There is news on the scene at the Milan Design Week, a detail novelty, but one that could set a precedent that will be difficult to reverse. To enter one of the Alcova venues, you will have to pay a €25 ticket.

Alcova is an exhibition platform that for years has been a gravity point in the geography of the Fuorisalone, with venues that episode after episode have focused on reorienting the city, from the Ex Macelli in Calvairate to the Ospedale Militare in Baggio, to the Bagatti Valsecchi and Borsani villas in Varedo, the latters returning this year; however, Borsani has a limited capacity, as Alcova states on its website, and for this reason access will be regulated by a ticket with fixed time slots. This ticket will also work as a priority access for the other Alcova 2025 sites, which remain free.

Standing in endless lines and in the middle of enormous gatherings has somehow become the hallmark of Milan Design Weeks through the last decade: it is one of the chapters in a social and market evolution that has followed the long life of the Salone del Mobile. Since the 1980s, this life has been on the move, changing shape, jumping out of the Fair’s enclosure, reaching the city and enlivening it.
It all started with a very twentieth-century dimension of “happenings” and arrived at the beginning of the millennium with the “fuori salone” being also an occasion for the sometimes dazzling debuts of emerging designers (Maarten Baas told us about this in an interview a few Design Weeks ago). Then the season of the big party has come, of districts appearing, disappearing and expanding, up to the present day, when the city finds itself under the enthusiastic pressure of huge crowds of onlookers, with a dimension that has increased since the pandemic.

With the introduction of the ticket, a new space has been created that is not accessible to everyone, but only to paying and accredited visitors, as is the case with the professionals at the Fair. But here we are outside the Fair. One cannot help but wonder if the new episode in the expansion of the Salone outside its walls is an unprecedented proliferation of multiple Saloni, surrounded by the parallel system of the open Milan of Design Week.

Opening image: Villa Borsani, Varedo, Italy. Photo Mary Gaudin