Silk Labubus And A Portal To Stand Still In 7 Highlights From Milan Design Week 2026

Creative Boom: News Art & Culture Silks, Labubus and a secret garden: my personal highlights from Milan Design Week 2026 Top picks from this year's event ranged from Ai Weiwei's protest fabrics to a garden designed by Paul Smith. Written By: Tom May 27 April 2026 If you've never been to Milan Design Week, be warned: it's huge, exhausting and seemingly endless. Officially tied to the Salone del Mobile furniture fair, the event now encompasses thousands of installations, exhibitions and activations spread across an entire city.

You won't find much in the way of digital, flat design here: the focus is very much on the analogue and physical, with an emphasis on product, automotive and interior design, and a little fashion design thrown in for good measure. It's all very spread out, so you can spend hours walking between venues, wait in cabs as you struggle to navigate busy streets, or opt for the efficient Metro system. But that's only the start: you may then have to queue for 20-30 minutes to enter an event, and once you're inside, there may be crowds to dodge and influencers to get infuriated by. The atmosphere is intoxicating, though.

The streets throng with beautiful, stylish, and immaculately dressed people (Milan takes such things seriously), though you can still get away with jeans and a T-shirt. The weather in late April is warm without being oppressive. Tiny espressos are consumed at every opportunity, and pavement restaurants will feed you throughout the day. By day three, though, no matter how much you're enjoying yourself, you'll be absolutely shattered. With that in mind—and given that it's impossible to get to more than one per cent of the events on offer—here are my seven personal picks from this year's edition.

Ai Weiwei threads a protest into silk This year, celebrated dissident artist Ai Weiwei used silk—for the first time in his career—to make a political statement, in partnership with luxury fabric maker Rubelli. The choice carried weight, of course. Silk originated in China, and Rubelli has been weaving it in Venice for centuries. The collision of those two histories was the point. Entering the first room was like stepping inside a textile firework. It was lined with silk lampas in deep red and gold, and as your eyes adjusted, the pattern revealed itself: surveillance cameras, handcuffs, Twitter birds, llamas.

The second room was devoted to Finger, Ai's famed middle-finger motif, rendered in a double-face silk that reversed red and orange depending on which side you were viewing. Both funny and furious, it was as neat a summary of his practice as you could hope for. Ai Weiwei and Nicolo Faveretto. Photo: Felipe Sanguinetti Samsung and the AI future Samsung's 12-zone exhibition featured a choreographed display introducing two concepts: Project Luna, representing shared AI, and the Galaxy Z TriFold, representing personal AI.

The Wearable Intelligence zone imagined an AI avatar drawing on lifetime data from your devices to offer personalised guidance on health and nutrition. The Culinary Intelligence space presented a kitchen that responded to each person's tastes and adjusted the mood of the meal. In Transparent Symphony, Samsung's MLED display tech imagined a future where screens become "quiet companions within our spaces". The exhibition closed with The Goodbye Show, in which the AI avatar returned for a playful performance, imagining tech that interacts with people in "expressive and humanistic ways".

Article truncated for readability. Read the full piece →

The article discusses significant trends from a major design event that could influence branding strategies, highlighting innovative approaches by well-known brands, making it impactful and relevant for industry professionals.