make it a walking tour so that no one gets traumatized on the subway, and we’ll also include free tickets and VIP event access to readers.
Speaking of tickets! Our favorite art fair, Future Fair (NYC), opens next week, and we have 40 comped tickets for our readers. These tickets grant you access to their Chelsea Night, which aligns with the Thursday gallery openings in the neighborhood. Book a nice dinner while you’re at it! Future Fair is a fantastic show run by some of the coolest people in the art world — I highly recommend checking it out.
In-Sites
Last week, we introduced Shelter to our In-Sites subscribers, with a preview available here. Shelter is the new trade show taking place May 17 - 19 during NYC Design Week, founded by fashion and design trade show veterans Deirdre Maloney and Minya Quirk. I’m a trade show veteran myself, so this is a topic I find endlessly fascinating, especially knowing how incredibly challenging and increasingly expensive it is to run a fair in New York. Deirdre and Minya shared candid insights on transitioning from fashion to design, including the biggest surprise they discovered about the design world, as well as the economics of launching a fair in NYC.
Shelter is hitting that sweet spot in design that has been missing a spotlight for a few years: a showcase (and community) for designers of truly bespoke, beautiful, handmade furniture that doesn’t quite fall into the collectible category that has become so popular in recent years. Collectible has the avant-garde/art-furniture category covered now, and their next New York City edition is scheduled for September.
Coming up on In-Sites, as noted above, we will do a big NYCxDesign issue due around May 12th so keep us posted with your events if you want to be included.
And for the next next In-Sites (mid-June) we have an interview lined up with social media expert Lola Wang about staying ahead of the IG algorithm, growing your audience, and where things are headed next. She shares actionable tips (and a whole strategy for interior designers), and I weigh in on what I’m seeing on Substack.
Now, typically at TDR, we don’t love to recap huge shows like Milan, because knowing our audience, you were probably there or have read 50 other recaps already. So instead of showing you the best of what you may or may not have seen, I thought it would be more interesting to gather the opinions of some people outside of the industry.
I was inspired after I watched a TikTok (yes, I’m 12) the other day by a brand specialist who discussed how fashion is now activating in Milan Design Week, and how they are “creating environments that feel like culture, not commerce.” Of course my face was like 🤨 because to me, it’s pretty obvious that fashion’s always been involved (but it’s expanding bigtime) and MDW is now just a more obvious place for fashion brands to introduce a different kind of status symbol — not just a $5,000 bag, but the design piece you might have an even harder time getting your hands on. In fashion there is no culture without commerce.
I wanted to hear more, so I reached out for a quote, and she admitted she had never actually attended Milan; she was reinterpreting what she had seen online - hence why I wanted to speak to people who actually went.
As we’ve all noticed, design isn’t just a niche conversation anymore - it’s starting to attract a broader crowd. I was curious to know if people from adjacent industries are seeing the same shifts, or just enjoying the spritz and spectacle? Keep reading.
In this issue:
Sneaky Links 📰
Final Bids 💰
Milan Design Week Thoughts and Feelings 🎭
Fair of the Month 🏠
Exhibition of the month 🪑
Reach an audience as cool as you are. Find out about advertising in TDR’s monthly newsletter.
Sneaky Links 📰
Some boogery kid scratched a Rothko. artnet
Philippe Starck was also annoyed about Milan. We should get together and grumble 🤙🤨. Dezeen
Tariffs are coming for New York Art Week, where TEFAF might feel the sting the most. Artnews
Design Museum to display Wes Anderson’s archives for their major exhibition opening 21 November 2025 until 26 July 2026. Tickets go on sale today. Design Museum
Final Bids 💰
Bonhams’ Glass & Design: From 1900 to Now had some great pieces for sale, but the highest sale was for Lot 18, a sofa by Paul Dupré-Lafon. Aside from that and a Lalanne, prices were reasonable. Bonhams
Results that sadden me: Mickey Snake, 2015 by Banksy sold for £330,600. It’s really ugly 😔 Bonhams
Princess Diana’s largest wardrobe sale ever is taking place at Julien’s on June 26. More info here, and register here.
Phillips’ Design auction was yesterday in London (I was in attendance - just looking 👀) and wow, no deals to be had at Phillips. Many works sold well above their estimates, including a small Line Vautrin, and Carlo Scarpa’s Rare ceiling light, model no. 208 which sold for £165,100, with a high estimate of £60,000. Phillips
Milan Design Week, Thoughts and Feels
In this issue, we looked beyond the usual Milan Design Week recaps to explore a growing shift: fashion brands increasingly using design festivals as marketing platforms, often without offering much real connection to design itself.
It makes sense: top communication agencies are now commanding big budgets from major companies, focusing less on smaller brands and more on helping big ones speak to a design audience. As more of these brands establish a presence in the city, costs are rising - prompting smaller, independent designers (the reason many of us go) to migrate to Alcova, an exhibition about 50 minutes north of central Milan.
More and more recaps have been popping up in my feed from voices outside our usual design circles - and I was curious about what they were seeing. One that stuck with me came from The Stanza, which included this quote:
The fact that each big fashion brand [in Milan] had lines around the block comprising mostly people who truly do not care about the art and just want cheap and free brand merch to post on their social media as a signal make it hard for these brands to be credible to a discerning audience.
I reached out to Nadine, founder of The Stanza - a hospitality and fashion platform that also happens to be one of the top business newsletters on Substack. While she comes from a design-adjacent perspective, I could tell she was picking up on many of the same shifts I’ve been noticing. After nearly a decade in private equity real estate in New York and LA, she relocated to Milan and has been rebuilding her life there ever since.
This is my 3rd design week, and it's a week I both look forward to and dread. It's the one time per year that Milan completely jolts up from an otherwise slow pace of life. On one hand, I've always met some great people and I love seeing all the creativity in the exhibits and events. But at the same time, the entire week evokes a sense of intense citywide FOMO and chaos. By the end of the week, I'm always relieved that it's over!
In regard to the Fashionization of design in Milan:
Fashion is getting more involved in adjacent industries (hospitality and interior design) because fashion is facing existential and structural problems. With everything happening in the world from an economic perspective, including the fact that there won't be a growth market such as China in our lifetimes (which greatly contributed to the growth of these luxury fashion businesses in the last cycle), I don't have confidence that fashion will ever return to being the business we know it as.
With respect to design, I think fashion conglomerates are seeing furniture as the next consumer goods sector that can be used to signal status, in the same way a luxury handbag did before they became overexposed to the aspirational customer base. Sure, a Saint Laurent bag is nice, but what about a Charlotte Perriand x Saint Laurent sofa? How many people have one of those? And of course, with social media used to memorialize and signal everything we do, it's now easier than ever to show the world that we have "good taste" and the money to buy it. That validation is what fueled the luxury business for decades, and now the industry is evolving to sell that emotion in another type of product.
I understand that fashion is a business and I'm all for embracing creativity. However, brands should learn from their previous mistakes and be careful to not overexpose for the sake of growing revenue.
Recently, in London, I had the pleasure of meeting Jirah, who describes himself as a designer whose work merges performance and conceptual art with a handmade approach to furniture and interiors.
This year marked Jirah’s first time showing work in Milan, specifically at Alcova, and the decision to attend was rooted in that opportunity. “It was very stressful organizing the show,” he admitted. The effort proved worthwhile. “It felt good to sit in the space after hours and see how well it came together. I met people from totally different networks than I had in Miami, and I hadn’t been to Italy before, so it all felt really unexpected in the best way.”
On the growing fashion takeover of design week: “I’ve always been fashion-adjacent, but those fashion events with door people guarding them like they’re the eighth wonder of the world? No thanks. I love that in design and architecture, people understand how long it takes to build something - there’s more patience, and more respect for the process.”
Matteo Azzelini, writer of Why You Should Care, is another perspective I was interested in hearing from. Matteo works in Consumer Insights & Marketing at Net-A-Porter, splitting his time between Milan and London. He said:
Given my passion for art and design, I could not miss Milan Design Week!
This year, it felt like every luxury brand wanted a presence at Design Week. Beyond those showcasing homeware lines, brands like Miu Miu and Aesop used the moment as a thoughtful extension of their identity, turning design into a compelling form of brand communication. Not all landed quite as well, as Audi and Stone Island seemed less connected to the context.
Three favorites from me: Beni Rugs x Colin King, HOSOO x DIMORESTUDIO, and Speak Memory by Deborah Needleman. Three different exhibitions, but all rooted in excellent craftsmanship and heritage. This is the kind of design exhibition I love most: one that puts pure design at the center, without relying on big-brand clout.
Of the biggest changes Matteo has seen from prior design weeks to the 2025 edition, he tells us:
I think brands have always been there but over the last 3/4 years there’s been a strong increase, as design week seems to be a big opportunity in terms of brand visibility. And that’s all fine but I think the problem is that sometimes brands are able to do it in a meaningful and relevant way (Hermes, Loewe, Miu Miu, Prada, Aesop), while sometimes it just feels like a kind of empty publicity stunt.
Amy Kaspar, founder of Alpha Kilo, a London-based comms agency, and writer of Industry Related, is a Milan regular and noticed a big difference. In summary, she wrote how fashion brands have fully infiltrated Milan Design Week - bringing massive marketing budgets, media pull, and crowd-drawing power that design brands simply can’t compete with. As a result, editorial coverage skewed heavily toward fashion-driven installations, leaving fewer opportunities and less visibility for actual design industry professionals. So while the queues grow and the spectacle ramps up, designers are increasingly being edged out of their own space.
Venice Design Biennial 2025: Call for Applications | Venice, Italy | Sept 5 – Nov 2, 2025
The fifth edition of the Venice Design Biennial invites designers, institutions, brands, and galleries to respond to this year’s theme—"Extinction / Salvation"—a lens through which to explore the evolving role of design in a rapidly changing world.
Two ways to participate: Main Group Exhibition (Glass & Collectible sections) and Collateral Projects. 🗓️ Apply by May 31
info@venicedesignbiennial.org | venicedesignbiennial.org | @venicedesignbiennial
Festival of the Month: NYC Design Week
From May 15th to the 21st, NYCxDesign activates throughout the city. There are a ton of events, including, of course, the anchor of the festival: ICFF (and its in-show independent showcase, WANTED.) As well as the new fair we have been hyping, Shelter. If you’re in NYC or headed there, stay tuned for our guide to be published soon on In-Sites, including free tickets, VIP events and more.
Exhibition of the Month: Mueble Escultura + Barro
Mueble Escultura, Deon Rubi’s side quest (co-created in 2022 with Cinthia Kazez), is a curatorial initiative that explores the intersection of artwork and design object. Since its launch, it has grown steadily through group exhibitions hosted in both independent spaces and cultural institutions, cementing design’s place in the contemporary art circuit of Buenos Aires.
Mueble Escultura + Barro CC
Caboto 531, C1157 Cdad. Autónoma de Buenos Aires
On view until May 16, 2025
Monday to Friday 12:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Thank you for reading our May newsletter! I hope you enjoyed it. As mentioned 5 zillion times, in two weeks, we will send out our NYCxDesign guide to our paid subscribers, then return to our usual content June 1. What will we write about in June? No idea. It’s summertime baby! But we do have mid-June In-Sites interview with Lola Wang ready to publish, which will be a good one with lots of social media advice.
On a personal note, I have been working with other brands/humans on their substack strategy, which has been so fun and rewarding. Some aspects of the platform drive me absolutely nuts, but all in all I think there is a lot of opportunity here - but it’s not for everyone. More on that mid-June.
Ok that’s it, see you in NYC!
Julia (and hello from Leo and Zack)
If you’re a designer, brand, or industry professional trying to navigate the new rules of visibility, sales, and connection, our secondary Industry In-Sites newsletter is for you. Subscribe and stay ahead of the conversation.
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Email: julia@thedesignrelease.com, or hit reply.
I always enjoy reading your posts! So insightful and entertaining.
Thanks for sharing! Always good to get different perspectives on design week