Milan Design Week 2019 in 5 trends

The Milan Design Week is back. The designer festival that once started as Fuori Salone, a kind of trailer for the Salone del Mobile, the annual major furniture fair of Milan, has been one of the world's most renowned meeting places for international ingenuity and innovation for years.

For a week, more and less central city districts were the scene of hundreds of temporary studios and presentations, crowded terraces and restaurants and steadily trudging groups of visitors loaded with information material.

The more than 1.200 exhibitors were again spread over 6 districts plus dozens of smaller locations and individual presentations, all of which were quite far apart. Fortunately, Milan has a well-functioning metro network, but after three days my pedometer was above 40 kilometers and that was still far from enough to see everything.

But enough to signal a number of trends. Here is the Milan Design Week into 5 trends.

1. Sustainability

Sustainability, sustainability, Sustainability. That was the undisputed keyword of Milan Design Week 2019. A significant part of the designers focused on reusing textiles, plastic, sawdust and waste materials in furniture, tiles, lamps and carpets with slogans such as Waste no more, be sustainable, Stop plastic pollution en save water.

Rossana Orlandi, Milan's 'design guru' par excellence, had launched a competition for young designers under the title Guiltless Plastic: not the material is to blame for the pollution of our planet, but the careless user.

The fact that this is also permeating the world of design is a useful message after half a century of unlimited plastic dumping. Let's therefore hope that this trend continues and that it does not give way to a new fashion hype next year.

2. Commerce

Original design is of course beautiful, but there is also a need to sell. And I have the impression that this aspect at the Fuori Salone is becoming more important every year, which is also very understandable in times of little or no growing markets.

For example, the Lambrate design district, which a few years ago was still the site of small-scale, young and sometimes crazy experiments, has now been taken over by established interior designers and hotel managers. This year, some furniture manufacturers have also left the classic Salone, located far away on the Rho fairgrounds, just outside the Milan city border, for what it is and opted for the center, or the Fuori Salone, which also seems less revolutionary as a result.

But of course there are also contrarian figures such as the Dutch top designer Maarten Boss, who had filled his exhibition space at the Stazione Centrale with hundreds of screens with (historical) fragments of people who all start a sentence with 'I think'.

A cacophonous and alienating experience, after which you have to watch out for a while before starting a sentence yourself with 'I think'!

3. Innovation

Design and innovation go hand in hand and that produced pleasant surprises again this year. Such as the Plastic Stone Tiles, multicolored tiles made of recycled plastic by designer Enis Akiev. Or Miss Solar Light, wireless lamps in the shape of a candlestick in which small solar panels are incorporated, an invention of the Dutch Annet van Egmond and a team of engineers.

Lambrate was home to the Italian company Xbacco, six young designers who specialize in the manufacture of personalized wine labels. This also includes a label that, thanks to an accompanying app on the iPhone, will move and tell the entire history of the wine in question. Magnificent!

4. Nostalgia

Design is not only innovation, but also likes to return to tradition. Thus, an 8 meter high reproduction of Up, the armchair designed 50 years ago by Gaetano Pesce with its lavish feminine shapes, was placed on Domplein.

To give this design icon a contemporary, less sexy and more #metoo-esque touch, some 400 large nails were driven in to symbolize just as many victims of violence against women.

In the year of the 500^e Of course, on the anniversary of Leonardo's death, references to the great master from Vinci could not be missed. Hence the Leonardo Horse Project: 13 interpretations by different artists of the horse sculpture designed by Leonardo, but never realized.

Finally, Masterly, the collective exhibition of Dutch designers, this year was dedicated to Rembrandt in his 350^e year of death.

5. Dutch people

Speaking of Dutch… During the Design Week, Dutch is the most heard language in Milan, after Italian and English. Dutch design does well as a household name and after the Italians, the Dutch are the largest group of exhibitors, with veterans such as Moooi, Lensvelt, Baas and Eek alongside hundreds of lesser-known names.

They could be found in every design district, the Dutch. A total of 120 of them, spread over 30 presentations of very different nature - from garden furniture to jewelry and from toys to carpets - found each other in Masterly, the Dutch exhibition that has now been held for the fourth time in the impressive Palazzo Turati near the Duomo. .

Once again a must for every visitor, according to the local and trade press, who was as always impressed by the beautiful entrance, a courtyard with 15.000 tulips, where the opening was graced with a singing performance by Reinout Bosman, also blogger on this site.

The idea of ​​a collective national exhibition seems to have caught on: a little further on, in Palazzo Litta, the (South) Koreans followed the Dutch example.