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When fashion meets design: the most successful collaborations between the runway and furnishings
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Chloé x Poltronova
With Milan Fashion Week 2027 approaching, let’s explore the partnerships between fashion and design: from Chloé x Poltronova to Gucci Design Ancora. Constantly evolving creative dialogues
Milan Fashion Week is approaching, ready to descend on Milan with its usual pizzazz, paralyzing the city and, apparently, any train that has the misfortune to pass through it.
And if by now we are all more or less affected by a certain fashion fatigue – between the endless waltz of creative directors, departures, new entries and inevitable backstage views – Milan retains a special ability to bring together different creative worlds. And perhaps it is precisely in the increasingly pervious relationship between fashion and design that this attitude is most fully expressed.
The exchanges between the two disciplines is certainly not new, but in recent years it seems to have become particularly fertile. Furnishings enter fashion shows, fashion houses reinterpret pieces of design history, while prints, materials and techniques move freely between wardrobes and interiors. The most successful collaborations, after all, go beyond the simple juxtaposition of two recognizable names: they express something about the way they both look at form, color, material and, above all, the objects we choose to live with.
As a new fashion season approaches, we’ve looked back at some of the most recent – and among our favorite – encounters between fashion and design.
Chloé x Poltronova
Chloé x PoltronovaChloé x Poltronova
Tomato, tomahto. How can you resist a design object that seems almost too playful to be taken seriously?
On the occasion of this latest Salone del Mobile, Poltronova joined forces with Chloé to bring back the Tomato Chair, designed by French designer Christian Adam in 1970. Soft, sculptural and unabashedly literal in form, the seat perfectly embodies the irreverent spirit of Italian Radical Design: a piece of furniture freed, so to speak, from the obligation to behave like a furnishing.
For Chloé, it has been reinterpreted in natural tanned leather in the shades of cream, cognac, sand and black: a more tactile and restrained version, perfectly attuned to Chemena Kamali’s vision for the house. Soft, sensuous and just a little strange, it is proof that certain forms, with time, only become more fascinating.
Gucci Design Ancora, Acerbis
Gucci Design Ancora (Acerbis)
Milan sees red. And, for once, it’s not because of the traffic.
When Sabato De Sarno was creative director of Gucci, one of the encounters he wanted to explore was precisely that between the fashion house and the culture of Milanese design. Together with Michela Pelizzari, founder of the Milanese agency PS and the project’s co-curator, he thus chose to dedicate his first Salone del Mobile to guiding the brand to the rediscovery of five twentieth-century furnishings by some of the designers who made Milan one of the capitals of international design.
Presented in the flagship store in Via Montenapoleone in 2024, during Salone del Mobile, the project brought together works by Nanda Vigo, Gae Aulenti, Piero Castiglioni, Mario Bellini, Tobia Scarpa and Piero Portaluppi: not necessarily the great classics that everyone knows, but less obvious gems from their archives, returned to the spotlight and, of course, immersed in Rosso Ancora. Among them was Storet by Nanda Vigo, a storage unit designed in 1994 and later reissued by Acerbis.
More than just a foray of fashion into furniture, the project was a declaration of love for the city’s design culture: a reminder that, in Milan, the past of design never remains in the archives for too long.
Stella McCartney x B&B Italia
Stella McCartney x B&B Italia
For Stella McCartney, the transition from fashion to design started from a very precise obsession: Mario Bellini.
The collaboration with B&B Italia stems from the designer’s personal passion for Le Bambole, the famous series designed by Bellini in 1972 and reinterpreted, fifty years later, through the vocabulary that has always defined McCartney’s work. The result is a capsule consisting of Bambola, Bibambola and Granbambola, all covered with the Fungi Forest print, hand-drawn and taken from the fashion house’s Summer 2022 collection.
Initially presented during Salone in 2022, the new version of Le Bambole has been redesigned on circularity principles, with a completely dismantlable structure and materials selected to facilitate maintenance, recovery and recycling.
It is perhaps precisely here that the encounter works best: not so much in the simple transfer of a pattern from the runway to the living room, but in the way that two apparently different worlds come to share the same question: How can an icon be rethought without distorting it?
La DoubleJ x Kartell
La DoubleJ x Kartell
Even before fashion began to systematically encroach on interiors, La DoubleJ had already brought its prints to the table.
In 2017, the Milan-based brand, founded by J.J. Martin, launched its first collection for the home, transferring colors and patterns from clothes to plates, textiles and objects. A year later, the meeting with Kartell seemed almost inevitable: two Milanese outfits united by a certain allergy to restraint and the belief that good design does not necessarily have to take itself too seriously.
For the collaboration, La DoubleJ’s prints dressed some Kartell classics, from Joe Colombo’s pieces to Anna Castelli Ferrieri’s unmistakable Componibili. Rather than bringing fashion into design, the project highlighted something the two brands already shared: the idea that even the most functional objects can have loads of personality.
