Milan's Salone del Mobile is more than just a fair; it's a global benchmark for design and furniture. Every spring, it transforms the city into a hub of creativity, innovation, and forward-thinking ideas. Born in 1961 to promote Italian excellence in furniture production, the Salone has evolved over the years to become the beating heart of Milan Design Week, drawing professionals, companies and design enthusiasts from all over the world. Fuorisalone brings the city to life, filling neighborhoods, galleries, and urban spaces with installations, exhibitions, and experimental performances, turning Milan into a dynamic stage for new trends.

In this article, we trace the history of the Salone del Mobile, its milestones, the evolution of Fuorisalone, and the key moments that have made it a must-attend event for the world of design, architecture, and contemporary culture.

by Silvana Annicchiarico

We recount in brief the origins of design’s most important event.

1961. Italy’s economic rebirth is in full swing. Consumerism is growing, the economy is marching on and modernity irreversibly and euphorically shapes the lifestyle and habits of the Italians. The previous year the Olympics Games in Rome and Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita had put Italy under the international spotlight. The Salone del Mobile was born against this background: a little over 300 hundred exhibitors, the pavilions located in Piazza VI Febbraio alone, and about 10,000 visitors, of whom only a mere thousand coming from abroad.

However, that’s where everything started: from the intuition of a few Italian furniture makers, led by Tito Armellini. After visiting the Koln Furniture Expo they understood, with a certain degree of foresightedness, the necessity of letting the rest of the world discover their products too. They hence funded Cosmit (“Comitato Organizzatore del Salone del Mobile Italiano”), taking the wise decision of making communication the fulcrum of their entrepreneurial venture. From the very start, the Salone became the main stage for Made in Italy design in the interiors and furniture industries. The expo, though, wasn’t just a great shopping window but a whole universe destined to grow and expand itself over the years, finding in the city of Milan the booster to promote and spread the excellence of Italian design to an international audience.

The Milan show has long since achieved worldwide fame, recognised as a stage for creativity. While we wait to find out this year’s statistics, we give you an idea of the Salone’s identity.

Since the beginning of the new millennium, the Salone del Mobile has been aiming more and more to establish its international stance, not only by increasing the number of foreign exhibitors in Milan, but by becoming a role model for those markets partial to Italian design and its culture. In 2005, hence, the Saloni WorldWide Moscow was launched, followed in 2016 by the Salone del Mobile Milano Shanghai. These events have been since bringing the best Italian brands to showcase their most creative, avantgarde and qualitative projects in matters of furniture manufacturing, hence strengthening the image of the Salone as a hub of cultural innovation. 

Although in the recent years the increasingly complicated global political situation has been slowing down the relationships with some markets (like the Russian one, for instance), the Salone hasn’t put its international ambitions aside, by attracting a growing number of visitors from extra-EU countries including the USA, Brazil, the Emirates and the United Kingdom.

The Salone’s hundreds of exhibitors and the thousands of goods showcased confirm its relevance as an international stage for creativity, as well as an unmissable meeting place for the industry insiders. The Salone can now count on an average of 400,000 visitors from more than 180 countries per year.

From the monographic exhibition dedicated to Achille Castiglioni to Peter Greenaway’s experimental project, we tell you about the most interesting exhibitions that have emerged since the Salone.

Since the 1990s the Salone has been significantly intensifying its cultural relevance by promoting a rich program of exhibitions, many of which have been celebrating the great masters of contemporary design. Everything began in 1996 with a retrospective dedicated to Achille Castiglioni, to then touch upon Joe Colombo, Gio Ponti, Vico Magistretti, Alvar Aalto, Bruno Munari, Ettore Sottsass. Other exhibitions, instead, experiment with new ways of communicating the culture of design through a series of transversal events that bring together design, art, fashion and food. It all began in 2000 with Stanze e Segreti at the Rotonda della Besana, with the participation and contribution, among others, of Achille Bonito Oliva, Peter Grenaway, Emil Kusturica, Robert Wilson, Yoko Ono, Marina Abramovic, Ghada Amer, Massimo Bartolini and Michelangelo Pistoletto.

Among the most memorable exhibitions, Grand Hotel Salone in 2002, curated by Adam D. Thiant, 1951-2001 Made in Italy? at the Milan Triennale in 2001, Immaginando Prometeo at Palazzo della Regione in 2003, Entrez Lentement in 2004, curated by Pierluigi Nicolin and revolving around the idea of a round table between eight contemporary architects and eight belonging to the modernist tradition, each participating with a house project. Not to forget the innovative and experimental project on Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper curated by Peter Greenway in 2008. 

From the first black and white poster to Massimo Vignelli’s Compasso d’Oro award, here’s some of the best graphic designs of the past sixty years of Salone del Mobile.

In 1961, the first Salone del Mobile poster was commissioned to graphic designer Camillo Pizzigoni, the original illustrator of cult comic La Vispa Teresa. It depicted the shape of an eye in whose pupil one can glimpse the silhouettes of pieces of furniture. Right from its inaugural edition the Salone displayed its impressive graphic and communication strategy that will define its whole history.

A fundamental step along this path occurred in 1994 when Massimo Vignelli redesigned Cosmit’s graphic identity and the coordinated image of the Salone. The project, which included both signage and promotional materials, employed the Our Bodoni, the version of Bodoni designed by Tom Carnase for Vignelli in 1989. The previously used posters and brochures were thus replaced by a new inventive A4 folded brochure rich in information.  The project was crowned with the Compasso d’Oro award in 1998. 

Among the many, beautiful posters, one can’t help but recall the 1978 one by Alberto Longhi, the 2009 one by Guido Scarabattolo and the 2017 one by Lorenzo Marini. In 2022, to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Salone, Emiliano Ponzi opted for a multi-episode narrative, with no less than six posters recounting the evolution of costumes and design in Milan from the 1960s to the present day.

The Salone’s legacy is not only about objects, but also about the spaces set up to enhance them. We tell you two unforgettable projects.

One of the undisputed protagonists in the history of the set-ups of the Salone del Mobile no doubt is Ferruccio Laviani. He made more than 100, 32 of which for Kartell alone. They all share a common trait: the ability of using a contemporary language also when dealing with history and memory. Two, out of them all, remain unparalleled. One was made in 2000 for Flos at Euroluce to showcase the Lux Lust lamp collection by Philippe Starck. Laviani opted for a series of female mannequins dressed up as provocative maids, so as to turn the environment into a hybrid of a hotel foyer and an Allen Jones’ sculpture exhibition.

The other was the memorable 2003 set-up for Kartell: in a time of political uncertainty triggered by the Gulf War, Laviani decided to share a message of peace and hope, building a ramp in the rainbow colours of the peace flag adopting a figurative language typical of Antonio Lopez’ 1970s illustrations. This to prove that also set-ups can establish a constructive dialogue with their times and issues.

At 39 Via Plinio a sinuous neon sign against a red backdrop lights the Milanese nightlife up. It is Bar Basso’s. The joint isn’t just a favourite among the Salone’s revellers, but it also is the beating heart and symbol of a city that, during the Design Week, becomes a place of encounters, dreams, dramas, exchange of visions and ideas.

In 1998, to liaise the networking between firms and young designers, curator Marva Griffin set up a spin-off of the Salone del Mobile, the Salone Satellite, catered for under-35s only. 

Spontaneous and collective: that’s the spirit the Fuori Salone (meaning “outside the Salone”) was born with. It doesn’t have a founder, a forefather, or an institution which fostered it. The Fuori Salone came to life by itself, starting from the 1980s, thanks to the initiative of a few subjects who, during the week of the Salone del Mobile, began to bring design culture outside of the expo spaces.

Once again this year, during Fuorisalone 2025, Milan comes alive as an unpredictable and vibrant creature. Events, installations, and encounters bloom in every corner of the city, sketching out a geography of discoveries and desires. The best way to experience it? By following two intertwined paths: the already familiar and beloved things on one side, and on the other, what you don’t yet know you want to see. This is the very soul of this edition — a dialogue between memory and surprise.

In a moment when design is breaking free from rigid boundaries, Porta Venezia turns into a fluid territory, Base Milano becomes a lab of utopias and shared actions, while Palazzo Permanente opens up as a poetic threshold between perception and technology. Fuorisalone 2025 speaks loudly of a design that dares to be political: a moving and radical tribute to Gaetano Pesce, a performance by Formafantasma and Cassina that questions modernity, and a path suspended between nature and AI in Portanuova.

And yet, there’s also space for pure wonder: the reinvention of Palazzo Donizetti’s interiors by international designers, Google’s hypnotic installation, the delicate touch of Maison Perrier-Jouët, and Alcova’s fragile utopias nestled between industrial archaeology and hidden gardens. Add to that the bold design provocations at Dropcity, the mobile experiments of Prada Frames, and MUJI’s quiet, domestic poetry.

For me, Fuorisalone 2025 is all of this: a landscape to cross without a map — a chance to be surprised, transformed, and swept away.