Where next for Salone del Mobile? Maria Porro on the future of the world’s biggest furniture fair

How do you solve a problem like Salone? How do you catch a crowd and pin it down? Even before the pandemic, the fair was facing, if not quite an existential crisis, then certainly a complex conundrum: how to maintain its relevance in a rapidly changing industry. How could companies justify the cost, not to mention the carbon footprint, for such a transient entity? After the financial crash of 2008, design was embraced by several sectors as a tool for progress. Different brands and commercial partnerships started appearing in Milan for design week. Installations, talks, exhibitions and provocations emerged as the more definitive attractions and, suddenly, Salone del Mobile was no longer synonymous with design week. Design was more exciting than furniture, and design week quickly engulfed Salone as a cultural event, beyond the business of its marketplace origins.

This is a simplistic chronology of the fair’s fate in recent times, but it’s important to at least focus the story in order to understand the predicament faced by Salone as we enter a new world order. Furniture manufacturers are increasingly investing in monobrand rather than multibrand stores, which present the opportunity to show their portfolios in controlled environments on their own terms under their own roofs. Cologne’s annual furniture fair IMM Cologne was cancelled in 2025; the Stockholm Furniture Fair is a shadow of its former self; 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen has successfully emerged as a blended commercial and cultural event that takes over the city itself, unencumbered by a fairground. It’s a very enjoyable experience. So is the very idea of a furniture trade fair today an anachronism?

Maria Porro on the future of Salone del Mobile

Back in Milan, Maria Porro is nodding and smiling patiently as this question is put to her. Porro was appointed president of Salone del Mobile in 2020 – the first female in the role in its then 59-year lifespan. Against such a patriarchal backdrop, Porro’s very appointment promised optimistic change. She agrees that focus and clarity are vital factors for understanding what is happening at Salone and where change might be needed. ‘We must be transparent and honest,’ she says. ‘We must not lock ourselves in our golden towers. We need to ask ourselves better questions. We misunderstand reality, and ignore the need for change.’

Porro describes her favourite festival, San Lorenzo, held in Florence in August, when Italians lie on their backs and look up at shooting stars in the night sky. ‘Our souls want mesmerising, crazy moments that last for a second, but not everything can be a shooting star. We should find the north star also, something that gives us direction,’ she says. ‘The questions you are asking about the future of Salone are the questions we need to answer over the next ten years. We require a long-term vision, and shouldn’t get distracted each year by the shooting stars.’

In November 2024, at the Piccolo Teatro Grassi, Porro unveiled the inaugural Milan Design (Eco) System, a rigorous report carried out by Salone, with scientific research by the Politecnico di Milano, 130 stakeholders and 530 field observers across ten working groups. Its purpose is to measure Salone’s environmental, economic and social impact, monitoring developments to assess key challenges and opportunities. In 2024, there were 370,824 attendees to Salone, 65.6 per cent from outside Italy, and a 32 per cent increase in web traffic on 2023. ‘And although we’re measuring the impact of Salone, we are also looking at factors such as attendance breakdown, accommodation, transport and waste,’ says Porro. ‘We need to understand how the entire ecosystem operates, and how we can work towards a long-term goal of beneficial impact for Milan and its future generations.’ In doing so, Porro is charting the course of Salone’s north star. It’s not rocket science. Then again, maybe it is.

It stands to reason that hitching Salone more closely to design week and then making sure that both are steering a course toward the future fortunes of the city is a sensible plan. (Eco) System sounds like marketing jargon, but to consider Salone as part of an integrated entity, and not just an annual trade fair in the Rho-Pero suburb, is a wise strategy. Everything is connected, after all, if only we care to understand the connections.

Porro agrees that connection and integration are critical for shoring up Salone’s integrity, and harnessing its potential as a cultural incubator beyond its role as a commercial marketplace. ‘Around one in seven architects and designers in Italy lives and works in Milan,’ she says. ‘This is very valuable and we need to help support and connect Salone with the city, as well as engage people from a young age.’ She points to the lower ticket prices she introduced for students to last year’s fair as an example of tangible change, which saw a 28.6 per cent rise in student attendance. ‘We reduced prices for Friday, not just the weekend, so students could experience the fair when business was taking place,’ she says. ‘It’s so important that young people see, touch and feel Salone as a working trade fair.’

Integrating propositional programming into the fairground is another strategy that Porro has already implemented. One of last year’s Salone success stories was an installation in the bathrooms exhibition about water consumption. ‘Showing the impact of our water consumption in the context of the fairground, surrounded by the world’s leading bathroom manufacturers, was a meaningful intervention. Brands signed an agreement to work towards better consumption.’

For some years now, Salone has hosted landmark projects across the city during design week, and Porro is intent on using these projects to strengthen relationships with cultural institutions and younger generations for lasting impact. She mentions an installation by Es Devlin at her alma mater, Pinacoteca di Brera, called the Library of Light. Part of Porro’s brief to Devlin was that she should work with students from the academy and that there must be a legacy impact beyond the installation’s duration. The Library of Light features a number of real books, which will be donated to local libraries after the event. ‘Here we have a project with a cultural institution in Milan, where students work shoulder-to-shoulder with one of the world’s leading creative talents, and the books will be dispersed as a resource for young people when the show is over,’ enthuses Porro. ‘This is the power of Salone as part of Milan – positive, connected engagement with long-term benefits for people and the city.’

Porro has taken her mission with Salone to Hong Kong and New Delhi in recent months, armed with its soft power as the heart and soul of the world’s design capital, to inspire and encourage new audiences, whether as exhibitors or visitors. As design fairs continue to proliferate and fragment into new formats in different places, how does she describe the value proposition to potential exhibitors? How do you persuade a brand to invest in shipping furniture across the globe, to build a room set in an artificially lit, air-conditioned warehouse for a week? ‘I still think that building a stand from a blank space gives you the freedom to show your brand in a way that you cannot do in a showroom or baroque building,’ she says. ‘Salone is the ultimate accelerator for business, and allows you to reach audiences in one week that otherwise take years to build. Brands compete side-by-side: small ones get to play with the big ones; established brands get to show their heritage and evolution.’

Porro is the great-granddaughter of Giulio Porro, who founded the furniture brand that bears their name. Today, she is CEO at Porro, as well as president of Salone. It’s no surprise that she answers questions about Salone’s relevance as a diehard manufacturing scion. And yet she clearly cares deeply about forging a future for the fair based on its place in a new reality that is reinventing itself before our eyes. ‘Salone has an integrity that is unusual – we need to treasure it, sharpen it and evolve, because times change, as do audiences and priorities,’ she says. Can she imagine a Milan Design Week without Salone? Her eyes flash briefly: ‘The idea that Salone has to only ever be a fair is wrong,’ she says. ‘Can I imagine Salone no longer as a fair? Maybe yes. But if Salone does not exist at all, then it would be the end of Milan as the global city of design.’ Perhaps that north star is Porro herself.

Salone del Mobile 2025 takes place 8-13 April. See our full Milan Design Week 2025 guide for the must-sees

This article appears in the May 2025 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands from 3 April, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today