Craft

Hermès Atelier Horizons’ May 2026 Disque Jockey Club is the first DJ booth ever delivered as a leather-clad piece of mahogany cabinetry — and the most legible argument yet for treating the workshop, not Salone, as the place where the maison’s design language is actually being written. Reported by Domus on 28 May 2026, the booth was developed by Hermès’ bespoke workshop in collaboration with British DJ Prince Charles, with two Japanese turntables integrated into the cabinet and concealed beneath fitted leather covers. The cabinetry was executed by French cabinetmakers in mahogany, then panelled in cowhide. There is no announced price, no edition, no commercial release — and that absence is the point. ...

Lina Ghotmeh’s “Reality is Fluid” manifesto, published in Domus 1112 on 28 May 2026, is best read backwards — as a Rosetta stone you hold up to Stone Garden in Beirut, the 550,000-brick Hermès leather workshop in Normandy, and the timber Serpentine Pavilion of 2023 to discover that they were all making the same argument before she gave it a name. The Lina Ghotmeh manifesto is short on prescription and long on syntax — a single ecological sentence stretched across two decades of built work, from the 356-metre Estonian National Museum in Tartu to the unbuilt revolving forest observatory at Nanto. Read in order, the projects index the manifesto more clearly than the manifesto indexes the projects. ...

Jongjin Park’s Strata of Illusion won the Loewe Craft Prize 2026 at National Gallery Singapore on 12 May with a paradox: a chair-shaped porcelain sculpture made from thousands of sheets of paper, folded and stacked into a block, then fired until the paper burned away and gravity warped the shell. Park, a 44-year-old Assistant Professor at Seoul Women’s University, took the €50,000 main prize and the silver trophy at a ceremony that drew the Loewe Foundation jury — fourteen judges including Deyan Sudjic, Patricia Urquiola, Frida Escobedo, Abraham Thomas and Loewe’s new co-creative directors Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez — to Singapore for the first time in the prize’s ten-year history. Two special mentions of €5,000 each went to Álvaro Catalán de Ocón with the Baba Tree Master Weavers of Ghana for Frafra Tapestry #2 (2024), and to Graziano Visintin for Collier (2025), a set of geometric gold necklaces inlaid with niello. The shape of the answer to “what won the Loewe Craft Prize 2026” is therefore not just a name but a method: paper as a kiln-fugitive substrate, porcelain slip as a skin, gravity as the final hand. ...

Prada’s annual presence at Milan Design Week has always been more intellectually ambitious than most fashion brands. While competitors build immersive brand worlds and photograph-ready installations, Prada runs Prada Frames — a symposium on the relationship between natural environment and design that produces more thinking than content. It is an unusual strategy for a luxury house founded in 1913, and it works precisely because it does not try to sell anything. This year, alongside the symposium, Prada presents Chawan Cabinet — an exhibition of ceramic tea bowls crafted by Japanese potters and curated by Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, one strand of Japanese design at Milan Design Week 2026. It is the most restrained and, ultimately, the most powerful fashion-house presentation in Milan this April. ...

Hermès — Hermes in plain ASCII — does not do spectacle. While other fashion houses compete for the most dramatic venue, the most immersive installation, the most Instagram-ready moment, Hermès returns quietly to La Pelota — the former Basque pelota court at Via Palermo 10 — and lets the work speak. The question every April in Milan is which house has decided to perform luxury and which has decided to construct it. Hermès, in 2026 as in every year it has come to Brera, has unambiguously chosen the second. Les Mains de la Maison — the hands of the house — is the title and the thesis. The exhibition design follows from it as inevitably as a saddle stitch follows a punched leather hole. ...