The Milan Design Week: a design event

The Milan Fuorisalone, or Milan Design Week, as a whole, is a gigantic design project, which in 40 years redesigned Milan. Design has arrived, in the form of creative and resourceful entrepreneurs, intelligent real estate developers, designers and architects, and has regenerated territories, giving them a new life.

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The gala dinner by Salone del Mobile.Milano at La Scala Theater

This could only happen in Milan, a city with a vocation for research in industrial design. In fact, Milan is surrounded by Brianza, “the region with the highest creativity rate in the world,” industrial know-how. This could probably happen only in Italy, thanks to the “Italian factor.” The Fuorisalone is indeed the sum of many local factors, and territorial factors are inherently local. 

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A choral and spontaneous event

Another fundamental characteristic of the Milan Design Week is that it is a grass-rooted event, created by the initiative of many people. The people who organized the events, the protagonists of the various events, the audience who attended them. There are some questions that are difficult to answer. One of the most recurring is, “Who invented the Milan Design Week?” Everyone and no one. Actually, it was quite amusing to discover that there are at least a hundred inventors of the Fuorisalone. It is true that some of the protagonists of the first phase of the Fuorisalone played a particularly significant role, but, since it is not a codified event, with a beginning or an end, there are not people who invented it. There are many people who created the conditions for what happened to occur over the course of several years.  

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The Milan Design Week 1989: exhibition at Lido, a public swimming pool facility

The Fuorisalone: connections and networking

If we wanted to describe the Milan Design Week in a few words, we could say that over time it has turned into a formidable communication format and that for years it was the main tool for networking. A scientific form of party, designed with the utmost care: design expressed itself as a place for relationships between people, where the convivial moment was a key component of the event, just like the exhibition and the installations.

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Milan Design Week: Salone del Mobile.Milano and Fuorisalone

It should not be forgotten that the Fuorisalone would have never existed without the Salone del Mobile. The trade fair, in the pavilions of Fieramilano — currently in Rho and, until 2005, at the old Fiera Campionaria premises — is the lifeblood that has always sustained the Fuorisalone, which, not by chance, for many years was not an independent event, but a series of “side events to the Salone del Mobile.” And the fact that since the mid-seventies the city of Milan has been attracting a cultured public interested in design is due to the Salone del Mobile and its ability to highlight the design culture element characterizing the industrial production of Italian furniture, already so well-known in the world as to be the subject of an exhibition at MoMA, in New York, in 1972, “Italy: the new domestic landscape,” curated by Emilio Ambasz.

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This is also the reason why the main subject of the events has always been furniture and why design has been identified with furniture for a long time. It is only in the last 20 years that a definition of Milan Design Week with events not related to the furniture sector began to emerge, and in recent times there have been increasingly insistent questions about the future evolution of the Fuorisalone. 

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The future 

2020 has doubtlessly been another important stage in the history of this week of global resonance and there are several unknown elements in its future. 

Salone del Mobile.Milano is back, and with it, Milan Design Week. Many things have already changed, but one thing is still clear: that people still want to meet in person. Therefore, Milan Design Week is still alive and vital, even if undergoing a profound transformation.

In the galleries, images and photos from the different editions of Milano Design Week, divided by years and editions.

Why visit

One can visit Milan Design Week for many reasons. As a simple design enthusiast, it is a unique opportunity to meet up close with the world’s best-known designers, who pass through Milan during this week.
Tip: get a comprehensive guide, such as Interni’s Fuorisalone Guide or DDN’s Fuorisalone Guide, or patiently browse Fuorisalone.it, looking for events that may interest you.

Although the events are all free admission, many require registration. However, be prepared for long lines, especially for the most popular events.

In addition to design and designers, Milan Design Week is an opportunity to see many secret corners of the city. Noble palaces, secret courtyards, and showrooms you don’t usually enter are among the places open to everyone during Milan Design Week.

Milan Design Week 

The events are open to professional and general public
Size: about 1,000 events, more than 400,000 visitors
Visit Fuorisalone.it website for more info on events