This one is explicitly about sustainability and circular design, which is either the natural evolution of the argument or a sign of how much the conversation has shifted in two decades. McCartney's ecological position has not softened, if anything the methodology has grown more rigorous and the urgency more obvious. The campaign is shot by Sam Rock, featuring Angelina Kendall, Adwoa Aboah and Renée Rapp, and the collection is strong the kind where you can already picture which pieces friends will be snapping up.

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ASICS and Los Angeles studio NUOVA installed Kinetic Playscape at Garage 21 in Milan's La Zona Risorgimentom an immersive sensory experience built around studies showing that 15 minutes and 9 seconds of play can positively impact mental function, and timed to introduce the Gel-Kinetic 2.0 sneaker.

The shoe reinterprets early-2000s running gear with Scutoid Gel cushioning and a TPU support cage, science-forward where the original was purely aesthetic.

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Inspiration by Maddalena Gioglio
Rosie Lee Creative

This is the first official collaboration between two of the most influential curatorial forces in experimental music: Unsound, which over two decades has embedded experimental music in significant institutional contexts from Krakow to New York to Adelaide; and Berlin Atonal, founded in 1982 and relaunched in 2013, operating consistently at the intersection of sound art, performance and contemporary composition. Audience and artists share the same evolving space across two nights and a day, moving between focused listening, peripheral perception and rest at their own pace. The 30-hour format draws on La Monte Young's Dream House installations and the overnight concerts of the Fluxus movement. Kraftwerk's cathedral-scale brutalism in the dark is the right room for this, and Atonal has always understood that the venue is the instrument.

Line Up
Marginal Consort
Romeo Castellucci and Scott Gibbons present To Carthage then I came
Caterina Barbieri with MFO and Ruben Spini present New Work
Keiji Haino
Terrence Dixon presents A Cosmic Display Of Beauty
Adam Wiltzie presents A Tired Reworking of Stars of the Lid For the Sleep Deprived
Brighde Chaimbeul
Kali Malone plays Installation Works
Actress
Joanne Robertson
Marta Salogni
Lois Patiño
Aleksandra Słyż & Teoniki Rożynek feat. microtub present And The Sun Stood Still
2K88 + Lauren Duffus + Rainy Miller + Bianca Scout
Joy Guidry
Kotonski Reworked - An Installation by Eiko Ishibashi & Jim O'Rourke
Paul Jebanasam
Shane Parish plays Autechre
7038634357
Raphael Roginski plays John Coltrane

Sat 16 May, 6 p.m. – Sun 17 May, 11:59 p.m, defo take a few days off to chill and reflect after!

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Inspiration by Mark

To mark 40 years since McDonald's opened its first Italian restaurant, the brand installed Pool: Unlock Happy Memories in a large industrial building as part of Tortona Rocks, a swimming pool-scale ball pit filled with 100,000 coloured balls, overseen by curator Nicolas Ballario and designed around childhood nostalgia.

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Inspiration by Maddalena Gioglio
Rosie Lee Creative

Every day, around 25 compressed paper rolls come out of Issey Miyake's pleating facility and go straight to recycling. Cut one crosswise and it looks like a tree ring, concentric circles of colour, each a faint record of whatever garment was pressed through the machine that day. Creative director Satoshi Kondo has been looking at this material for years.

The Paper Log: Shell and Core, showing now at the brand's Milan flagship, is the result, a collaboration between Miyake Design Studio's in-house team and Madrid's Ensamble Studio, who treated the paper as structural memory, hardening peeled layers into rigid sculptural objects, while the in-house team sawed, waxed and glued the raw logs into furniture prototypes.

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Inspiration by Maddalena Gioglio
Rosie Lee Creative

Sónar+D 2026 runs 18 and 19 June in Barcelona under the theme of “post-AI reality, digital culture and alternative futures” a programme exploring what culture and creativity look like after the initial disruption of generative AI has settled into substrate. The shift in framing matters: not “AI is arriving” but post-AI reality, implying we are already inside the new condition and must understand it from within rather than anticipate it from outside. The programme falls across three themes, AI & Music, Beyond the Screen, and Digital Gardens and Dark Forests with participants including Google DeepMind and Daito Manabe, Mindy Seu, Yancey Strickler, Joana Moll and Volvox Labs among others.

I’ve always wanted to go to Sónar rates it as one of his favourites, which is recommendation enough. Historically one of the most culturally serious technology festivals on the European calendar.

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USM partnered with architecture studio Snøhetta and Swiss artist and experience designer Annabelle Schneider for Renaissance of the Real, a multisensory installation debuting at Fondazione Luigi Rovati during Milan Design Week last week

The Haller storage system, USM's classic modular framework, serves as the structural skeleton for a breathing textile membrane that cocoons visitors inside it. The brief is explicit: step away from digital acceleration and rediscover the sensory intelligence of the physical body. A storage system best known for its modularity and precision turned into something soft and enveloping. The contrast is the point.

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Inspiration by Maddalena Gioglio
Rosie Lee Creative

At Milan Design Week last week, CP Company and Alessi presented a collaboration that brings performance sportswear into tableware, a breakfast collection built around shared domestic ritual, anchored by Alessi archive pieces including Richard Sapper’s 9090 espresso maker, Enzo Mari’s Arran tray, and coffee cups by Jean Nouvel, paired with CP Company’s Overshirt.

The connecting thread is material: garment dyeing finds its parallel in the black PVD finish applied to stainless steel after manual sandblasting, developing a patina that ages with the user. CP Company making tableware is not as strange as it sounds. The brand’s entire identity is built around the idea that functional objects carry cultural weight with a breakfast set with Alessi extends that argument into the home.

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The iconic Rough Trade Records founded in a West London record shop in 1976 on a DIY ethos that was essentially political before anyone called it that, has announced a three-day Southbank Centre takeover this July to mark its 50th anniversary. Pulp perform their latest album at the Royal Festival Hall on the Saturday; Scritti Politti play two sets at the Queen Elizabeth Hall the same day; and on the Sunday, Jarvis Cocker introduces a screening of Ken Loach’s 1969 film Kes, its soundtrack performed live by orchestra. All the juxtaposition is deliberate and so Rough Trade, a label that spent fifty years backing counterculture now filling the best rooms on the South Bank.

Running alongside: 50 Records for 50 Years on Rough Trade exclusive vinyl, split across two drops 1976 to 1985 featuring Patti Smith, The Clash, Sade and The Fall; 1986 to 1995 featuring Nirvana, Aphex Twin, Björk and De La Soul.

Plus check out 50 Years of Rough Trade: 1976-1985 Blog

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Inspiration by Mark

Aries has delivered its debut collaboration with Champion, a 10-piece capsule built entirely on dead-stock Champion Reverse Weave jerseys, pre-aged and heavily printed with Aries archive graphics, shot by Douglas Irvine with British professional boxers Harlem Eubank and Tiah Mai Ayton.

Not new fabric printed to look vintage, but actual unsold stock already carrying the weight of a century-old athletic brand, given new context. The boxing reference is precise: controlled aggression, discipline, countercultural energy. The garments carry that charge without explaining it.

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Inspiration by Mark

Ikea PS returns at Milan Design Week with its tenth collection, previewing three pieces ahead of the full global reveal on 13 May. IKEA An air-filled armchair and a rocking bench from in-house designers Mikael Axelsson and Marta Krupińska, and a three-directional floor lamp from Rotterdam-based designer Lex Pott. The chair pairs a carbon steel frame with a tailored emerald green textile cover and a system of air chambers, a decisive shift away from the fully plastic designs of the 1990s, addressing long-standing criticisms around durability and comfort. “My initial idea was to create a metal frame with a balloon trapped inside,” Axelsson explained 20 prototypes later, including a tractor tyre, he arrived at two separate, adjustable air chambers that finally make the thing work.

I had an IKEA inflatable chair when I got my first flat in London, i cant remember what happen to that

The full collection drops 13 May at Democratic Design Days in Älmhult, Sweden, with over 35 pieces. IKEA Thirty-one years after the first PS collection launched in Milan, the brief hasn’t changed: good design, accessible to everyone.

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Inspiration by Mark - currently not in Milan

Founder Teddy Santis put it plainly: he still buys records, still has Technics in his house, his office, and his stores. The turntable is dressed, not merely branded. plus its function is genuine and its aesthetic is deliberate. Founded in 2014 and rooted in New York hip-hop culture, ALD has been building towards this for years, positioning the brand not as clothing but as a total environment, which they do so well. The turntable is the most honest expression of that yet.

Love the launch video too!!

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Inspiration by Mark

Apple shot its first ever 360-degree music video on iPhone, Vietnamese rapper MCK‘s comeback trailer “HVL,” filmed with 8 synchronised iPhone 17 Pros at an ancient church in Ninh Binh. Viewers scroll in any direction on YouTube to explore the scene. Well worth checking out.

Director Phương Vũ built the piece around MCK’s birthday, March 2nd (2.3): the video runs exactly 2:23, posted at 23:23 Vietnam time, with the number 23 appearing throughout all three chapters. Hidden URLs in the footage unlock preview tracks. A distorted audio cue at the end, sped up to 2.3x, decodes into a phone number connecting to a voice note from MCK. Over 7 million views, with fans returning to find and share clues.

MCK is Vietnam’s most-streamed artist on Spotify and had been on hiatus for two years before this. Apple has been building a consistent roster of Vietnamese artists for the Shot on iPhone series, MCK is the third, after tlinh and Wren Evansand when Tim Cook visited Vietnam in 2024, one of his stops was director Antiantiart’s space in Hanoi.

The Eames Houses runs 20 April to 10 May at Triennale di Milano, free entry an expansive installation from the Eames Office and Kettal presenting the first comprehensive overview of Charles and Ray's residential architecture, alongside the debut of the Eames Pavilion System: a modular kit-of-parts in aluminium, glass and timber drawn from archival research into unrealised work.

A fully realised two-storey build and an exploded version ran simultaneously, alongside rare archival drawings, films and scale models of eight houses several of which have never been published. The system is not a reconstruction. It's a viable contemporary product, buildable and configurable, translating one of modern design's most ambitious unfinished ideas into something you can actually make.

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Inspiration by Mark, Jealous not to be in Milan

Gucci Memoria runs from today - 21 to 26 April at Chiostri Grande di San Simpliciano an immersive exhibition under Demna's creative direction reframing the house's massive 105-year history as a living, evolving narrative rather than an archive. Not a conventional retrospective, but memory treated as active and selective, curating moments of cultural collision across the brand's lifespan.

It's one of most interesting thingd Demna has done since arriving at Gucci and staging it during Milan Design Week rather than Paris Fashion Week signals a willingness to work outside the system. For a house that has struggled to reconcile its archival identity with a new creative vision, the tension itself turns out to be the most interesting subject.

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Inspiration by Mark, Jealous not to be in Milan

Corteiz and Gabriel Moses have teased a collaboration built around a single graphic: the Columbia Pictures Torch Lady, historically a robed female figure inspired by the Statue of Liberty reimagined as a Black woman holding the flame, centred on a hooded windbreaker. Based on imagery teased on Moses’ Instagram, the construction is a standard lightweight windbreaker, keeping the focus entirely on the graphic. Moses shoots cinema. and with Clint 419 builds a philosophy around escaping constraint. Together they make a garment that is also a position, one of the most recognisable pieces of corporate cinema iconography in the world, revised in a single clean move.

No release date yet.

To promote The Drama, A24 opened a one-day wedding chapel in Las Vegas where couples could be married by cast members as officiants, with Alana Haim as DJ and Zendaya appearing as a surprise witness. A souvenir hoodie printed with the film's plot summary in garbled text was available on site. A24 never names the plot twist. Instead it drops prospective audiences into the emotional environment of the film the rituals, anxieties and absurdity of getting married and lets them work it out. A24sMarketing that builds an entire participatory experience around withheld information is rare. Most brand experience design doesn't get close to some of the craziness of an A24 event

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Inspiration by Mark

Opening 16 April, the latest addition is The Everythingists, a new commission by Es Devlin, a sculptural drawing conceived around the idea of ‘Everythingism,’ positioned in dialogue with the legacy of Natalia Goncharova and her contributions to painting, theatre design and the Russian avant-garde.

It runs until 18 October, part of V&A East’s six-monthly rotating commissions programme that also features Shahed Saleem and Lawrence Lek.

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The Fondation Alaïa‘s exhibition pairing Azzedine Alaïa and Christian Dior has been extended until 21 June, worth knowing if you’re passing through Paris before summer.

Curated by Olivier Saillard, the show puts around thirty Dior designs alongside a similar number of Alaïa’s own pieces, drawn from the 500 Dior garments Alaïa spent his life collecting. The shared obsessions are obvious once you see them side by side: accentuated waists, sculpted shoulders, all shades of black and grey. Alaïa worked at Dior for just a few days in 1956, but the impression clearly lasted a lifetime.

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The Prodigy and Hummel have produced a limited edition football shirt designed by the band black and off-white, raglan sleeves with piping, the Ant drip logo as the crest, band logo across the chest, and on the back, 91 in hand-drawn font by artist Tom Gordon, the year it all started

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