Craft

The Loewe Foundation Craft Prize has, over its nine editions, become the most reliable indicator of where contemporary craft is heading. The winners are rarely the work that generates the most heat in the moment. They are, almost always, the work that the rest of the field will be talking about three years later. Founded in 2016, the prize has compressed a generational shift in how luxury houses speak about making — from the language of heritage and savoir-faire to the harder, less marketable language of contemporary practice — into a single annual announcement that the design world now treats as canonical. ...

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. It is the most restrained and, ultimately, the most powerful fashion-house presentation in Milan this April. ...

Hermès 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. ...