Salone del Mobile 2026: 10 Fashion-Led Design Moments in Milan
No blank space
Salone del Mobile, also known as Milan Design Week, returns to Milan from 21 to 26 April, transforming the Italian city into a sprawling showcase of design, craft and visual storytelling. From streets to palazzos and historic buildings, installations and presentations spill across the city, where furniture, fashion and design begin to dissolve into one another.
This year, luxury fashion steps further into the conversation, with highlights including Fendi’s Baguette® 26424 Re-Edition line and Bottega Veneta’s collaboration with Kwangho Lee. Ahead, a closer look at the fashion-led moments unfolding across Milan this year.
Bottega Veneta, Lightful
Bottega Veneta collaborates with Korean artist Kwangho Lee for Lightful, an installation at the Via Sant’Andrea store. The work combines a suspended woven form, central to Lee’s practice, with new light sculptures made from the house’s leather fettucce (strips). Rendered in black and green tones chosen by Louise Trotter, each piece takes on a fluid, organic shape informed by Lee’s experimental approach to craft and material. Light is woven into the structure itself, becoming part of its form.
Fendi, Baguette® 26424 Re-Edition Collection
At Fendi, the focus turns to the Baguette. The house launches the Baguette® 26424 Re-Edition in twenty versions, including six Milan City exclusives, revisiting the original 1997 design with a softer construction and a renewed emphasis on wearability. Each is marked with Re-Edition metal tags and housed in wooden crates that reference archival storage. Stencil printing, a yellow canvas strap and a metal logo buckle complete the packaging.
Giorgio Armani, Armani/Archivio
Armani/Archivio, the digital platform dedicated to Giorgio Armani’s archival legacy, expands into its second chapter with 13 menswear and womenswear looks from 1979 to 1994, meticulously reproduced and made available for purchase in-store. The curation places emphasis on the jacket, revisiting its evolution across Armani’s early decades and reinforcing its role as a defining silhouette within the house vocabulary. A bespoke installation by Milan-based studio NM3 takes over the Via Sant’Andrea boutique, hosting invitation-only talks on collecting, archiving and heritage.
Marni, Marni x Cucchi
Marni lands at Cucchi with a reading of Milan’s café culture, where routine becomes ritual and ritual becomes social theatre. RedDuo reframes the historic interiors in a tension of red and green, broken by polka dots and stripes that shift between retro reference and graphic disruption. At the centre of the collaboration sits a bow tie emblem, merging both identities into a single visual code across tableware, textiles and uniforms. The experience extends beyond the café, with cups and saucers available at Cucchi and Marni’s Via Montenapoleone store.
Balenciaga, Artean
Pierpaolo Piccioli turns Balenciaga’s Milan flagship on Via Montenapoleone into a site of artistic exchange with Artean, an installation centred on works by Spanish sculptor Eduardo Chillida. The Basque term, meaning ‘between’, frames a presentation of seven sculptures that inhabit the store alongside the house’s current collections. Some of the works subtly reference Cristóbal Balenciaga, extending a dialogue first initiated decades ago.
Issey Miyake, The Paper Log: Shell and Core
Issey Miyake’s The Paper Log: Shell and Core brings together Satoshi Kondo of Miyake Design Studio, the in-house team and Ensamble Studio in a shared exploration of material transformation. The installation consists of two bodies of work based on the Paper Log, compressed paper derived from the house’s pleated garments. Shell transforms the material into sculptural paper forms, holding every crease in place. Core explores function, with the in-house team developing stools, chairs and tables as prototypes drawn from the same source.
Missoni, The Slow Art of Craft
Missoni dedicates an immersive presentation to the Caperdoni machine, an emblem of its longstanding textile know-how. Still preserved and used in-house, the machine transforms hand-assembled spools of mixed hues into surfaces rich in colour interplay and texture. The Caperdoni fabric also enters the home line for the first time, reworked into poufs, throws, cushions and accessories for everyday living.
Gucci, Gucci Memoria
Gucci stages Gucci Memoria at the Chiostri di San Simpliciano, a 105-year reflection on the house curated by Demna. The exhibition positions the cloisters as a shifting archive, in which Florence becomes both an origin point and an evolving reference over time.
A garden installation fills the larger cloister with seasonal flowers drawn from the Flora motif, while tapestries map Gucci’s history in layered fragments, from its founding by Guccio Gucci to its cultural expansion. In the smaller cloister, vending machines offer canned drinks inspired by La Famiglia archetypes, created with Gucci Giardino in Florence.
Louis Vuitton, Objet Nomades Collection
Louis Vuitton reimagines Palazzo Serbelloni into a moving sequence of interiors for its latest Objets Nomades presentation, where each room reveals a different layer of design dialogue. Pierre Legrain’s influence runs through the collection, reinterpreted in furniture, dining objects and textile pieces that recall the structure and tactility of his bookbindings. The Riviera Chilienne and Celeste dressing table return as familiar anchors, set against new works by Estudio Campana, Raw Edges and Marc Newson.
Longchamp, Longchamp x Patrick Jouin
Longchamp continues its steady stream of collaborations, this time working with French designer Patrick Jouin. Unveiled at a pop-up inside the Via della Spiga flagship, the Longchamp x Patrick Jouin collection sits between design object and collectible piece, filtered through the house’s familiar codes.
The Drop side and coffee tables are crafted in spun steel with enamel surfaces that resemble layered brushstrokes, where shades of light and heritage green move across each top. The Olo armchair follows in leather, finished with edges dyed in the same tone for continuity. A portable leather lamp shaped like a cone completes the set.
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