Design 8 Design Trends From Milan Design Week From zipped buildings to bringing the outside in, here is the best of Milan Design Week. By jitendermittal Published 10 July, 2025 Design 8 Design Trends From Milan Design Week From zipped buildings to bringing the outside in, here is the best of Milan Design Week. By jitendermittal Published 10 July, 2025 Previous article Should You Use A Job Offer To Get A Raise In Your Current Role? Next article 6 Serums Your Skin Will Throw A Party Over Each year the design world gathers in Milan to collaborate, inspire and show off to one another, and of course, the aesthetically inclined. It is known as Milan Design Week and this year it was held on April 8 to 14. Under the banner of Fuorisalone, the myriad of events include the Salone del Mobile furniture fair, where international brands launch their latest collections, the light fair Euroluce, as well as countless satellite events throughout the city. Here are some of the wildly-inventive trend-inspiring works on display this year. 1 Maximalist Mood Velvet animal prints and embroidered tiger heads meet tartan, tassels and florals at the Gucci pop-up apartment outfitted by Creative Director Alessandro Michele. In keeping with the bold and opulent aesthetic that’s catapulted Gucci back to cult brand status, now you can feel confident about mixing and matching almost anything as long as it is plush, bountiful and textured. If you have the budget, you can also buy the real thing from their homewares collection. Image source: Instagram @gucci 2 Volcanic Values Mexico City designer David Pompa loves to showcase natural materials in his work. The porous volcanic stone spherical light fixtures in the Origo Collection epitomize his love of organic matter. Origo – the latin word for origin – “speaks about the origin of the universe, a specific point of time, an intersection of axes in space, where everything begins,” David Pompa said in a project description. The black volcanic bases with a glass bulb attached echo the core of the earth beneath us, and the sun, the source of all light, above. Image source: Instagram @milan.design.week 3 Outside In Melbourne-based artist Linda Tegg planted a field of wild grasses to form a spontaneous garden inside Jil Sander’s HQ. The genesis of Tegg’s nature-inspired projects started with a work called Grasslands, 2014, at the State Library of Victoria where she gathered some 10,000 plants from 60 native grassland species from Victoria. Now she brings the “locally sourced” mindset to Italy. The plants in this work are taken from abandoned sites around Milan. Tegg’s work is a reminder that plants are worthy of our gaze and appreciation in and of themselves, and that “going local” can wake us up to the beauty in our midst. Image source: Instagram @milan.design.week 4 Conscious Raising Italian architect and designer Gaetano Pesce’s work ‘Maestà Soffrente’, on display in Milan’s Piazza Duomo, translates to mean ‘suffering majesty’. The famous form, reminiscent of a woman attached to a ball and chain, symbolises the idea of the woman as prisoner, tied to the prejudice of men. This is just one of many works taking on feminist concerns. Image source: Instagram @milan.design.week 5 Not So Fantastic Plastic Plastic is the problem but can it also be the solution? This year artist Rossana Orlandi Srl launched the 1st edition of Ro Plastic Prize to challenge and inspire the design community to think differently about how they make things. When transformed, plastic can become a resource with vast possibilities and potential and there is so much of it in our world already that it’s imperative we work out how to reuse and recycle it. Orlandi wants to make sustainability sexy and ensure it’s the main agenda for the design world. Image source: Instagram @econylbrand 6 Let Me Hear Your Body Talk What if you could measure your physiological responses to different environments and work out which space suits you best? The Google Design team explored the field of neuroaesthetics, that is the connection between biology and wellbeing, in their multiroom installation A Space for Being at Spazio Maiocchi. Visitors to the exhibition are monitored and told which rooms suit them most, a.k.a. ultimate self care. Image source: Instagram @reddymadedesign 7 Mad for Mushrooms Italian architect Carlo Ratti has grown a series of arched architectural structures from mushroom mycelium, which will be returned to the soil after Milan design week is over, in a fully circular fashion. The Circular Garden installation comprises a chain of 60 four-metre-tall arches, matching a form used often in the work of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. End-to-end the chain measures a kilometre – a “record” length for the fungus material. Image source: Instagram @fuorisalone 8 Zip Me Up I’ve never been a huge fan of an exposed zipper, like on the crutch of a pair of pants for example, but a giant zipper curling open on the side of building is a whole other story. Artist Alex Chinneck unveiled his seventeen metre wide sculpture that unzips a Milanese facade, as well as two other evocative works last week. If Chinneck has anything to do with it, we may be seeing a whole lot more of the utilitarian zipper as a focal point. 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