Milan Design Week and What We Could Learn From It

May 3, 2026

The week before last, Lin and I were in Milan for what was meant to be a much-needed break. A proper holiday where we were going to switch off, eat well, wander about, look at nice buildings and not think too much about work or HiFi or any of that.

Of course, we also happened to book it at the same time as Milan Design Week, which, if you know anything about it, is not exactly a low-key “do”. People fly in from all over the world for it. Designers, brands, artists, people who seem to have a very strong opinion on chairs, lighting and materials and probably have much nicer homes than I do. I bet lots of them say their home is “curated”. Our home is certainly not curated!

Now, we did not go to Milan Design Week. That was not the plan…honest guvnor. There were restaurants to visit, streets to wander and get lost in, and the general business of just being somewhere different for a few days. That’s what we like to do; wander, get lost, find new places to eat, and take in an art gallery or five. But equally, it would have been a bit daft not to dip a toe into MDW, particularly as Lin actually studied fine art and glass at university and has a far better grounding in all this than I do. I just sort of like things when they look right, without always knowing why, though I’m fairly knowledgeable in some aspects of design that interest me.

Anyway, we went along to a few bits and pieces, nothing too heavy, just picking things that sounded cool or were nearby, and one of those was a preview of a collaboration between Devon Turnbull, his OJAS project, and Klipsch. I am not going to get into the techy stuff of the speakers themselves because that is not really what this is about, and anyway, there is coverage of that elsewhere on HiFi PiG.

What struck me was not so much the product but how it was being shown to folk.

The event itself was done in collaboration with USM, the Swiss modular furniture manufacturer, and it was held in an art institute right in the centre of the city. That already changes things a bit. You are not in a hotel room with the curtains drawn and a slightly apologetic-looking system set up at one end. You are in a space that is already about objects, about form, about how things sit in a room and how people move around them. Design gubbins!

When we got there, it was pretty quiet. There were only a few people in the room, five, including us, which in itself felt a bit odd given how busy everything else in Milan seemed to be that week. But actually, that ended up being part of the point. Because those few people were not the usual HiFi crowd, apart from us. They were younger, for a start. Stylish in that Milanese way that suggests they have thought about what they are wearing, but don’t want you to think they have thought about what they are wearing. They looked like they cared about design, about spaces, about how things fit together visually and culturally, rather than technically. I recall that one was a film director working on something for Netflix.

And they were interested. Properly interested.

Not in that slightly insular, arms-folded, chin-stroking way you see at HiFi shows where people are almost waiting to catch something out or confirm a suspicion that something is a bit off in the system playing. This was loads more open. They were asking questions, trying to understand what they were looking at and hearing, engaging with it in a way that felt… I do not know… fresher, I suppose. Definitely cooler. Certainly more Milan Design Week.

One guy had a bag full of records he had clearly just bought that day. You could tell he was quite excited about it, but he was also very quick to say that he was “not an audiophile”, which is an interesting thing to feel the need to say out loud, I thought. And I think what he really meant was that he did not see himself as part of that stereotypical audiophile world. He liked music, he liked records, he liked the physicality of it all, but “audiophile” carried with it a certain ‘thing’ that he was not overly comfortable being associated with.

Which says a lot about outsiders’ perceptions of the audiophile world, really.

HiFi, whether we like it or not, does have a bit of an image problem. From the outside, it can look like a fairly closed-off and inward-looking hobby. Quite technical, quite insular, and, if we are being brutally honest, not always the most visually inspiring. I’ve banged on about this a fair bit in the past. Rows of black or silver boxes, stacked not so neatly, cables everywhere, speakers that are often… well… boxes. Nice boxes, expensive boxes, very well engineered boxes, but boxes nonetheless.

Now, I love that stuff. I really do. There is something very reassuring about it all. It is familiar, it is functional, and there is a kind of something to it that I think appeals to a lot of us who have been around HiFi for a while. It’s all a bit physics lab at school. But if you step outside of that audiophile bubble for a bit and look at it through the eyes of someone who is more interested in design or interiors or just making their home feel a certain way, it is not hard to see why audiophillia might not immediately grab them as something they want to be a part of.

Which is why seeing things like the Louis Vuitton turntable at Milan during Design Week felt quite cool. It is not just about playing records at that point. It becomes an object, a statement piece, something that exists in a room as much for how it looks and what it represents as for what it does. You might think it is completely over the top and mental. You might love it. You might think it is missing the point entirely. But you are reacting to it, and that reaction is part of the conversation. Personally, I thought it looked pretty daft, but that’s not the point!

Going back to the OJAS and Klipsch setup, the slightly amusing thing is that the speakers themselves are not what you would call subtle. They are big, fairly industrial-looking, finished in battleship grey, with horns sitting on top. In a different environment, they might have felt a bit imposing, maybe even slightly out of place. But in that space, alongside USM’s modular furniture, they made visual sense in a way that is quite hard to explain without sounding a bit pretentious – and I don’t have the fancy facial hair or stylish clothing to carry that off. It was not that they suddenly became design objects in the conventional sense, but more that they were part of a wider language of objects that are allowed to have presence in a space. Nothing was trying to hide. Nothing was apologising for taking up space. It all looked cool as fudge.

And I think that is quite an important point.

HiFi has, for a long time, either gone down the route of being very obviously “HiFi” or trying to disappear entirely into the background. Hide the boxes, minimise the visual impact, make it blend in. What I saw in Milan was something a bit different. Not hiding, not shouting, but just existing as part of a space that has already been thoughtfully put together. It made me think about how often HiFi feels like something you add to a room after the fact, rather than something that is considered from the outset as part of how that room works. You have your living space, your furniture, your layout, and then at some point you introduce the system, and it sort of takes over a wall or a corner or, if you are particularly committed, an entire room. Now, Lin and I are in the process of looking at a new apartment to buy in the South East of France, and since coming back from Milan, my mind has been all a flutter with how the room will look, how our art, glass, and ceramics will fit in the space…and how the HiFi will also become an integral and well-presented part of that space.

At Milan Design Week, the sense I got, even from a handful of installations, was that audio could be part of that initial conversation rather than an afterthought. It really has quite obsessed me over the last week or so.

All that probably requires a different kind of collaboration. Not just audio brands talking to each other, but audio brands working with furniture designers, architects, interior designers, people who are thinking about spaces in a more holistic way. Which, of course, is exactly what was happening there in Milan. Waterfall, the glass speaker folk from France, have also done collaborations with furniture brands in the past, and I thought they were excellent.

What really stuck with me, though, was still that small group of people in the room. They hadn’t come because they were deep into HiFi groups on socials, or because they had a long list of equipment they wanted to hear. They were there because something about the space, the brand, the event had drawn them in. And once they were there, they were open to it. REALLY open to it!

That feels important to me, because for all the discussions we have about how to get younger people interested in HiFi, maybe the answer is not to try and pull them into our existing world, with all its quirks and habits and occasionally slightly weird priorities. Maybe it is about meeting them where they already are. In places where design matters, where experiences matter, and where objects are part of a broader cultural conversation.

Places like Milan Design Week.

I do find myself wondering whether HiFi actually needs to change in any fundamental way, or whether it is more about how it presents itself. Because at its core, it is still about music, about connection, about that moment when something just sounds right, and you get lost in it for a bit. None of that needs reinventing, I don’t think. But the way it is packaged, shown, and talked about probably does, at least if the aim is to bring more people into it.

Traditional HiFi shows will always have their place. There is something quite comforting about them, in their own slightly chaotic way, with sounds bleeding through walls and familiar faces popping up in different rooms. But they are also, undeniably, a bit of that bubble thing I mentioned. And if we want that bubble to expand, or at least become a bit more permeable, then stepping outside of it into spaces like Milan Design Week might not be a bad idea.

Design, for a lot of people, is an entry point. It is something they already care about, already engage with, already spend time and money on. They might not care about formats or circuitry or any of the more technical aspects that some folk tend to focus on. But they do care about how things look, how they feel in a space, what they say about them as individuals. People express themselves through the things they buy and display in their homes. That is not shallow, I don’t think; it is just a different way into it all. And once they are in, who knows where it leads.

I keep thinking about that guy with the records. Sat there, slightly outside of the traditional HiFi world but clearly very much inside the world of music and objects and experience. But multiply that across events like Milan Design Week, across different cities and different contexts, and you start to see a slightly different picture of what HiFi could be.

Not a replacement for what already exists, but an expansion of it.

More collaborations, more crossovers, more situations where audio is part of a broader cultural and design conversation rather than something that sits slightly off to one side, or the weird relative at a family event. It does not mean everything has to become a design statement, and I would be quite sad if the traditional black boxes disappeared entirely. There is still something about them that feels right – proper HiFi, I tend to call it. But alongside that, there is clearly room for something else to flourish.

Look, I might be reading too much into it. It was only one event, one room, and a handful of people. But it did feel different, and there were only five people in the room.

Milan did not suddenly reveal the future of HiFi to me. But it did make me think that the future might not look quite like the past.