Lorenzo Damiani Tavolante
The benchmark event for the furnishing and design sector is throwing open its doors to a superlative array of products, a more user-friendly layout, a revamped Euroluce, a wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary cultural offering and an equally valuable calendar of meetings, bringing new meaning to future trade fair events while providing concrete responses to the current changes and challenges in the design world.
The Salone del Mobile.Milano took up its traditional position on the starting blocks in April. As of tomorrow, Tuesday 18th, for six days, the 61st edition of the trade fair will be on at Fiera Milano Rho, designed to be an opportunity, a place and a tool for reflection on the role and the evolution of the trade fair system. The Salone thus demonstrates that it is a global hub of experimentation and cross-pollination, a place where culture is created and thought generated, an inclusive space for interface and exchange and a producer of added value.
With people firmly at the centre, be they visitors or exhibitors, and a top notch trade fair experience, the Salone is launching three major innovations: a single exhibition level, with the exhibitors from the upper pavilions (8-12, 16-20) moving into the lower ones, making for consistent aesthetic, narrative and reference target paths, increasingly enhancing the visitor experience and ramping up opportunities for the individual brands to meet and interact; a new Euroluce layout, boasting an urban, loop-shaped path so, rather than visitors being faced with innumerable choices of direction, allowing them to encounter all the exhibitors, within just a few hundred metres, avoiding the frustration of missing out of something; a wide-ranging cultural component in the lighting biennial spaces, consisting of multi-disciplinary content ranging from architecture to photography and art, with exhibitions, talks, workshops and site-specific installations curated and organised by curators of differing generations, spheres and provenance.
Maria Porro, President of the Salone del Mobile.Milano, had this to say: “What will fairs be like in the future? The Salone del Mobile.Milano is attempting to respond to this question today. We are presenting a reworked 61st edition, fresher and more accessible, vital and vibrant, that looks to the future of the trade fair experience, underpinned by the confidence and the commitment of those who appreciate its value and are keen to preserve it. It will be a Salone packed with new things and open to cross-pollinations. Design and furnishing are fuelled by science, technological research, art, photography, digital communication, publishing and lots more besides. The new exhibition format will underscore this relationship in even greater depth. Being a positive and innovative catalyst for ideas, projects and relationships is what makes it an international focus of attraction: 34% of our exhibitors, a figure that has risen steadily year after year, are from different countries – we are expecting thousands of visitors from Europe, the United States and China, as well as from Saudi Arabia, India and the Far Eastern countries. We believe that the Salone should reflect the quality and excellence of an entire productive system, an event that act as a cultural bridge, an economic driver and an accelerator of virtuous environmental processes – in fact, the next few days will enable us to gauge the progress made towards ISO 20121 certification for sustainable events management. We also believe in an event in which tradition, rigour and seriousness are mixed with passion and an ability to anticipate and produce innovation. This is why design, and the entire design community, will continue to find an ideal home for living in and visiting at the Salone.”
The 2023 events – the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, International Furnishing Accessories Exhibition, Workplace3.0, S.Project, Euroluce and SaloneSatellite – encompass a total of more than 2,000 exhibitors from 37 countries, including more than 550 talented designers under 35 from 31 countries, and 28 design schools from 18 different nations.
