Reclaiming the real
The back-to-back design week held in Milan in April, followed by the Met Gala in May, has unleashed a fashion frenzy, stimulating minds and setting off an impulsive adrenaline rush of dizzying proportions. With the Design Week 2026 generating a direct economic impact of about €255 million, some 800,000 attendees flocked from 167 countries to savour the visually stimulating showcase. This massive event, including the Salone del Mobile and Fuorisalone, significantly boosted Lombardy's hospitality sector, with hotel occupancy hitting 90 per cent, buoyed by half a million tourists during peak days, elbowing an 8.6 per cent increase in average per capita spending to €250.
What made it relevant for Italy was the Lombardy region, which served as a global design hub, home to 30,000 design and furniture companies that gainfully employ 90,000 skilled workers, generating over €11 billion in annual export turnover (while India hovers in the €2.2 billion realm). A furniture design movement that began in 1961 has now burgeoned into a multi-dimensional mecca of creative expression.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the Big Apple hosted a different design extravaganza, tied to curated celebrity couture, raising a record-breaking $42 million for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute in a single star-studded night, surpassing the previous record of $31 million set in 2025. With no one blinking at the $100,000 ticket or a $350,000 table, the bling knew no bounds. This singular event generated massive ‘Media Impact Value’ (MIV) for the fashion, tech and hospitality industries, with figures exceeding $1.3 billion in previous years.
The fusion of technology and art is gaining ground and shifting gears with Silicon Valley giants like Meta, OpenAI, Amazon and Snapchat as sponsors, leaning into the power of social entrepreneurship. The soft power is crystallising into hard economics. The deluge of AI-driven creative Apps and the use of online tools for design-driven deliverables is an index of circular economies taking to the ubiquitous cloud.
Esha Ambani’s ribbon dress at the Met Gala, designed by Manish Malhotra in collaboration with Swadesh, made a stitched statement in traditional craftsmanship, perfected and nurtured over centuries from across India. With art, design, crafts and creativity taking centre-stage at defining high-points on the global cultural calendar, the layered luxury segment is seeing a steady endorsement from growing patronage and passion. India’s rich heritage offers an untapped potential to power semi-dormant sectors where gaps present enormous opportunities. Conversely, the roots of the banyan tree call for shedding the overblown shades of colour in favour of studied minimalism and maha-mudra of the elemental, eternal design in harmony with nature.
The rise of 2,400 plus D-Schools across many Indian universities and educational institutions in recent years and adaptations of media-labs and ‘maker spaces’ is a reflection of expanding engagement of the STEAM principles (science, technology, engineering, art & math) as the new norm of holistic learning. It is also dawning among planners that the nearly 50,000 graduates and diploma holders will find swift absorption in the design-hungry economy previously dominated by traditionalists, who largely remained anonymous in their toils, rather than revelling in their spoils. The rising numbers of designers, artists, craftsmen, design professionals, champions of couture, expositions and revitalisation of cultural centres require a serious rethink of conventional rote-based school curricula and the embedded structural rigidity of the higher education system.
Though the birth of the movement through symbiotic osmosis is inevitable, a national strategy may be the call of the hour to re-design, re-wild, re-generate the rigours of an elastic 360 framework – an ecosystem, where the industry, tech, gig-resources, service, culture, heritage and national priorities find common ground. Building on this denominator is the only sustainable future metric for civil societies to prosper and lend themselves true meaning.
While the Milan Design Week values human-centric design and sustainability principles of materiality and circular economies, it unites designers, architects, craftsmen, engineers, innovators and creative thinkers to work collaboratively. Over the last six decades, it has reinforced the proverbial Vitruvian pantheistic notion of humans capable of becoming active agents of change, connecting design with emotions, identity and seeking solutions to complex problems. The 2026 theme of ‘Becoming the Project’ is indeed a tireless striving, where the square and circle seem to converge.
What is significant about the Met Gala is that the celebrities gather not so much for a charitable cause, but to sustain the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, which exhibits seven centuries of fashion across continents, rendering it synonymous with art. This acknowledgement is the realisation of civilisations, where virtues expressed, unspoken and lived, are testaments to true treasures of time.
The author is an India-born Silicon Valley-based world-acclaimed museum designer and thought-leader, known for establishing award-winning institutions, author of seminal books on the future of museums and curating luxury