Must See Milan: 2026
Each April, Milan becomes a city alive with design—from historic villas to cutting-edge showrooms. Materials, palettes, and textures tell the story, and for the textile obsessed, there's plenty to discover.
Textiles to Seek Out at Salone
Milan Design Week stretches across the entire city, and there's no way to see it all. This guide is focused on where to find the best textiles and surface design in Milan — the presentations, installations, and showrooms that are worth planning your week around.
Ai Weiwei: About Silk at Rubelli
Ai Weiwei works in silk for the first time in a collaboration with Rubelli. The centrepiece is an elaborate silk lampas, woven with metallic yarns. As a fan of the artist, and the brand, I’m looking forward to seeing this piece in person. The press release discusses some of the included imagery: surveillance cameras, handcuffs, chains, the Twitter bird, and the alpaca figure that became a symbol of dissent against internet censorship in China.
Rubelli's weavers engineered the textile structure, translating political imagery into the language of Venetian silk production. At the centre of the installation sits a sofa upholstered in the same lampas designed by Ai Weiwei. Two display cases designed by Formafantasma house silk artefacts from the Rubelli Historical Archive alongside Chinese textile documents, drawing a line between the Silk Road's history and the fabric's contemporary meaning. An accompanying documentary by Felipe Sanguinetti, filmed at Downing College, Cambridge, and the Rubelli weaving mill in Como, traces the collaboration's process.
April 16th–May 15th
Loro Piana
Loro Piana Interiors presents Studies, a new format that examines individual objects within the interior vocabulary. Chapter I: On the Plaid is the first installment — an installation devoted entirely to the plaid, exploring its role as a functional and material presence in domestic space.
April 21st–26th, 10am–8pm
Dedar: Versi Liberi, Chapter Two
Dedar launches the second chapter of Versi Liberi with an exhibition designed by Studio Anne Holtrop, introducing new colourways and textures alongside three new designs.
Modern interpretations of placed designs are rare, and this collection of "engineered" pieces—conceived for chair seats and backs, placed on pillows, or similarly positioned—occupies territory that few textile houses are working in right now.
April 21st (10am–4pm), April 22nd–26th (10am–7pm)
Marimekko: Osteria Fiori di Marimekko
Marimekko takes over Hosteria Grand Hotel with a multi sensory activation centered on Kukasta Kukkaan, a new floral design by Erja Hirvi. Bold textile installations sit alongside a shoppable curation of ceramics and floral-inspired aperitivo with a Finnish inflection. It's lighter fare than some of the more conceptual presentations on this list, but worth a stop if you're interested in seeing how large-scale print translates into spatial experience.
April 20th–22nd
MoscaPartners Variations at Palazzo Litta
MoscaPartners Variations returns to Palazzo Litta with twenty-six international exhibitors working under the theme of metamorphosis—transformation, sustainability, and new connections between people, space, and nature. The baroque interiors of Palazzo Litta always create an interesting and productive friction with contemporary work. This year's outdoor installation is by architect Lina Ghotmeh, her first site-specific outdoor work in Italy. Among the exhibitors, LcD Textile Edition presents Full Metal Banquet, a Belgian textile project with scenography by Eric Charles Donatien—one to seek out for the textile-minded.
April 21st–26th
Rossana Orlandi
Rossana Orlandi's gallery-showroom in the Magenta district has a way of surfacing work you won't encounter elsewhere during the week. Each year I find something here I hadn't been looking for—an unexpected material, a new designer, an emerging studio pushing at the edges of craft. Keep an eye out for the iconic, bespectacled Rossana herself!
Via Matteo Bandello 14/16, Milano
*Photos from last year
Balmaceda: A Letter About Códices
Returning after last year's Milan debut, Balmaceda presents rugs from its Códices collection in a site-specific installation by Luis Urculo, set within a private San Vittore apartment. The exhibition is staged as the imagined home of an unseen archaeologist—rugs inhabit the space alongside objects and artifacts, constructing a portrait through absence, where identity emerges from material traces and accumulated references. Three rooms move between the finished pieces and their conceptual origins, with ancestral motifs translated into contemporary forms. The domestic setting does real work here, grounding the rugs in a lived context rather than a gallery one.
Alcova
Alcova returns to Milan for its eleventh edition, this time across two sites. The Baggio Military Hospital, a vast post-World War I complex in the Primaticcio district, reopens with previously inaccessible spaces—the Church of San Martino and a historic archive among them. The second venue is Villa Pestarini, the only Milanese villa designed by Franco Albini, opening to the public for the first time in its 87-year history. Glass-block façades, sliding partitions, and large windows overlooking the garden remain intact as Albini designed them.
More than 120 international exhibitors are showing, spanning established studios and emerging practices. Alcova has always been strongest when the architecture and the work inside it speak to each other, and the pairing of rationalist domesticity with a sprawling institutional compound gives this edition a wider tonal range than recent years in Varedo. Plan ahead—lines are long and the crowds are thick.
April 20th–26th
Baggio Military Hospital, Via Giovanni Labus 15
Villa Pestarini, Via Mogadiscio 2/4, Milano
*Photos from last year
Fornasetti x cc-tapis
Fornasetti and cc-tapis have come together to reinterpret a selection of archival motifs, bringing Fornasetti's imaginative, almost dreamlike visual world into the tactile realm of the handmade rug.
Trompe-l'oeil, fragmentations, rhythmic variations, and graphic details merge with refined textures. Each rug is handcrafted using Himalayan wool, merino, and silk, selected to enhance depth and optical play. The sheen of the wool, the softness of merino, and the luminosity of silk—the craftsmanship is legible in the product.
Dialoghi: Paola Lenti Milano
Paola Lenti presents Dialoghi, an exhibition that explores the interplay between color, material, and form within an environment where architecture, design, and nature converge. At its centre, more than forty color families unfold across the brand's range of textiles and materials, establishing chromatic compositions.
For anyone working in color—whether in textiles, interiors, or surface design—you’ll want to see this. The installation extends Lenti's distinctive design culture, one that evolves while maintaining an iconic identity. Keep an eye out for Misha wallcoverings. This elegant Milanese brand has partnered with Paola Lenti on a new pattern, which will be installed in the showroom.
April 20th–26th
Paola Lenti Milano, Via Bovio 28, Milan
*Photos from last year
Moooi 25 and Promising at Superstudio Più
Moooi marks its twenty-fifth anniversary with a large-scale immersive installation at Superstudio Più, wrapped in silver—raw, rough, and reflective. Icons are reengineered, light becomes movement, and new designs sit alongside evolving pieces in layered environments where material, technology, and storytelling converge. A second location at Moooi Milan on Via Turati offers a quieter counterpoint. This is more furniture- and lighting-forward than textile-focused, but Moooi has consistently brought strong upholstery and surface work into their presentations, and the scale of the Superstudio installation makes it worth a walk-through.
April 20th–26th
Salone Del Mobile
Salone del Mobile runs alongside Design Week at the Rho Fiera fairgrounds, about forty minutes outside the city center. It's one of the industry's main trade fairs—vast, exhausting, and genuinely worth the trip. The scale is hard to overstate: hundreds of exhibitors across halls dedicated to furniture, lighting, textiles, and materials. Below are a few stands and presentations I'd recommend seeking out.
SaloneSatellite
SaloneSatellite is Salone's platform for emerging designers under thirty-five, and it's consistently one of the most energizing parts of the fair. We covered the program in TTE 21: Milan Vanguard—subscribers can revisit that for a closer look at some of the voices that have come through it. It's always worth an hour to see what's new.
*above photos featured in TTE 21
L’Opificio
L'Opificio is a family-run Italian textile house specializing in jacquard weaves and velvets. Worth a stop if you're drawn to richly chromatic upholstery textiles with real production integrity behind them.
Verdi
Verdi is a Colombian studio with roots in the country's mountain weaving traditions. Founded by Carlos Vera Dieppa in 1995 — who developed a distinctive technique intertwining local organic fibres with metal threads on custom-built looms — the brand is now led by his children Tomás and Cristina. Their rugs are beautifully woven and worth seeking out.
