Luxury Brands Out in Force at Salone del Mobile

Hello and welcome back to The Week Ahead, your guide to the coming days’ most important and interesting events. This edition is all about Salone del Mobile, which over the last few years has become a fixture on the fashion calendar, despite only a handful of luxury brands operating serious homewares businesses.

We have seen more labels follow the lead of Armani and Ralph Lauren and offer more than candles and the occasional throw pillow. But the real appeal of Salone is in the opportunity to get more face time with the customers who matter most: the ultra-wealthy sorts for whom the annual pilgrimage to Milan plays the same role as your Saturday trip to Ikea.

What Luxury Brands Are Doing at Salone del Mobile

What’s happening: Salone del Mobile, the annual furniture and design fair, begins in Milan on Tuesday. Luxury fashion brands will be out in force.

Who’s there: Just about every luxury brand of note will have set up a temporary shop, hosted a dinner or a party, or put on an exhibition or all of the above. While some are showing actual furniture and design objects, most labels are putting their own stamp on the proceedings. These include a pop-up “reference library” from Jil Sander and Demna’s guide through a century of Gucci’s design history. A growing number of brands have recurring, Salone-specific projects: Miu Miu’s Literary Club, which includes performances and a lecture series, is back for a third time. Louis Vuitton will show its latest “Objets Nomades” artist-driven furniture collection, and Prada is hosting its fifth “Frames” symposium. Loro Piana is looking join the club with “Studies, Chapter 1: On The Plaid,” a deep dive into the techniques and materials of its throw blankets.

While there has been grumbling about the luxury marketing activations overshadowing the actual furnishings, Salone’s organisers know the crossover helps more than it hurts. Case in point: This year’s agenda includes “Abito,” an exhibit pairing a century of fashion with Italian furniture and other domestic objects.

Why it’s happening: That’s the question, this year especially. Luxury brands are still casting about for how to pull out of their multi-year slump, with even labels that had once defied the downturn, like Hermès, now reporting disappointing sales.

In better times, homewares, along with beauty and hospitality, were seen as potentially lucrative side businesses, meant to transform big fashion brands into full-on lifestyle labels. While these efforts are ongoing, reviving demand for core fashion and leather goods surely takes precedence right now.

In a sense, this has made Salone even more important for struggling brands. The downturn has sharpened the industry’s focus on the kind of top clients who will be showing up in Milan (those Loro Piana plaids will set you back at least $3,000; and if you have to ask about the cost of the Campana Brothers’ cocoon hanging chair for Louis Vuitton…). It matters less whether these customers buy the actual homewares and more whether the Salone activation itself sparks joy.

There are exceptions. Armani, Fendi, Hermès and others have built out successful homewares divisions, and many of these brands have been coming to Salone for years, or even decades before it was an industry trend. And there are a smattering of non-luxury brands in attendance as well; Nike regularly uses the event to showcase high-tech materials (this year it’s a look back at the work of M. Frank Rudy, inventor of Nike’s Air cushioning).

But overall, Salone is just one more stop on luxury brands’ never-ending global marketing tour, albeit with more artisanal chess tables and teapots. That’s no knock on what these labels are doing — pop-up literary salons and sculpture gardens play an important role in cementing their status as culture-straddling brands for people with good taste. But the dream of building cross-category juggernauts may be on hold.