Performances had been the most important development at Milan Design Week 2025
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Milan‘s annual design week usually revolves round installations and exhibitions within the metropolis’s grand palazzos. These are undoubtedly stunning settings for displaying design—and a part of what makes Milan such a particular showcase—however these areas have turn out to be extremely aggressive to acquire for the jam-packed week, in addition to barely anticipated by audiences.
This 12 months, a number of designers and types switched issues up and selected equally spectacular theatre areas through which to current—or constructed levels of their very own. In the meantime, a number of luxurious manufacturers took a cinematic method to their shows, involving grand, immersive units, and in some instances dropped at life by actors, performers and dancers.
Milan’s Historic Theatres Took Centre Stage
Cassina’s Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Charlotte Perriand Assortment, on stage at Teatro Lirico in Milan
(Picture credit score: Omar Sartor)
The biggest instance in each scale and ambition was Italian furnishings model Cassina’s ‘Staging Modernity‘ exhibition, which was held on the spectacular Teatro Lirico. Curated by Formafantasma—who gave the impression to be all over the place this 12 months—the showcase celebrated 60 years of Cassina’s Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Charlotte Perriand assortment. This included a glance again in time at a number of the most iconic items of modernist furnishings, with archival drawings and analysis supplies, maquettes and video interviews within the theatre’s lobby that traced the historical past of the gathering.
Shifting into the auditorium, a sequence of platforms had been constructed on prime of the stall seating to current limited-edition items from the gathering launched in new colors. These had been displayed alongside plastic animal figures and backdrops printed with forest scenes—contrasting the rational ‘machine for dwelling’ idea of modernist design towards a pure and wild ecology. In the meantime, a revolving sequence of reside theatrical performances on the stage and amongst the stalls additionally explored this theme, incorporating the furnishings as energetic props.
Kelly Wearstler x The Rug Firm: Crescendo put in in Milan’s Teatro Geronimo
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of The Rug Firm)
By no means one to shrink back from the highlight, L.A.-based designer Kelly Wearstler additionally debuted her newest assortment for the Rug Firm inside a theatre. The charming Teatro Geronimo’s round inside offered the setting for the brand new rugs, as a part of an set up titled ‘Crescendo.’ Among the carpets had been suspended from the ceiling on rotating round tracks, whereas others had been organized as a vignette on stage and extra positioned on the ground and partitions.
Coincidentally, the pastel hues of the theatre’s inside matched the tender, muted tones of the rugs, which included 4 designs every in a darkish and a lightweight colourway. The upper-level viewing containers provided exhibition areas to showcase and clarify the supplies and processes used to supply the designs.
Classic Cinema References Captivated Audiences
Dimoremilano x Loro Piana’s La Prima Notte di Quiete at Milan Design Week 2025
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of Dimorestudio)
Milan’s Dimorestudio recreated a Nineteen Seventies cinema lobby—full with velvet furnishings and leopard-print carpet—and directed a film-inspired manufacturing to exhibit new work for Loro Piana. The courtyard of the luxurious vogue home’s headquarters was reworked into a completely immersive expertise titled ‘La Prima Notte di Quiete’ through which guests had been guided by a number of red-curtained holding areas earlier than witnessing a manufacturing unfold throughout a sequence of rooms designed to appear to be a mid-century villa.
The set up’s stage of element—from the soundscape created by Nicola Guiducci to the lighting, rain results, props and total impression of eerie disarray—was nothing wanting spectacular. The influences of movie administrators like David Lynch and Federico Fellini had been additionally very obvious.
Futurespective: Related Worlds by Vary Rover and Nuova
(Picture credit score: Pietro Cocco)
British auto model Vary Rover equally took audiences on a time-travelling expedition with California-based design studio Nuova, by a two-part set up contained in the 18th-century Palazzo Belgioioso. The Nineteen Seventies was the vacation spot as soon as once more within the first capsule—particularly, the second of Vary Rover’s inaugural automobile manufacturing—the place a automobile dealership from the last decade was recreated full with walnut-ply panelling, burgundy carpet and couch upholstery, a fish tank and a traditional Vary Rover parked inside.
An unassuming door within the ‘showroom’ opened to disclose the model’s newest mannequin inside a starkly totally different, shiny, modern area, the place mirrored columns and white gravel had been put in to signify the automobile’s subsequent technology. Actors wearing both classic ‘70s apparel and retro-futuristic powder blue uniforms additionally added to the all-encompassing expertise of the juxtaposed areas, as a part of ‘Futurespective: Related Worlds.’
Beni Rugs x Studio KO, Intersection
(Picture credit score: Romain Laprade)
On a smaller scale, however equally impactful, Beni Rugs totally lined its area with hundreds of scrawled be aware papers, amongst which a performer sat pensively with a typewriter and infrequently hit the keys as if reeling off a memoir. Forming a backdrop for the model’s collaboration with Studio KO, ‘Intersection,’ the historic rooms additionally featured a dishevelled herringbone wooden flooring and total evoked a scene of a tormented inventive’s attic.
Georg Jensen’s Gelateria Danese
(Picture credit score: Peter Vinther)
Georg Jensen debuted its new assortment, and inaugural present beneath the helm of inventive director Paula Gerbase, inside a pop-up ice cream store modelled on a Nineteen Twenties Artwork Deco cafe. The Gelateria Danese was some of the common points of interest in the course of the sun-drenched week, serving gelato, espresso, and affogato within the Artisan Collection – decadent silver dishes, cups, trays and spoons by 22 silversmiths.
Georg Jensen’s Gelateria Danese
(Picture credit score: Georg Jensen)
Extra hints of cinema could possibly be noticed at David Rockwell’s Casa Cork, the place the Tony Award-winning designer used the sustainable materials to create a bar space within the again that was harking back to a classic cinema lounge. Moreover, famed manufacturing designer Es Devlin’s Library of Gentle contained in the courtyard of the Pinacoteca di Brera was successfully an enormous revolving stage, upon which guests had been inspired to work together with the books saved on the enormous arc-shaped shelf, and watch the historic colonnaded constructing slowly rotate previous them.
YK100 lighting by Yrjö Kukkapuro, produced by Blond
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of Blond)
To cap this development, Swedish model Blond introduced 1968 stage-style lighting by Yrjö Kukkapuro on the Euroluce truthful. The YK100 assortment by the celebrated Finnish designer, who handed away in February, contains flooring and pendant lamps mounted on industrial-style metal helps and held inside aluminium brackets that enable the sunshine supply to be rotated and tilted in any path.
YK100 lighting by Yrjö Kukkapuro, produced by Blond
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of Blond)
Past the goal to current design in progressive methods and novel settings, the thread of theatre, cinema and efficiency in Milan speaks to a wider present want to flee into different worlds and distract ourselves from actuality, if just for a brief interval. Design as theatre, and vice versa, additionally helps to characterize inanimate objects, and the format of reside efficiency cleverly coerces audiences into pausing for longer.
We count on to see many extra design shows of this sort going ahead – and for the designers and types who undertake this method to duly get their flowers.
