Has evolved from a national fair for Italian furniture manufacturers into a planetary epicenter of design culture, not merely exhibiting furniture but staging an annual performance of innovation, prestige and aesthetic discourse where commerce, craft and conceptual speculation intersect, held each April in the FieraMilano complex at Rho since 1961, the fair now spans over 230,000 m², hosting more than 2,500 exhibitors and attracting upwards of 270,000 visitors from over 150 countries, its rhythmic expansions—Euroluce in odd years, EuroCucina and the International Bathroom Exhibition in even ones—illustrate a strategic curation of interior ecologies, while the SaloneSatellite, created by Marva Griffin, incubates emerging talent under 35, explicitly linking academic research, industry and youthful experimentation, this institutional ecology positions Milan not just as host but as dramaturge, scripting how design circulates socially, materially and symbolically, especially visible in the proliferation of Fuorisalone events—over 1,100 in 2024 alone—transforming the city into a polycentric scenography where palazzos, ateliers and fashion houses become stages for hybrid installations, performances and atmospheres, exemplified by the Alcova exhibition in the former home of architect Osvaldo Borsani, which reframes domesticity as speculative terrain, in this sense, the Salone functions less as a trade fair and more as a ritual of visibility, where objects are not only launched but narrated, contextualized, and inscribed into global imaginaries of taste, sustainability and future living, making it an instrument of cultural soft power as much as a commercial apparatus.
