Archive

When Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby announced on 20 May 2026 that their London studio would close after 30 years, they ended a partnership that put one product into the hands of 8,000 Olympic torchbearers and another under millions of office workers. The question this piece sets out to answer is the simplest one anybody asks after such an announcement: what, exactly, did Barber Osgerby make between 1996 and 2026? The answer is roughly four dozen products of consequence, spread across a tight roster of manufacturers — Vitra, Flos, Cappellini, B&B Italia, Established & Sons, Knoll, Hermès, Isokon Plus, Mutina, Fredericia and Emeco — plus one Olympic torch, one circulating coin, and two sister practices that outlived the founding studio in different corporate hands. What follows is that catalogue, in order. ...

The giambattista valli buyback from Artémis, announced by Business of Fashion in May 2026, is the second time in eight years that a Paris fashion house has undone a Pinault-family bet — the first was Stella McCartney rolling back the 2001 Kering joint venture in March 2018. Valli’s reacquisition of his namesake house, Giambattista Valli SAS, from the holding company chaired by François-Henri Pinault closes a nine-year minority-to-majority arc that began with a 2017 stake and a 2021 control move. It is a small deal by Kering or LVMH standards, but it is the second clean unwinding of a founder-house from Artémis since the Stella McCartney departure, and it arrives during the most aggressive founder-buyback cycle in three decades. ...

Sou Fujimoto’s House of Dior Shinsaibashi opened in Osaka on 21 May 2026 as the third star-architect Dior maison in East Asia in 23 years, after SANAA’s Tokyo and Christian de Portzamparc’s Seoul. The new four-storey flagship in the Shinsaibashi-suji shopping district wraps a ribbed, undulating facade — Fujimoto’s reading of haute couture drapery — around interiors by Peter Marino and an upper-floor restaurant by Anne-Sophie Pic. Dior Shinsaibashi is the most architecturally legible chapter yet in LVMH’s 23-year campaign to commission named architects for its Asian flagships rather than fit out anonymous retail shells. ...

The audo copenhagen norm architects relationship is the longest brand-architecture alignment in the current Scandinavian design industry, and it is the reason a 1979 flatware company called Menu and a 1942 Lassen-family lighting house called by Lassen now share an 1880s neoclassical building at Aarhusgade 130 in Nordhavn that simultaneously functions as a showroom, a boutique hotel, a concept shop, a cafe, a restaurant, an event space and a stack of residences. Audo Copenhagen is the consolidated brand name that the Design Holding portfolio formalised in 2019 to operate that building and the catalogue inside it. Norm Architects is the studio that drew the building, that draws most of the furniture inside it, and that — in May 2026 — re-staged the entire format in lower Manhattan as Audo House Tribeca. The brand was assembled around the architecture. That is the unusual thing to record. ...

Frank gehry furniture is a single 54-year argument that any material — corrugated cardboard, ColorCore plastic laminate, bentwood maple, mirror-polished stainless steel, ColorCore again, then bronze and copper — can be made to behave like architecture. The argument opens in 1972 at the Easy Edges workshop on Cloverfield Boulevard in Santa Monica, and it closes, posthumously, on 14 May 2026 in the back room of Gagosian Beverly Hills, where Larry Gagosian and the Gehry family have hung Fish on Fire — the last fish Frank Gehry executed in copper — beside a 2014 bear and a 2023 ColorCore crocodile under ten ink-and-watercolour drawings of fish in motion. Between those two dates sit the Wiggle Chair, the Fish Lamps, the Snake Lamps, the Knoll bentwood collection led by Cross Check, the Alessi Pito kettle, the 2006 Tiffany & Co. jewellery, the 2012 Gagosian fish revival, and the 2023 Louis Vuitton Capucines handbags. The 2026 show, organised six months after Gehry’s death and designed by his own studio, is also the prologue to “O Século de Gehry” at Fundação de Serralves in Porto, opening June 2026 and running until January 2027. ...

Luca de Meo’s first eight months as Kering CEO add up to a Capital Markets Day in Florence on April 16, 2026, five different creative-director appointments inherited or made across the portfolio, a Gucci Times Square takeover that BoF on May 24, 2026 called “back under the microscope,” and a three-phase plan called ReconKering that asks investors to wait until end-2030 to see the payoff. This is a Kering portfolio refresh on a scale the group has not attempted since the disposal of the sport-and-lifestyle assets, and it lands as the Kering AGM convenes May 28, 2026 at 3 PM Paris time at 40 rue de Sèvres. The question every house faces is no longer who runs it. It is what shape it should be by the time the Lead phase opens in 2029. ...

Giambattista Valli’s 20 May 2026 designer buyback from Artémis is the third clean designer reclamation since 2018 — and the first to expose how loud the difference is between a family holding (Pinault’s Artémis) and a listed luxury group (Pinault’s Kering). The three cases that actually qualify — Valli in May 2026, Stella McCartney twice (March 2018 from Kering, January 2025 from LVMH), and Phoebe Philo as a permanent founder-majority structure since October 2023 — do not form a wave. They form a small, specific pattern that gets misread every time a designer leaves a group. ...

Hiroshi Fujiwara’s 3 June 2026 Bang & Olufsen capsule is the 22nd named Fragment Design collaboration in 22 years — and the first to push the double lightning-bolt cabinet from a USD 36 Pikachu keychain and a USD 150 Air Jordan 1 Low all the way to a GBP 53,000 made-to-order Beosystem 9000c. Reading the Fragment Design collaborations as one cabinet, from the 2002 HTM Air Force 1 to a Struer-built stereo cabinet in 2026, is the cleanest way to see how a Tokyo graphic studio has spent two decades acting as the single most prolific co-sign engine in global product culture. ...

Matthieu Blazy’s eighteen-month walk from Bottega Veneta to Chanel produced a USD 19.3 billion house’s first “high single-digit” growth quarter — and three Margiela-Margiela-Simons stops on a single CV that Leena Nair calls “one of the most talented designers in the world.” The Matthieu Blazy career, traced strictly by appointment date, runs through six houses in nineteen years: Raf Simons’s independent label in 2007, Maison Margiela couture from 2010, Celine under Phoebe Philo from 2014, Calvin Klein 205W39NYC under Simons again from 2016, Bottega Veneta from 2020, and Chanel from December 2024. The pattern matters because almost no other working creative director has been inside that many of the houses now defining 2026 womenswear — and none of them sits, today, on Chanel’s revenue. ...

Tadao Ando spent fifteen years turning three of François Pinault’s historic shells — a Venetian palazzo on the Grand Canal, a seventeenth-century Dorsoduro customs house and an eighteenth-century Parisian wheat exchange — into the same room. The Tadao Ando Pinault Collection lineage runs from April 2006 to May 2021 and resolves, in all three cases, to a single architectural move: a free-standing concrete volume inside preserved masonry, with light arriving only where Ando lets it. Palazzo Grassi was the rehearsal, Punta della Dogana the proof, and the Bourse de Commerce the closing argument. ...

Italian radical design begins in Pistoia in December 1966, when Archizoom Associati and Superstudio mount Superarchitettura in two rooms of a provincial gallery and publish a founding statement against the modernist project. The movement runs for roughly thirty years from that exhibition to the opening of the Groninger Museum in 1994, passes through three distinct organisational forms — the Florentine collectives of 1966–1974, the Milanese teaching networks of Global Tools and Studio Alchimia in 1973–1980, and Memphis Milano in 1980–1988 — and is carried throughout by three protagonists whose careers overlap and intersect: Andrea Branzi, Ettore Sottsass, and Alessandro Mendini. The shape of the answer is a lineage, not a school. There is no single manifesto and no single object. There is a chain of groups, magazines, exhibitions and pieces of furniture in which each generation re-stages the argument of the previous one with different materials, different cities and different enemies. ...

Jonathan Anderson is the first designer since Christian Dior himself, in 1946, to oversee Dior womenswear, menswear and haute couture from one office. The jonathan anderson lvmh trajectory — from the September 2013 deal that made him Loewe creative director and gave LVMH a minority stake in his independent JW Anderson label, to the April–June 2025 Dior appointments that consolidated three creative directorships under his name — is the most aggressive single-designer bet the group has placed in a generation. It runs across two brands (Loewe and Dior), one foundation prize, one curated museum show, and roughly twelve years. ...

Loredana Parmesani has filled a 19th-century Pallanza villa with 130 Mendini objects arranged not as museum vitrines but as rooms — the Proust Armchair in one, the Straw Armchair in another, the 100% Make-Up vases lined up like household china, a jacket from the 1997 Furniture for Men series standing in the hallway clad in gold mosaic. The alessandro mendini retrospective at Villa Giulia, Verbania, on the western shore of Lake Maggiore, runs from 16 May to 27 September 2026, was organised by the City of Verbania with the Alessandro Mendini Archive run by Mendini’s daughters Elisa and Fulvia, and stages the Studio Alchimia and Alessi lineages inside a domestic shell rather than the white cube. The exhibition is titled “Alessandro Mendini. Objects. Rooms as worlds.” The design of the show is by Alex Mocika. The thesis, by Parmesani’s own statement, is that the room — “a place of reflection, rest, quietness, and work, but also a place of turbulence” — is the unit of Mendini’s thinking, and that to put his work in vitrines is to mistake the work for its objects. ...

On 22 May 2026, the 29th Compasso d’Oro jury — chaired by Jasper Morrison under ADI president Luciano Galimberti — handed Italy’s design Oscar to 20 projects at the ADI Design Museum in Milan. The compasso d’oro 2026 winners include Philippe Malouin’s Bilboquet table lamp for Flos and Snøhetta’s Array modular sofa for MDF Italia, while Patrizia Moroso of Moroso took the products career award alongside three more lifetime laurels — Alberto Meda and Paola Lenti for design, Aldo Colonetti for research. Thirty-eight honourable mentions and three long-selling products round out a roll call that this year reads less like a national survey and more like a refereed argument about what Italian industrial design currently rewards: mass-market objects with a clear authorial signature, infrastructure and mobility projects with measurable social weight, and historical research that pays its rent. ...

A seven-metre aluminium Savoy vase rises at Copenhagen’s harbour edge: Iittala and Norsk Hydro have built Alvar Aalto’s 1936 icon at monumental scale, walkable inside, for 3 Days of Design 2026. The iittala savoy pavilion 3 days of design commission - officially the Aalto 90 Pavilion - is the centrepiece of Iittala’s contribution to the 17–19 June 2026 edition of the Copenhagen festival, built in low-carbon Hydro REDUXA aluminium and timed to mark ninety years since Aalto designed the original glass vessel for the Savoy restaurant in Helsinki. It is also, read alongside the same supplier’s commissions at Schloss Hollenegg, the clearest sign yet that Norsk Hydro is positioning itself as design-grade aluminium’s go-to producer for 2026. ...

On a basement floor near Milan’s Duomo in 1958, a twenty-eight-year-old painter named Cesare Colombo drew a single perspective in unbroken pen-stroke and quit easel painting for good. The drawing was for the Santa Tecla, a jazz cave a few minutes’ walk from the cathedral; the painter, soon to call himself Joe, had trained in painting at the Accademia di Brera and architecture at the Politecnico di Milano, and the Santa Tecla project pulled those two trainings into a single discipline. The Joe Colombo Milan archive — the corpus held and stewarded by Studio Colombo under Ignazia Favata, with sibling holdings at Triennale Milano and the MoMA collection — has long described that pivot in summary form. In May 2026, two previously unknown perspective drawings of the Santa Tecla surfaced in the archive of Enrico Baj’s former law office, and the Joe Colombo Milan archive widened by one chapter. The rediscovery clarifies rather than rewrites: the arc that runs from Santa Tecla to the Boby Trolley is one continuous line, and the new drawings prove it in pen. ...

Twenty-six summers, twenty-six architects, and one impossible brief — design a London building before you are allowed to design a London building. The Serpentine Pavilion architects, from Zaha Hadid in 2000 to Lanza Atelier in 2026, have together built the most reliable predictor in contemporary architecture of who will define the next decade of museums, biennales and pavilions. Read the commission as a long roster — Hadid, Libeskind, Toyo Ito with Cecil Balmond, Oscar Niemeyer, Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura, OMA, SANAA, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Peter Zumthor, Herzog & de Meuron with Ai Weiwei, Sou Fujimoto, Smiljan Radić, SelgasCano, BIG, Francis Kéré, Frida Escobedo, Junya Ishigami, Counterspace, Theaster Gates, Lina Ghotmeh, Mass Studies, Marina Tabassum, Lanza Atelier — and the line reads as a forward index to the next twenty Pritzkers, Venice directorships and global museum jobs. The pavilion does not predict the future; it commissions it. ...

Twelve years after Olivier Saillard first handed her an 1810 jacket once worn by Napoleon Bonaparte on the second floor of the Palais de Tokyo, Tilda Swinton’s design projects have become a parallel filmography — a sequence of stagings that treat the archive, the runway and the museum as the same room. The Tilda Swinton design projects assembled between 2012 and 2026 do not look like an actor’s brand portfolio. They look like a curatorial practice: four Saillard performances, two knitwear capsules with the Hawick label HADES, a Gentle Monster eyewear campaign inside HAUS NOWHERE Seoul, and, on 5 and 6 June 2026, House of Gestures in the atrium of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao — co-presented by Dom Pérignon to mark the unveiling of its 2018 vintage. The throughline is not celebrity. It is the object, the garment, and the room they share. ...

Barber Osgerby designs span thirty years and ten manufacturers, and on 20 May 2026 Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby confirmed in interviews to mark the closure of their London studio that the catalogue is now closed. The partnership that began in 1996 with a bent-plywood low table for Isokon Plus ends in the same week that their Triennale Milano retrospective, Alphabet, comes down — a roster that runs through the Loop Table, the Tab Light for Flos, the Iris Table for Established & Sons, the Tip Ton chair for Vitra, and the London 2012 Olympic Torch. The Barber Osgerby designs that defined the last three decades of British industrial design are not being withdrawn; the practice is. The majority of the pieces shown at the Triennale remain in production, which is the answer to most of the questions readers will ask first. ...

Element: Metal at Schloss Hollenegg closes a five-edition castle programme that has, since 2016, turned a 12th-century Styrian fortress into the most material-specific design exhibition outside the museum circuit. The schloss hollenegg metal show runs until 31 May 2026 in a building first documented in 1163, owned by the Liechtenstein family since 1821, and curated by Alice Stori Liechtenstein with works by Max Lamb, Philippe Malouin, Sabine Marcelis and a cast of roughly a dozen others. It is the last in a sequence that has cycled through the classical elements one material at a time. To close on metal - and on extruded aluminium in particular - is a choice with its own logic, and the choice deserves to be read carefully. ...