EDITOR’S LETTER
Quite frankly, Milan Design Week — Salone del Mobile — is for neither the faint-hearted nor the lacking in stamina, especially with a photographer, video crew and sound recordist in tow. Lights, camera, walk, talk. For the Vogue Living team, the world’s largest annual design festival was an exhilarating (albeit heavily scheduled) race to absorb its atmosphere and energy, meet its protagonists and cover enough ground to satisfy the very different requirements of the magazine’s print, online and social media platforms. That’s a lot of eyeballs and a lot of shoe leather. It’s usually only on my return to Australia, when the jetlag has subsided and my mind’s inbox has started to filter and edit, that I can make sense of the week that was. This year’s Milan Design Week was a truly sensory experience. Whether it be the visual symmetry of Nendo’s 50-chair homage to the Japanese manga tradition; Umut Yamac’s sweetly eccentric ‘Perch’ lights at Moooi; Airbnb’s joyfully curated celebration of human connection through food and craft; or the 2016/Arita project’s graceful tribute to the 400-year heritage of Japan’s Arita porcelain (poignantly on the very day that an earthquake rocked southern Japan), Milan — as always — inspires, soars and rarely disappoints. Our 30-page report on Design Week 2016 begins on page 58. And each year there is one conversation that lingers in my memory. Talking with Paola Antonelli (pictured top left), the Italian-born senior curator of architecture and design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), at the Lexus installation (where she was judging the Lexus Design Awards), was an uplifting start to my week. “I can’t count how many years I’ve been coming to Milan, but every year I get at least five or six amazingly inspirational ideas,” she said. “In Milan I go to the hair salon or the bakery and they always ask me, ‘How is Salone?’ I don’t believe there is anywhere else in the world that has such a citywide party as Milan. When the weather is good and the wisteria is in blossom, there’s nowhere like it.”