Last week, the well-heeled, well-traveled members of the cultural cognoscenti descended upon Italy for Milan Design Week — a sprawling, city-wide celebration of the most beautiful, most innovative and most exclusive offerings in furniture and design. To give you a sense of scale, Salone del Mobile — MDW’s anchor fair — boasted nearly 3,000 exhibitors and over a million square feet of floor space. Which was excellent news if you were lucky enough to have your passport stamped at Malpensa Airport in the last 10 days. If not, serious FOMO.
But thank god for Instagram. Piecing together the nearly 40,000 mentions of #MilanDesignWeek or #SaloneDelMobile gave the (woefully) excluded a decently thorough picture of the week’s offerings. It was in this spirit that we rounded up 21 of our favorite images for your perusal. Scroll below to see some of the coolest grams from one of design’s biggest happenings — and then book your flight for next year’s fair, stat.
1. Dwell visits the icy gray Carl Hansen booth at Salone del Mobile.
2. Online fashion behemoth Yoox was on-hand to do what they do best: trend-forecasting. To wit, they called out a pleasingly contrasting palette from Muuto.
3. Naturally, Armani posted a tastefully muted vignette to showcase the tastefully muted work of Armani Casa.
4. Apparently, Louis Vuitton is worming even deeper into your home — and your wallet — with a new furniture line. If their preview installation is any indicator, there will be some very covetable pieces.
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5. “Exercises in Seating” by Max Lamb surveyed the designer’s decade-long career — and it was a ubiquitous presence on social media.
6. Color, symmetry and perfect lighting — no surprise that this shot of the Carlo Moretti showroom comes from Architectural Digest.
7. The eclectic chic and sublime use of color in the below gram come courtesy of French designer India Mahdavi.
8. Marni‘s fruit-salad exhibition was inspired by Bogota, Colombia and (allegedly) was a mediation on sustainability. It also just looked really cute on Instagram.
9. Shiny! Bright! Colorful! This ultra-graphic image from online design mag Moco Loco was deserving double tap-bait.
10. Yatzer demonstrated a mastery of composition AND a mastery of hashtags in their snapshot of the COS x Snarkitecture installation.
11. Want. All. The. Colors. Fritz Hansen’s photograph of the new Series 7 colorways was a true #envygram.
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12. Like with its arts and culture coverage, T Magazine takes a sophisticated, understated approach to its Instagram feed.
13. Coolest detail shot? This zippy, colorful carpet posted by Italian fashion brand Terranova.
14. European lifestyle magazine 5 Style captioned this photo “simplicity and refinement.” We would have gone with: “I want to go there.”
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15. Cool hunters WGSN were able to make bottles of rain look, well, cool on their account.
16. Textile designer Madeline Weinrib — ahem, a recent 1stdibs Saturday Shopper — showed off her awesomely saturated floor coverings in a bleached-out Milan warehouse. Very cool.
17. Yup. Cannot read a word of the caption on this post from Danish interiors magazine Bo Bedre. Luckily, beautifully baroque florals require no translation.
18. PR powerhouse Karla Otto was invited to better parties than you and — as evidenced below — her Instagram probably looks better than yours as well.
19. Australian photographer Brooke Holm’s documentation of Milan Design Week was one of the most consistently beautiful we encountered. See below, and then do yourself a favor and check out her entire feed here.
20. To absolutely nobody’s surprise, EIC of Vogue Living Neale Whitaker has a great eye for striking, thoughtfully conceived architecture shots.
21. And of course we can’t ignore 1stdibs’ own Instagram feed. This shot comes courtesy of our collaboration with Cabana magazine — we partnered with the cutting-edge design bible to create a one-of-a-kind pop-up shop at the MiArt fair. The best part? You can still shop the wares, long after everyone else has said arrivederci to Milan Design Week.
