What's it like to be a designer in Milan today?

Milan design week is the most significant event in the global design calendar. But what shapes the city's creative scene for the other 51 weeks of the year? Jane Englefield reports.

Home to the world's biggest design week and a long-standing manufacturing hub for high-quality furniture, lighting and homewares, Milan's reputation precedes it.

The city is synonymous with Italian design, thanks in part to the seminal work of creatives such as Gio Ponti, Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini during the post-war period.

"The balance has shifted"

But today, the Milanese design scene is becoming about much more than that, say local design duo David Raffoul and Nicolas Moussallem of David/Nicolas.

"It does feel like the city is going through a particularly interesting phase and that the balance has shifted," they reflected. Originally from Beirut, the pair opened their second studio in Milan in 2021.

"Many designers, collectors and creative people from all over the world have chosen to live or work in Milan, which has brought a new energy to the design scene."

Local architect and designer Maddalena Casadei agrees. "Since I first started working here in the 2000s, Milan has become a much broader ecosystem, where industrial production, collectible design, research and communication co-exist and overlap," she said.

For Studio Vedèt founder Valentina Ciuffi, who established Milan design week platform Alcova with British architect Joseph Grima in 2018, broader changes in the perception of the city itself may be at play.

"The city has improved in terms of its international image," said the curator. "It is perceived as less provincial than in the past. So even from Milan, you attract more international clients, and you are also seen as being more international."

In the eyes of some local designers, these shifts are helping to foster more experimental work. Studios such as 2050+, which describes itself as straddling design, technology, the environment and politics, visual research company Studio Folder, and architectural designer Hannes Peer are leading the charge.

Design consultant Joy Herro moved from Rome to Milan in 2018, when she says local galleries still followed a "fairly traditional format, where the focus was mainly on the design object itself".

"In the past few years, especially since Covid, the scene feels much more dynamic again," said Herro, who is the founder of new local gallery The Great Design Disaster.

"It's less about the object or the form alone, and more about the ideas behind it: the themes, the narratives, and the context in which the work is presented," she added.

"There are many independent initiatives, experimental formats, and more crossover between art, design and fashion. It feels like Milan has rediscovered a more experimental spirit, where sometimes a chair is not just a chair anymore."

"Rigid hierarchies" historically dominated the scene

For some, it's a welcome development after the pioneering ethos that drove Ponti et al became mired in the pressures of business.

"After the extraordinary decades of Italian design in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, there may have been a phase in which the system became more structured and less experimental," said Britt Moran and Emiliano Salci of local firm Dimore Studio.

"The designers of the golden age gradually stepped back, and the large studios that grew around them during the 70s, 80s and 90s became increasingly institutionalised," agreed Tutto Bene co-founders Felizia Berchtold and Oskar Kohnen, who are based between Milan and London.

"Many offices expanded to a scale where quantity inevitably overtook quality, and where rigid hierarchies made it harder to remain agile, curious, or experimental."

Now, like many of their peers, they take a more optimistic view of Milan's design scene. "There is a renewed appetite for ideas and for cultural depth, not just for stylistic decoration," they said.

But while the tide may be turning, Formafantasma co-founder Andrea Trimarchi suggests there is still some way to go.

Italian duo Formafantasma are known for research-based projects pushing at design's avant-garde. In 2021, Trimarchi and studio co-founder Simone Farresin based themselves in Milan following an extended period in the Netherlands – home to a highly experimental design scene.

"Milan is still very traditional," acknowledged Trimarchi. "Of course, I'm generalising. There are still interesting studios doing groundbreaking work. But in general, it's a city that is still a bit conservative when it comes to design."

That sentiment is echoed by Edoardo Pandolfo and Francesco Palù, co-founders of local glass studio 6AM. They work in Milan for its globally recognised industrial heritage, but acknowledge that this strength can go hand-in-hand with a traditional way of doing things.

"Our niche is the Italian way of doing design," the duo said. "So very luxurious, very well made, very well packaged or whatever, but hyper badly communicated and expensive," they joked.

"If you go to Scandinavia, for example, they are lightyears ahead of us in terms of marketing and positioning on the web."

Meanwhile, a number of practitioners point out that wider, deep-rooted issues still make life difficult for young designers trying to find their way in the city.

"From an outside perspective, sure, Milan is full of events like design week and the Olympics and so on," said Francesco Zorzi and Nicolò Ornaghi, whose distinctly utilitarian furniture has attracted attention since founding local studio NM3 in 2020.

"But it's not very welcoming, especially for younger creatives and younger generations who do not have the economic power to sustain the costs of living in a city which has become very expensive," they added.

For a city that is meant to be rooted in design, they argue, there is still a lack of institutional support for emerging talent. "There is very little interest in pushing politics that try to help young entrepreneurs or younger creatives."

This tough environment creates a design culture where connection and collaboration can prove difficult, says Casadei, who admits to feeling "a deeper loneliness today for designers – younger and older".

"Competition in Milan is high, and it is difficult to find moments and people who truly want to engage in a real exchange," she added.

According to Berchtold and Kohnen, the endurance of other unhelpful anachronisms may also be preventing Milanese design from reaching its full potential.

"Design in Milan is still relatively male-dominated, particularly in visible leadership positions," considered the duo. They suggest that the 20th-century model of the "great designer" continues to characterise much of the design scene.

"That model certainly still exists, and in some contexts it works," they continued. "But today we are more interested in collective intelligence: movements, methodologies and interdisciplinary approaches rather than personalities on pedestals. The 'bro culture' of design studios is simply not very interesting anymore."

Still, from Ciuffi's perspective, the future looks positive.

"Milan has always been a very bourgeois city," she said. "It is conservative in that sense. So there are social problems that I am against. But what I like about the new international wave is that we have to stop looking with only the eyes of the Milanese."

This article was originally written for the Dezeen Dispatch magazine at Milan design week 2026.

Milan design week 2026 is taking place at various locations around the city from 20 to 26 April. To see what's on, visit Dezeen Events Guide.

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