In these past two weeks you will have zigzagged through hundreds of guides telling you what was unmissable, what to see, what is in. I, if I can be honest, don’t know. I don’t know as I write this piece, and I won’t know even once the week is over and this piece is published. Not out of disinterest, I know, because in recent years my experience has always been the same: too much noise, too much stuff, too many opinions. I feel overwhelmed even before I begin. A continuous horizon of events, installations, openings, invitations and then, queues queues queues. People everywhere, in a state of excitement, FOMO is felt on the skin and smelled in the air.
Milan Design Week has a density that seems to compress space and distort it, forcing you into a perpetual motion of seven days in which - in order to see everything you “should” see - you must not work, have a life, or even sleep. You survive on olives and lukewarm prosecco, and meanwhile you accumulate images, encounters, impressions. But the feeling is always the same: not being able to truly choose. And above all, there is no time to understand what you are looking at, even when you do choose: the experience is determined more by flows than by attention.
If for some Design Week is a perfect machine, it is also an ecosystem that is increasingly difficult to inhabit consciously. It divides the public between enthusiasts and perplexed observers, but still forces them into the same condition: that of rapid, hit-and-run consumption of experiences.
To understand how we got here, we need to take a step back.
The Salone del Mobile was born in 1961 as a trade fair with a clear function: to connect companies and buyers, showcase products, activate the market. For years its perimeter remains defined. It is between the 1980s and 1990s that something changes: outside the fair spontaneous events begin to emerge - exhibitions, installations, studio openings. They are not yet a system, but they intercept a different need: not only to see design, but to experience it.
Thus the Fuorisalone is born. Initially marginal, almost parasitic, it grows until it becomes an autonomous phenomenon. In the 2000s it becomes structured, attracts investment, and brands begin shifting more and more attention outside the fair, transforming the city into a diffuse exhibition space.
After Expo 2015 this model fully consolidates: Milan stops being just the site of a fair and becomes a stage. The sum of Salone and Fuorisalone produces an experiential architecture in which market, culture, tourism and communication are inextricably intertwined.
Design is no longer just object: it is experience, narrative, content.
And it is precisely here that a less visible but perhaps decisive shift occurs. What begins as a spontaneous expansion - a way of experiencing design beyond the product - progressively becomes an autonomous system, increasingly oriented only toward visibility, presence, the continuous production of content. The city ceases to be the context of design and becomes its device: it no longer hosts, it performs. And when everything becomes an event, the risk is that experience loses depth, in both senses, turning into a continuous sequence of stimuli that are almost impossible to sediment and process.
It is here that Milan Design Week becomes interesting not only for what it displays, but for what it reveals to us. It is not simply an event, but the symptom of a broader urban model: a city that organizes itself through temporary intensities, flows, peaks of attention. A city increasingly capable of functioning as a platform and less and less willing to exist as a place.
As Guido Martinotti observed in Metropoli: la nuova morfologia sociale della città (Il Mulino, 1993), contemporary cities are increasingly traversed by “city users”: people who do not inhabit them, but use them. During MDW this dynamic becomes dominant. Milan fills with temporary, mobile, fast bodies. Bodies that consume not only objects, but images, experiences and relationships. The city offers itself as an aesthetic surface: every courtyard is a set, every installation content, every district narrative. Milan makes itself available to the gaze, becoming itself content: neighborhoods behave like temporary brands, aesthetics become economic infrastructure, experience becomes commodity. It is a city that produces value - economic, symbolic, relational - and sometimes it also produces culture, truly.
But it is also a city that, precisely through this intensification, tends to reduce the conditions necessary to build meaningful experience over time. As Lucia Tozzi suggests, the model of “weeks” produces an intermittent and unstable city, where immediate value prevails over the construction of a lasting fabric. The bulimic and disorienting excess of offer does not automatically translate into quality, but often into overlap, into noise. In this context, design itself is transformed. More and more often it is designed to function above all in the immediate: to attract, to surprise, to be shared. It is no longer just project, but becomes above all content. No longer just object, but an experience to be lived, often too quickly, and for this reason just as often unsatisfying.
Design Week makes these dynamics visible, showing both the city’s attractive force and its structural fragilities. What appears as vibrancy is in reality what tends to impoverish Milan, the result of a pervasive and precise capitalist logic: continuous growth, intensification, accumulation. More events, more presence, more visibility. More of everything.
But not everything that grows manages to turn into meaning. Milan, during Design Week, functions perfectly. That is the point. It functions as a platform, as a productive machine, as a system of continuous activation, but precisely for this reason it increasingly struggles to make space for what is not immediate, for what requires time, and perhaps has a greater chance of building relationships.
And perhaps it is precisely here that its deepest contradiction lies: not only in the absurd quantity of what it produces, but in the difficulty of holding onto anything. Because the city is not the one we cross during the various “weeks”, but the one that is built beyond and around them. In the dead times, in unprogrammed relationships, in spaces that do not need to perform in order to exist. And perhaps it is there, too, that it would be worth returning to imagine, work and commit to.
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