27/05/2025 • 4 min read

Milan Design Week 2025 Review

Timeless themes, topics, and trends

by Alex Przybyla

Milan felt like a Haworth garden this year: everywhere you looked, a flower from the Haworth world was blooming. Imaginative concepts from Poltrona Frau, experimental questions from Cappellini, radical approaches from Zanotta, dramatic flourishes at Cassina – we were surrounded by stories. (And that’s just within the Haworth ecosystem!)

While gathering content for the Milan Design Week 2025 Trend report – download that here – we posted a daily report on topics that we felt deserved special attention. Those topics included colour, materials, AI, and nostalgia. 

Read on for a summary of what we discovered – this is Milan Design Week 2025 in review!

Colour 

This year, we marvelled at colour in good company. While we were in Milan, we had the privilege of spending a few days in the company of Pantone, the worldwide experts in colour. Pantone looks deeply into each colour – and then they look beyond, questioning colour expectations and delving into each colour’s potential stories. Pantone’s love for colour was infectious; spending time with them gave us ‘eyes to see’ colour in a deeper way. 

(Read our interviews with Pantone’s Jane Boddy and Tannese Williams in the Trend Report!)

We encountered rich, saturated colour frequently. Deep reds, scarlets, and amaranths stood out in particular; we called this theme ‘Campari’ as a cheeky nod to the liqueur invented near Milan. We also saw bright, sour citrusy tones like lime and lemon that brought joyful, optimistic bursts of energy to spaces. 

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Material

Milan is a week of surprises. While we’re always excited to find innovative materials, see creative production methods, or witness returns to traditional forms and processes, this year we were particularly surprised by the exploration of immateriality. Designers questioned tangibility, visibility, and form.

Stephen Burks Man Made spoke to the spiritual sense of emptiness that influences the studio’s design process. Google’s ‘Making the Invisible Visible’ exhibition used light – formless, intangible light – to create partitions that were almost like curtains, blurring the borders between presence and absence, materiality and immateriality.

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AI tools in design 

We spoke with several creative minds about the role of AI tools in design. Generally, the sentiment was one of qualified optimism. Hanne Willmann, a young designer based in Berlin, finds AI tools helpful for testing initial ideas. At the same time, Hanne said that AI just rehashes what’s ‘already out there’, so it will never ‘replace actual design work, because design work is on a deeper level, finding something new that has not been there yet.’ 

Gensler Design Director Peter Schafer saw positives in AI tools, especially as time-saving resources. AI can also aid in storytelling in the early stages of a concept – for example, it can find the history of the street or neighbourhood where the project will take place. AI can also help to identify more sustainable materials and processes. Peter noted the concerning lack of transparency around AI’s energy and water usage; we’ll need to collectively push the tech giants and hold them to account.

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Nostalgia 

With such a rich history, Milan can be forgiven for turning an eye toward the past. Every year, icons are honoured, anniversaries are celebrated, and historical designs are put back in the spotlight.

But Milan is not the world’s home of design because it is content with what has come before. Even amidst so much history, it is not the past that surrounds you during Milan Design Week – it is the energy of the future, the dynamism of change. Poltrona Frau, Cassina, Cappellini, and Zanotta all celebrated past icons in their own ways – but the focus of all four brands was clearly on tomorrow. Their legends are not frozen in amber, unchanging and immaculate – they are evolving even now. 

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The four topics we explored in Milan are not ‘trends’, per se; they are more like meditations on four subjects that affect most of us in the world of design. 

We’re not looking for streamlined, global mega-trends – if such a thing even exists anymore. Our Trend Report takes the same approach. We are not encouraging ‘trend-chasing’, which is uninspired and unsustainable. 

Instead, we look for fresh takes on the timeless, paired with insights from creative minds. We found much to inspire us – and we hope you will as well!

DOWNLOAD TREND REPORT

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