Global design events are revealing affairs, reflecting the sector’s priorities while amplifying tensions between commerce and creativity. We flock to them to discover trends, rising stars and brands that are making waves. But when the revellers have drained their Proseccos, queues have dispersed and brands have dismantled their installations, designers return to studios, where economic precarity, rising material costs and client demands dictate their reality. So what might we conclude about what lies beneath the glitz of these moments, and what does the current form of design festivals say about what it’s like to be a designer today?

This year’s Fuorisalone in Milan, arguably the world’s most significant design event, saw luxury, corporate and tech brands of the likes of Hermès, Google and Asus dominate the city’s Brera design district, with installations that prioritised immediate sensory experiences over long-term innovation. Their presence underscores design’s powerful allure, but also its commodification – brands co-opting the discipline’s cultural cachet, while sidelining its capacity for problem-solving. With the decline of traditional media, it’s also clear that many are choosing to bypass the few remaining critical editorial platforms in favour of reaching audiences directly with immersive experiences optimised for ‘likes’ and viral shares – a feedback loop that favours style over substance.

But opulence can be deceptive, a sign of weakness rather than strength: when the economy is unstable is exactly when social purpose cedes ground to commercial imperative – those with funds call the shots and creative people take fewer risks. This hyper-commercialisation is certainly not specific to Milan – rather, it reveals the deeper economic malaise gripping much of the design world, which is deeply vulnerable to global shocks that affect supply chains, labour flows, trade and materials availability. In recent years, these have included the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit and conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, with Donald Trump’s tariffs and a potential US-China trade war now in the mix.

Nonetheless, by all accounts, Milan remains a fertile environment for designers, with opportunities for growth and an environment that spurs innovation. According to Linda Di Pietro and Giulia Cugnasca, artistic directors of the cultural centre BASE Milano in the canal-side Tortona district, government support for the Italian design sector has traditionally been stable, regardless of the political leaning of the administration of the day, because it’s seen as so essential, accounting for 19.7 per cent of employees in the EU design sector and 22.3 per cent of design sector turnover.¹ “In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on the promotion of Italian products abroad, with more targeted support for initiatives that strengthen the visibility of goods made in Italy," they observe – though the government’s global Made In Italy campaign has recently come under criticism for masking the exploitation of migrant workers² and for a lack of transparency about provenance³.

Regardless, creative hubs for thoughtful design are thriving when you look beyond Brera. For example, BASE Milano’s exhibition during the design week, We Will Design, explored notions of kinship and featured experiments with fungi and solutions to resisting surveillance in public places. The nomadic platform Alcova, which this year took place in Varedo, about 15km north of Milan, has become a must-visit destination for those seeking emerging talent – this time, experimental collectible design sat alongside a hammam built from recycled materials that was first installed in Paris as a showering station for young migrant men. Back in the centre, Drop City, a new permanent venue in the tunnels behind Milan Central Station, brings yet another perspective: aiming to showcase boundary-breaking ideas into "alternative forms of design and architecture in a world of systemic crises" – it opened with Prison Times, an exhibition critiquing the carceral system.

But Milan has its challenges: some say that the high cost of housing and workspaces, in combination with the competitive nature of design activity in central areas, is pushing out emerging designers and contributing to an exodus to other cities and countries. “Milan may be entering a phase of saturation that could undermine its creative ecosystem – it risks losing some of its experimental and grassroots energy, and becoming exclusive and self-referential," Di Pietro and Cugnasca say, highlighting the need for the design world to become less centralised.

What might this mean for Europe’s other centres of design? Now that Milan’s annual moment has passed, London is set to embark on its own season of cultural activity – from March to October, it will host London Craft Week, SXSW, London Design Biennale, London Festival of Architecture, the World Design Congress (a one-off event), London Design Festival, London Fashion Week, Open House and Frieze. All these offer commercial and creative opportunities, but are also likely to reveal the impact of global economic uncertainty on the city’s cultural sector.

Unlike Milan, where design dominates and is deeply embedded in a history of industry, in London the sector is intertwined with a range of other fields such as art, craft, music and tech – a cross-pollination that, alongside the large international and affluent cultural audience that exists in the city year-round, offers its cultural sector some resilience. As with Milan, the entire country’s design sector is highly concentrated in one city, with 25,000 design businesses located in the capital. And it’s simultaneously thriving and exclusionary: while design in London generated £27.2 billion in 2019 (28 per cent of the country’s design sector growth)⁴ according to the Design Council, intensive gentrification, combined with the escalating cost of living, means the difficulty for young creative people to live and work in the city is now almost taken for granted.

London-based designer Andu Masebo says that coming “on the back of inflation, Brexit, recession after recession, austerity, the cost-of-living crisis, the price of education, an impossible housing market and an even more impossible situation around rent," the prospect of tariff-related disruption seems almost minor. “Having said that, if any of the above crises has taught us anything, it's that pain trickles down much quicker than opportunities,” he says, adding that, since Brexit, “one thing that's palpable is that economic and creative opportunities are definitely less”.

These challenges are backed up by Minnie Moll, chief executive of the Design Council: "London based designers are being squeezed by soaring living costs and a shrinking supply of affordable workspaces and the wider economic climate has led to reduced investment in design, and there remains a lack of targeted policy support for the sector.” William Floyd Maclean, founder of the cabinetry business Somer, is one example. “We decided to move out of London as the city was no longer able to accommodate our ambitions for growth: our aim is to champion timber-based manufacturing in the UK, and development has increasingly taken priority over the manufacturing industry within the M25,” he says.

The emergence of new developments outside of the centre, including the purpose-built Design District in Greenwich, and the consolidation of studio and workspaces in Park Royal in west London and East Bank, the major new cultural district on the site of the former Olympic park in Stratford, are signs that creative infrastructure is adapting, but whether these places retain the experimental energy once found in the city’s core remains to be seen.

Justine Simons, London’s deputy mayor for culture and the creative industries, is mindful of the unintended consequences that development can have. “One of the big risks of a big regeneration project is that land prices go up and parties get forced out, which has been the story with lots of major cities around the world,” she tells me. She points to efforts to counter this, including protecting studio space in planning law, the establishment of 12 creative enterprise zones that are being targeted with policies to support creative production, and the launch last year of the Creative Land Trust, under aims to secure affordable workspace for 1,000 or more artists and makers over five years.

Whatever their internal differences, Milan and London are now confronting similar threats from outside and within. Once unchallenged as cultural capitals, they must now reckon with deep-set inequalities, as well as collaborating nationally and internationally and redefining their USP and ethical position, rather than relying on their legacies and their—now perilous—relationship with the US.

The ongoing global instability is likely to encourage greater collaboration outside of these traditional safe havens. But in reality, a wider geo-cultural realignment has long been underway: since the late 2010s, Chinese visitors have been the biggest cohort of the 68 per cent of international attendees to the Salone del Mobile.Milano, while the UAE doubled its attendance and Saudi Arabia signed a new partnership with the fair. Soon, they may feel that their energies are better spent fostering home-grown design scenes and markets. Within Europe, cities such as Lisbon, with its substantially lower studio costs and growing collector bases, are becoming more attractive for creative people. Meanwhile, with the proliferation of design events outside of Western Europe and the US—from Tbilisi to Ljubljana, Dubai to Singapore, the Bukhara to Bangkok—we can’t be assured that the former centres of culture will hold on to their titles forever.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.

References

^1.https://www.salonemilano.it/en/articles/how-design-economy-doing
^2.https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/how-migrant-workers-suffered-craft-made-italy-luxury-label-2024-09-18/
^3. https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/italian-farmers-rally-against-fake-made-in-italy-products-at-brenner-pass/
^4. https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-work/design-economy/#c8746