Milan came alive during Milan Design Week 2025, a six-day festival that branches out from the Salone del Mobile furniture fair into the streets — and what some designers affectionately call ‘Friends Week’. Except for some openings, it’s not exclusive (unlike fashion week); anyone can walk around and enjoy the offerings. The energy is unmatched. And although the year has been filled with turbulence and uncertainty, the week remained social, stimulating, overwhelming, and cigarette-smoke-smelly. Between the parties, performances, and stalls, it’s a time full of design-infused fun. Anyway, here are some notes.

Day 1

A man sits at the airport reading La Repubblica, his face hidden behind a full-page Gucci ad on the back cover. The same ad drapes the façades of buildings across Milan. A rickety tram (drenched in yellow for Fendi Casa) takes me to Galleria Rossana Orlandi. I’m here to look at design objects, but it feels like fashion week: people are dressed up, Orlandi circles in oversized sunglasses, and I think I just saw a dog wearing a Prada hat.

Real business cards are being exchanged, and seven kilos of mozzarella just slumped dramatically onto a table. Nacho Carbonell sketches beside his light installation, Michela D’Angelo sits under rattan lamps, Ori Merhav places shellac baubles on her shower stand, and I’m perched on a hand-woven aluminium chair by Nicolas Zanoni — licking the last remnants of caviar left on my hand. The day ends with a 20th-anniversary cocktail party for the Canadian design company Bocci, where I sip Etna Bianco surrounded by hundreds of beautiful past and present designs.

Day 2

Salone del Mobile is hosting 2,000 exhibitors from 37 countries, and the city is just as packed. People are everywhere, and lines spill onto the streets, frustrating my fellow mozzarellas. Beds are cloistered in the Teatro Litta foyer for breakfast with Marimekko and Laila Gohar, who are launching a new collection developed from archival stripes. Meanwhile, at Teatro Lirico, an audience sits among armchairs, dancers, birds, and the odd anteater for an hour-long Cassina performance. The Fendi Casa cocktail swarms with buyers fumbling on their phones, while hairy chairs spread like Lorax hugs and slivers of marble peek through rosewood cabinets. I’m now squeezing through a mass of black blazers to celebrate Saint Laurent’s reanimation of four furniture Charlotte Perriand designs, sipping Louis Roederer, and silently applauding whoever cast the catering staff (hot waiters). The night ends at an Apartamento and Belmond party.

Day 3

It’s the halfway point, and everything begins to melt together like soldered steel. Furniture fairs are not for couch potatoes — this week has involved a LOT of walking and looking. Sleek furniture, finger food, and a head heavy with mages of countless silhouettes perfect for purgatory (there’s a lot of lobby stuff here). In brighter news, the floating Hermes installation displayed a subtle, graceful collection of porcelain plates and intricately coloured glassworks, and MoscaPartners’ Variations show featured a fantastic light cage of metal wires designed by LCD. The Miu Miu Literary Club hosted talks that revisited Simone de Beauvoir and Fumiko Enchi, and today, Kai Isaiah Jamal is moderating a conversation about love, sex, desire, and the raw honesty of a life. These reinvigorating moments just got balanced out by the chaos of bodies at Capsule Plaza’s Spazio Maiocchi. Glasses are breaking everywhere.

Day 4

I just stumbled upon a small showing of Gaetano Pesce's works and drawings at the Antonia Jannone Disegni di Architettura gallery. And finally, a Sicilian cannolo! Oh, and I think I just found my highlight under a pool — or rather, beneath the former public baths of the Piscina Cozzi swimming pool — at a glassworks exhibition. The debut solo show of 6:AM features an immersive soundscape and sharp scenography; its captivating glass designs feel like a refined sign of things to come. And speaking of scenography, Nike and Berlin-based music label PAN collaborated with Sub Global on The Suspended Hour, a dark, misty spatial intervention with a cavernous pit and a devilish sonic sculpture that mixes club culture with Hades’ kitchen. The space also introduced a new iteration of the Air Max 180. “NIX” was designed by PAN’s founder, Bill Kouligas, who later threw a party at the jam-packed Gatto Verde club.

Day 5

Coffee (and a headache), then another gallery — Delvis (Un)Limited — for their latest project, The Theatre of Things. The exhibition plays with the idea of living in design, inviting designers to create a home space and spend a night in it, sleeping in a bed made by the Belgium-based collective Espace Aygo. How all four members managed to sleep in it is a marvel. Around the corner, Nico Vascellari’s Pastorale unfolds with a mechatronic stainless-steel structure rising from a soil floor in the Cariatidi room at Palazzo Reale, launching millions of seed particles into the air with a jarring whoosh. I have puntarelle and anchovies for lunch, then swing by one of Capsule Plaza’s satellite locations to see Misha Kahn’s new works. The show features a suite of mirrors and a multi-coloured, trippy resin table that looks like a gestural pasta bake of dreams and memory.

Home time. I’m tired — and I haven’t even gone to Bar Basso this week. There’s been scant political chatter. Some words of fear about Trump’s new West, soft mutters about the impacts of looming tariffs. More common, though, are the threadbare adjectives, the complaints about how busy Design Week has become, and the overreaching fashion houses turning exhibitions into upscale billboards. There’s a palpable urgency in the air — greater, even than the rush fashion week creates for the lucky few who get to enjoy it in full. But this week is for everyone. And while the crowds and endless lines might test your patience, there’s something democratic in the idea that a stranger can wander into a showroom without a name on a list. And that budding creative minds can still hold onto hope — for a career, for their moment, for their future.