A bit of all white: Hermès unveils its latest home collections in Milan

Amidst the cacophony of Milan Design Week, there are a small handful of shows each year that set the agenda and become talking points for everyone attending. In the decade or so since Hermès first showed its homeware during the Milan fair, its exhibition quickly emerged as a bellwether, not just in the week, but in the annual calendar; Hermès shows appear on mood boards of design houses, years later. Rich in texture, narrative, materials and meticulous detailing, the Hermès shows are benchmarks of quality, expression and inspiration that live on.

Hermès unveils new home collection in stark white space at Milan Design Week 2025

This year, visitors to La Pelota, the post-war former swimming pool on Via Palermo, were surprised to witness a starkly different approach by the French luxury house. The cavernous space was a white box, brightly lit, with various geometric-shaped boxes suspended in the air, each housing a different novelty. Pools of coloured light were reflected on the floors beneath the boxes. Increasingly, when everyone else at Milan is concerned with layers of context and theatrical stagings, Hermès has taken a different approach: clinical, pristine, ethereal and otherworldly. Stepping into the room was like entering a hallowed, sacred space – or an operating theatre.

Charlotte Macaux Perelman and Alexis Fabry, artistic directors of Hermès collections for the home, are the masterminds behind the scenography, and they sat down with Wallpaper* to explain their process and journey to this radical departure. The full interview will be published next week, but the essence of their direction is to encourage us to consider the emotion of an object, laid bare in all its glory. ‘Inside the box is the latent object, the perfect object, the power of imagination, on the threshold of an intermediate world. It is not an illusion,’ reads the official statement.

Such an unforgiving setting asks a lot of the objects on show. These boxes aren’t mere plinths, they’re like inverted altars, inviting us to worship their contents, or at the very least, to study each display with forensic attention. Only Hermès could be confident of the quality of its homeware to be so bold, and this year’s collection has moments of exquisite beauty, intrigue, charm – as always.

Standout pieces include Tomas Alonso’s coloured glass side tables with a swivelling cedar box for a surface, Amer Musa’s cashmere throws and Nigel Peake’s hand-painted, geometric porcelain collection.

If the Hermès show leads the way as the poster child of Milan Design Week, what are we to take from this show? What does it say about the times in which we find ourselves, in design and beyond? As visitors emerged from this controlled environment, blinking into the spring sunshine, there was a general sense of bewilderment. Where were the stories and the materials, the echoes of process that proliferate as hallmarks for integrity elsewhere? Perhaps these heavily contextualised displays that we’ve come to expect serve, beyond storytelling, as distraction from the objects themselves. Maybe it’s time we looked more closely to consider the essence of things as they are, in design and life.

hermes.com

Read about more of the fair's must-sees in our Milan Design Week 2025 guide