Why does fashion pretend to be for everyone during Design Week?

The 63rd edition of the Salone del Mobile in Milan closed with staggering numbers: over 302,000 registered attendees, more than 2,100 exhibitors from 37 countries, and an estimated economic impact of 278 million euros, marking a 1.1% increase compared to 2024. But it was above all the Fuorisalone that captured media and public attention, with over 1,650 events spread across the city, up 20.5% from the previous year, and a human tide estimated in the hundreds of thousands that flowed through Milan day and night. In this context, fashion brands significantly increased their presence, with 48 official activations during the week—not counting the initiatives from more sportswear-focused brands or smaller players—blending artistic installations, immersive experiences, and social moments, more or less tangential to actual design. These numbers reveal an increasingly urgent need for the fashion system to generate engagement, at a time marked by a profound luxury crisis, volatile markets, and a growing loss of cultural relevance. While the world of design is opening up, Milanese fashion remains anchored to old, inaccessible, and often self-referential paradigms. Brands that take advantage of Design Week do so not only to showcase themselves, but also to gain visibility beyond the elitist boundaries of fashion shows. If fashion week is a closed-off marathon for insiders, design week has become a city-wide adventure where the public can explore, touch, and experience. Where Fashion Week builds walls, Fuorisalone opens doors. This gap highlights a growing divide between the fashion industry and the urban and social context in which it operates. And yet, one can't help but wonder: does it really make sense to participate in an overtly horizontal and democratic event like Fuorisalone when, for the rest of the year, the elitist and vertical model of fashion week is fiercely defended?

The issue is not without its contradictions. In Milan, during this week, we witnessed an emblematic display of the now worn-out relationship between fashion and the public. Thousands upon thousands of people queued up, sometimes for hours, to get their hands on a free Etro-branded stool or the bag-folder distributed by Loewe. Carefully designed, limited, desirable objects, certainly. But above all, they were resold en masse on Vinted and other second-hand platforms at outrageous prices, in a short-circuit that strips everything of meaning. The object is no longer a symbol of an experience or a testimony to a shared aesthetic, but becomes merchandise for quick trade, to be monetized instantly. And so, even the democratic gesture of a free gift becomes hollow, turning into a performance that reproduces the dynamics of artificial scarcity and instant profit. In return, fashion brands get something unseen since the glory days of Supreme and Virgil Abloh: kilometer-long queues outside stores, people doing whatever it takes to be first in line, bookings piling up and overlapping. It’s clear that, first of all, these events do not serve to build community since the visitors collecting gifts will never be customers, and that alongside these open events and guided tours there is a separate calendar of dinners and previews dedicated to members of the “inner circle” who have the privilege of skipping the line. Secondly, the relationship thus created with local communities is entirely toxic: brands chase numbers, require live bookings to visit installations to harvest data, and seek floods of interactions and tags from crowds and crowds of visitors; meanwhile, the public, feverishly seeking access to their world, ends up being parasitic and money-driven. It’s no coincidence that these gifts and gadgets are all advertised by a now-famous page called “Milano da Scrocco,” whose posts leave no room for misinterpretation.

This tension between inclusion and exclusivity is nothing new, but today it feels sharper than ever. On one hand, brands discover in Design Week an opportunity for genuine contact with a broad, curious, and diverse audience. On the other, they keep – or try to reinforce – the boundaries of fashion week, continuing to lock fashion shows behind selective invitations and showrooms disconnected from the city's daily life. Especially since every party, every dinner, every cocktail, and even every event is in fact invitation-only or designed just for influencers: every time a door is opened to the public, there’s careful planning to create a second, more private and exclusive event that keeps the gate closed. Milan’s fashion scene, therefore, seems unable to choose between openness and closure, between community and exclusive club, between dream and reality – appealing, in any case, to a bored and ultra-wealthy elite that inhabits a parallel ecosystem made of members’ clubs, flaunted luxury, and self-referential consumption. The opening of venues like Casa Cipriani—increasingly a location for branded dinners—The Wilde, Core Club, and even Soho House, which hosted an event during the week, and many others, indicates a structural transformation in the city’s purpose: increasingly geared toward hosting foreign wealth and less and less capable of offering vital spaces to those who live there every day. The Milan emerging from Design Week is a magnified reflection of its present: a city suspended between international appeal and internal disillusionment, between widespread creativity and an increasingly distant elite. The numbers tell of a still-vibrant metropolis, but the dominant feeling among younger generations is one of disorientation. Too expensive to live in, too exclusive to feel represented, too busy cultivating a glamorous narrative to notice its social cracks.

What if Fashion Week became like Design Week? More open, more widespread, more integrated with the city. An event truly capable of engaging the public, not just a handful of insiders or selected influencers. A fashion week that lets itself be experienced, that experiments with new formats, that brings creativity out of the showrooms and into urban life. It wouldn’t just be a symbolic gesture, but a concrete action to heal a system in crisis, to restore meaning to a sector that, now more than ever, needs to redefine its cultural and economic role. A more inclusive Fashion Week—even if it’s still unclear how—perhaps with events dedicated to the public, could generate new revenue streams, broaden the consumer base, enhance the value of Italian manufacturing, and relaunch Milan’s international appeal in a more authentic way. Building a system doesn’t just mean being together, but sharing vision, risks, and audiences. And today, the only audience that truly seems eager to take part is the one that Design Week successfully reaches—because it knows how to speak to everyone without sacrificing quality. And perhaps, by opening up Fashion Week, it would also relieve some of the pressure on Design Week itself, now congested to the point of paradox.

Milan is a city used to hosting global events, but it does so at the cost of increasing urban stress—collapsing logistics, chaotic mobility, and drained public resources. Considering that Fashion Week already occupies space, people, and communication, and has become more “visible” and more “Instagrammable” over the years, wouldn’t it make more sense to rethink its format? To turn it into an opportunity to engage with the city, open doors, create real experiences—not just feed-worthy images? That way, at least partially, we might resolve the contradiction that now tears the system apart: on one side, extreme exclusivity; on the other, an obsession with engagement at any cost. Fashion cannot continue to chase the public only when it suits its interests, then retreat into its ivory tower the moment the spotlight fades. If it wants to be relevant again, it must step outside its boundaries, speak clearly, embrace contamination. Like design does. Like the city does, when it’s given the space.