My Take on Milan Design Week 2026? Looking Forward to Copenhagen!

Milan Design Week was once the most important seismograph of the global design industry. A place where curiosity, risk, and sometimes even failure became visible. The images and captions flooding our feeds these past weeks tell volumes, revealing one new trend after another: black lacquer, glass in every conceivable variation, red marble, cognac leather – all whispering to us about the new feeling of luxury. I look at my dining room, at my Tossberg chairs, and ask myself in all seriousness: Is the luxury sensation of 2026 simply IKEA design from 2019? So much that is new at Salone del Mobile, then?

Salone del Mobile: Music for the Masses

This year, Salone played Music for the Masses: nothing groundbreaking, nothing truly new, but plenty of past- and future-summoning with vintage-meets-Starship-Enterprise vibes. There was, at least, a generous helping of digestible mainstream design, technically flawless, commercially calculated. But an enthusiastic wow, an enchanted ooooh that makes your heart beat faster? Not really.

Fuorisalone: Isaac Asimov on Absinthe

Fuorisalone, by contrast, was another world entirely. If Salone was a Sunday matinée, then Fuori was a party with Isaac Asimov on absinthe and Madonna in her Erotica era: science fiction meets frivolity, escapism meets ornate pseudo-provocation. Wherever you looked, you encountered surreal habitats from some dream world – metal mattresses and fakir beds, inflatable bouncy castles and the most expensive marble, immersive experiences far removed from any livable reality.

Whether you find it humorous, intellectually stimulating, or otherwise enriching to ride a red cabbage on a carousel, or to wander meditatively through a (admittedly fascinating from above!) labyrinth in search of your own mental states and sense of direction, is as much a matter of personal taste as the question of what insights the woven-in sexuality and corporeality of a self-declared "second wave feminist" artist might offer in the year 2026 while you recline on her metallic shimmering mattress. Could it not simply be a beautiful room (and Faye Toogood's room truly was beautiful!) with interesting furniture and art objects? Yes, at many Fuori installations, the spectacle was given more space and attention than the substance.

Immersion as a Strategy of Distraction

Milan Design Week today is a highly precise instrument of brand communication. The industry feels desperate. Manufacturers outdid one another with exclusive, immersive, interactive experiences, seducing and intoxicating every sense with sensations, visions, scents, sounds. What became visible – and above all tangible – this week was a masterfully staged escapism. And I say this without malice, because some of these productions were genuinely impressive. Film-set-worthy interiors through which visitors moved as if through an exhibition where nothing may be touched. An installation, perfectly styled, but you weren't allowed to sit down. That, really, says everything.

The paradox: the greater the effort, the less the substance. Immersion as a strategy of distraction. When all the senses are occupied, no one asks any questions anymore. That, presumably, is the point. And may the industry recover soon!

Spectacle Is Not a Rescue Plan

This is, of course, a legitimate and urgently necessary wish. But the industry revealed no coherent plan. Spectacle is not a plan – especially when so many extreme contradictions become visible: on the one hand, you enter into a pact with McDonald's, you let the Californian luxury designer craft the bohemian vibe for the mass market, but on the other hand you double down on high-priced art, push the design collectibles market to the breaking point, and restrict – pardon, "curate" – access to exhibition spaces at every corner. Queuing for hours at the Gucci or Louis Vuitton spectacles in order to feel, for a few brief moments, like part of an elite and to dive into supposed design worlds, is no more a survival plan than resurrecting the inflatable ideas of the nineties. Outside, half a million people stand in line to glimpse, everywhere, visions of a dehumanised world.

Mausoleums, Bank Vaults, and a Rock in the Surf

From Jil Sander's pitch-black book mausoleum to the bank-vault aesthetic of Dimoregallery, to monumentality literally carved in stone, Fuorisalone elicited from me, above all, a great many ufffffs. Inside some of the larger installations, you felt intimidated at best and unable to breathe at worst. It isn't that these installations weren't somehow beautiful, or at least impressive. They were, truly. But do we really want a home to feel like something that rules over us – leaving us neither room nor agency, shaping our being so heavily that, as a dear design colleague recently put it, one can't even shift one's own stool, because, well… too heavy? Ah, right, it's only a staging, only finest storytelling carved in rock and stone, disguised as a luxury home, an almost spiritual oasis in the desert of flourishing neo-capitalism, geopolitical upheavals, and economic uncertainty. Thankfully, Margraf offered us a rock in the surf. A mausoleum.

Where Is the Human Being?

Cosiness, approachability, humanity – these were almost nowhere to be felt at the fair this week. Only there, where times past were conjured up, did these fundamental needs appear in faint outline: at Gucci, at Marimekko / Bar Unikko. Elsewhere, empty rooms of the future were celebrated on a grand scale, design pieces staged as untouchable exhibition specimens and art installations – and, the other way around, art and bric-à-brac were disguised as design.

What was visualised was a dehumanised world – a vision that, given the crowds in Milan, was as ironic as it was detached from reality.

Alongside countless other fair and Fuori installations, even the (in itself wonderfully designed) Salone Raritas exhibition, as beautiful and well-organised as it was, led visitors into an unpeopled world in which design appears distanced, self-referential, and sufficient unto itself. Which, in its own way, makes sense: if there are no more humans in the future, what do we need furniture for? And certainly: what do we need furniture fairs for?

A Proposal for Cologne

So as not to end this retrospective on too pessimistic a note, here's a thought: Cologne's furniture fair, imm, might consider a Milan-inspired rescue strategy. Let Aldi, Action and Kik build immersive pavilions out of vegetable labyrinths, curate spiky furniture and talking art by Bill Kaulitz for an all-sense-enchanting experience.

Erco and Jung could simply transport, exactly as it is, the magnificent safety-deposit-box room from the basement of their new Munich showroom – which, until last year, housed the former HypoVereinsUniCreditbank – straight to Cologne. With sweet Shaun-the-Sheep plastic bag charms, we could be rewarded for our hours of queuing in front of, let's say, the Iris von Arnim Pavilion. And Teppich Kibek would be the perfect partner for a punch-needle workshop in which we democratically punch Lucky Luke's cigarette as phallic shapes into doormats...

And Cologne: could you somehow persuade Jil Sander to be Jil Sander again? Then maybe something could come of it.

Until then: Copenhagen, here I come!

Why I'm Looking Forward to Copenhagen

Why? Because Copenhagen is so wonderfully normal. In the year 2026, that is the greatest compliment one can pay a design fair. There, design is regarded as what it is. No more, no less. Rooms, thoughts, ideas. People who meet one another. Furniture you are actually allowed to sit on.

The theme of 3 Days of Design 2026 is, fittingly: Make This Moment Matter. It's a clever invitation to the industry and to creatives to recalibrate from "more" to "meaningful", to show substance instead of surface, to be timeless rather than briefly spectacular. And if Milan this year asked the question, "How loudly can we keep shouting before someone notices we have nothing to say?", then Copenhagen poses the other, far more interesting one: "What actually remains of design when the circus noise dies down?"

That is exactly what I want to find out.

København, jeg har savnet dig.

Between glass blocks, longing, and a furniture market in flux: my take on Milan Design Week 2026.