This Week: Luxury’s Salone Love Affair

A downturn in demand for luxury fashion hasn’t stopped brands from making a splash at the latest Salone del Mobile design fair, which opens in Milan this week. If anything, the slowdown has sharpened the industry’s focus on the strata of top clients — critical to luxury’s business this year — who come to town for the spring event.

Louis Vuitton, Dior, Loewe, Gucci, Saint Laurent, Prada, Jil Sander and The Row are just some of the labels taking over pretty palazzos to stage exhibitions, talks, cocktail parties and dinners this week. And that’s in addition to the luxury fashion brands that actually have significant businesses in homewear.

More than 70 percent of UHNWIs surveyed by BoF & McKinsey last year intend to increase their spending on home decor. And Armani, Fendi, Hermès, Loro Piana, Ralph Lauren and Versace are among the homeware heavyweights aiming to tap growing interest in the category this week when they present their latest collections to interior decorators and their rich clients, even as Trump’s tariffs savage their stock portfolios.

But for most fashion brands, Salone is about building brand buzz, not selling furniture.

Saint Laurent is exhibiting four previously unrealised pieces of furniture by the late Charlotte Perriand, while Loewe is unveiling 25 teapots designed by the likes of Rose Wylie and Jane Yang-D’Haene. Miu Miu is staging the second edition of a literary club set to “explore girlhood, love and sexual education” through the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Fumiko Enchi.

Gucci, meanwhile, is leveraging Salone for the next chapter of a global marketing push to reassert its heritage by spotlighting its Bamboo 1947 bag with an exhibition entitled “Bamboo Encounters.”

Bottega Veneta, which generated significant buzz last year with a mountain of Le Corbusier stools, is sitting things out as it onboards new designer Louise Trotter, though one could argue that Salone is the perfect platform to keep the brand in the conversation as it awaits a new runway vision.

Last year, luxury brands raced to stage their activations early in the week, before key clients left for the Venice Biennale, which overlapped with Salone. This time around, the pile up of events on Monday and Tuesday seems less logical. No fashion label wants to hold an event after top-spenders have skipped town and the actual trade show gets underway, but in some cases, brands owned by the same group — LVMH’s Louis Vuitton and Loro Piana, for example — will go head-to-head on the same evening.

And if the avalanche of fashion activations has brought new energy to the event, some design world insiders complain that the fashion industry has turned the fair into a marketing circus, a criticism brands would do well to heed, lest their Salone love affair becomes a one-sided relationship.

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