Milan, the capital of sustainable beauty

This magic is recreated every year, spurred by a trade fair; Milan’s furniture week is increasingly the week of creativity, with new trends and new colours, and technology used for comfort and beauty.

What it is that determines this role is not so much the giant Furniture Trade Fair, which has hundreds of thousands of visitors a day, and which occupies all of the already immense, new Milan Exhibition Centre, but the non-Trade Fair events, the so-called “Fuorisalone”. Everybody talks about the Fuorisalone as if it were a place, but it is everything but a precise physical location. The multitude of “non-Trade Fair” events and exhibitions that are for not only traders but also students of architecture, lovers of beauty, real or aspiring photographers, take place in an area that coincides, approximately, with that around via Tortona, which was once a degraded, post-industrial area of Milan, but which is now synonymous with being “up-to-date”. In fact, there are eccentric events, presentations, inaugurations and aperitifs are scattered throughout the centre of Milan, from Brera to the Garibaldi area, from Porta Ticinese to Corso Venezia.

In these places, there are products, but also, and above all, suggestions, on display; here, you can find inspiration for tomorrow, or more likely for the day after tomorrow; you can see furniture, furnishings and domestic appliances, and, above all, a different way of living the present. It is not for nothing that the word that describes the objects on display is “sustainability”: economic, artistic, and environmental.

And everything produced from recycling, or that uses energy sparingly, becomes an object of the future, from the chair to the car, from the dishwasher to a sculpture.

It is an order that the people of Varese have been well able to apply: from Greenkitchen 2.0, an integrated kitchen project with almost zero pollution and energy impact, which was presented at the “EuroCucina” Fair, and created by Whirlpool Europe (that is, from the melting pot of ideas situated in Cassinetta, near Varese), to the bookcase on which you can also create a home vegetable garden, which was presented at the “Fabbrica del Vapore” by Giorgio Caporaso, to the starry sky by the American designer Kellam Clark, made using material from Metalmarc, a company in Induno Olona which specialises in reusing metal.

These are just a few examples of the huge array of proposals, which will come and go in one week, but which give the idea that here, despite everything, the future continues to be reconceived.