Real situation: I am drinking my usual moka coffee, made with that old Bialetti moka pot I brought with me all four times I moved house. I’m wearing my leopard-printed fleece and the black leggings I usually wear at home, with my neck still hurting because this morning I did my Ashtanga lesson after days of not practising because I just felt tired and lazy. I’m at my desk, and it’s Friday afternoon.

Anyway, enough about me. Let’s travel fifty years into the future…

Welcome to 2076. Let’s visit an Italian home from the 2020s.

It’s 2076, and we’re browsing some digital archives together. Or perhaps they’re holograms projected directly in front of our eyes by some strange device attached to our faces….We’re looking for a home to buy, preferably something vintage, because we both have a weakness for old things. And I’ve always been particularly fascinated by the 2020s.

Apparently, it was a rather strange decade. People spent an extraordinary amount of time staring at tiny screens, watching complete strangers go about their daily lives and, even more surprisingly, listening to those strangers telling them what to buy, what to wear, what to eat and how to decorate their homes.

Imagine that! aha hhh

Anyway, let’s see what their homes actually looked like.

Oh, look! We’ve found a few homes from Italy….I love italy. We should definitely move there. Here’s one in Rome. A beautifully coordinated, clean, spacious apartment that once belonged to someone called an influencer. Remember those? That very peculiar profession that became so popular in the 2020s?

Oh, look at these pictures! We MUST visit this house. Let me call the agency and arrange a viewing. Apparently, they can send a robot to pick us up and take us there. How convenient!

[...] Okay, we’re here!

And just look at this place. Oh yes. This is soooo 2020s.

The funny thing is that fifty years ago, the owners probably made every single design decision with one very specific objective in mind: to create a home that would never go out of style. They wanted something timeless. I’m pretty sure of that. It was such a popular word back then…

And yet, here we are in 2076, standing inside a home that practically screams 2020s.

Oooh…what a view….Shall we have a look around?

The identikit of the (Italian) influencer-style home

01. The floor

Light oak parquet, frequently in a herringbone pattern. Natural-looking, warm, elegant and reassuringly neutral. Apparently, this was the floor everybody wanted when they wanted something that would never go out of fashion.

02. The kitchen

A large island, ideally monolithic, with handleless cabinetry in beige, greige or another sophisticated neutral. Stone or stone-effect surfaces are almost obligatory. And lots and lots of cabinetry. Apparently, people owned an extraordinary amount of stuff, provided nobody could actually see any of it.

The archaeologists will probably be able to estimate an influencer’s number of followers from the size of their kitchen island. A bit like studying the atrium of an ancient Roman domus to understand the social status of its owner.

Look! I can also see a strange machine called Bambi. Could it be named after the Disney character? How cute… Oh no, it’s a Bimby.

It sits right next to another dusty, box-shaped thing with a handle… Look, there are some fossilized French fries in the corner. Must be the famous friggitrice ad aria…

03. The bathroom

Large-format porcelain stoneware, preferably imitating marble, travertine or another natural stone, with Ceppo di Gré being the absolute favourite. Minimal joints, integrated niches, a generous walk-in shower and, of course, a countertop washbasin sitting on a floating vanity unit.

Oh, wait! What’s behind that glass cabinet? We’ve just discovered a glass cabinet with almost intact bottles of stuff. Apparently, they were all used for something called skincare routines, that was something they used to spend so much time on it…

Here’s another useful measurement system for you, archaeologists of the future: the more bottles, the fewer colours and the more minimalist the packaging, the bigger the influencer’s following.

You might also come across a rather mysterious archaeological artefact. Some kind of tribal mask? White, with the letters LED written on it? Apparently, people used to wear these on their faces to look younger. Or maybe just to record vlogs.

04. The doors

Flush with the walls, often full-height or painted in exactly the same colour as the surrounding surfaces. Apparently, people in the 2020s had developed a strange fear of doors. Any visible frame, handle or sign that one room ended and another began was considered a serious threat to visual harmony. So they spent a fortune making doors look like walls.

05. The palette

Cream, sand, taupe, warm grey, greige and every possible shade between beige and beige. This home is a living abacus of neutrals.

Dear archaeologists of the future, please don’t assume the photographs of these interiors have faded over time. They really did look like this.

Apparently, people in the 2020s believed that too much colour in their homes could stress them out. Spending hours staring at tiny screens and constantly comparing their lives to those of complete strangers, on the other hand? Perfectly relaxing, apparently.

But wait! This must have been the home of a slightly rebellious influencer. See those sage-green cushions? That little “pop” of colour? Yes, there’s even a bit of terracotta over there, on those vases. Definitely, some rebellious souls must have lived here…

06. The lighting

I know, you need a bit more light, right? Unfortunately, the voice-control system isn’t working anymore, and we have absolutely no idea how to turn the lights on. But wait, there’s a tiny rotating button over there. Yes, right there, mid-grey on a greige wall. Almost invisible. Try turning it!

Oh! Finally, we can see something. But… where are the lamps?

Apparently, together with doors, lamps were another extremely scary element in those years. We still don’t know why. Perhaps something terrible happened between chandeliers and influencers…

Anyway, most of their lighting was recessed or integrated. See those tiny spots in the ceiling? And those LED strips hidden everywhere?

But again, this was the home of a slightly rebellious influencer, as we already discovered from the sage-green cushions. Look! There’s actually a statement lamp over there. Yes, that must be a Flos lamp….

07. The furniture

A large, soft sofa in a neutral fabric, rounded silhouettes, a sculptural coffee table and a few carefully selected contemporary pieces.

Look!! I love this. I can see some beautifully preserved books over there. Not a single page seems to have been touched. Because apparently nobody ever read or used them. Let me explain. I’m the expert here on that strange decade… These were called coffee-table books. Enormous, expensive books about art, fashion or design, whose main purpose was to demonstrate the owner’s excellent taste. And look at their condition! Not a single page touched. What an extraordinary discovery!

Oh, and look at that sofa! Perfectly preserved too. It’s covered in something called bouclé, a fabric that apparently took over the furniture industry in those years. People loved it so much that they started covering almost everything with it.

But wait. How did they manage to keep these enormous cream sofas so clean? Didn’t they eat chocolate? Drink red wine? Have dogs? Children?

And look at these mysterious objects on the coffee table. A ceramic knot, a sculptural vase with no flowers and something that looks like a stone with a hole in it.

Dear archaeologists of the future, please don’t mistake these for ancient ritual objects. They were simply called home accessories. Their purpose was to make a room look lived-in without giving away any evidence that somebody actually lived there.

Very often, these objects were copied from the homes of influencers. But we’re actually visiting an original influencer home!

We’re so lucky!

08. The laundry

You’re not really in an Italian influencer home if there isn’t a dedicated laundry room. A place where you can pretend to be ironing, complain about your incredibly busy and messy life, and casually slip in a few affiliate links while pretending to do some housework.

Dear archaeologists of the future, please don’t be fooled. This wasn’t just a laundry room…this is where the magic used to happen: it was actually a small television studio, where people performed everyday domestic tasks while selling detergents, fabric softeners and whatever else came with a discount code.

A bit like the Italian televendite of the 1990s, except that everybody pretended it wasn’t advertising.

09. The bedroom

Floor-to-ceiling curtains, a huge upholstered bed with an oversized padded headboard and… how many cushions? I can count at least six. No, wait, eight!

The bed looks incredibly high. There must be one of those things they used to call a mattress topper on top of the mattress.

Dear archaeologists of the future, we still haven’t figured out what people did with all those decorative cushions when they actually wanted to go to sleep. Did they have a separate room to store them? Did they simply throw them on the floor every night? Another mystery of the 2020s.

Oh, and look! There’s a walk-in closet. Of course there is.

Dark oak cabinetry, glass doors, integrated LED lighting and perfectly organised shelves. It almost looks like a luxury boutique.

Apparently, people in the 2020s loved having shops inside their homes. Especially shops where everything was already theirs. They had entire rooms full of clothes, complained they had nothing to wear, and then spent their afternoons filming themselves selling those same clothes. Fascinating civilisation.

Let me explain a bit more about what was happening back in 2020s.

Now, wasn’t that an interesting visit?

But before we look at another house, there’s something you need to understand about the culture of the 2020s. And since I’m the expert on that very strange decade here, let me explain.

You see, people used to spend hours scrolling through something called Instagram, looking at the lives of complete strangers. Fashion influencers, beauty creators, parenting influencers, celebrities… people who had absolutely nothing to do with architecture or interior design, but who shared practically everything about their everyday lives. Including their homes…and here’s where things get interesting.

If you looked at enough of these accounts, you would start noticing that a surprising number of their homes looked remarkably similar. Actually, they looked pretty much like the one we’ve just visited.

Of course, not every home had every single element we’ve discovered today. But put enough of them together, and you had a very recognisable aesthetic: the aspirational Italian home of the 2020s.

And because people were seeing these homes everywhere, they started wanting the same things in their own homes too.

The strange obsession with “timeless” homes

You may wonder…maybe it’s because they all wanted to become influencers?

No, I don’t think so. I’m talking about people with completely different jobs, some of which we still have here in 2076. Doctors, teachers, lawyers, personal trainers, whatever… At some point, they all started dreaming of enormous kitchen islands, herringbone oak floors, invisible doors and fifty shades of beige.

But here’s the part I find particularly funny.

Many of these people were absolutely terrified of making design choices they might eventually get tired of. They wanted something timeless.

Yes, I know. It sounds rather funny now, in 2076, but believe me, timeless was a BIG word back then. Everybody wanted a timeless kitchen, a timeless bathroom, a timeless home. And the more they worried about choosing something that might go out of fashion, the more they turned to the same supposedly safe combinations everybody else was choosing.

They were so afraid of following their own taste that that they ended up creating homes that looked exactly like their decade.

The strange case of taking interior design advice from skincare influencers

There is another rather weird thing about those years that I haven’t told you yet.

Remember all those influencers whose homes everybody wanted to copy?

Well, people weren’t just looking at their homes for inspiration. They were actually taking interior design advice from them. Yes, you heard that right.

Someone who became famous for reviewing face creams could suddenly become a reference for choosing kitchen materials, bathroom tiles or the perfect sofa. And, quite often, there was a link to buy whatever they were recommending…Ah, those were times when the most extraordinary coincidences happened!

How could anyone not love the 2020s? Someone could show you all the wonderful things they had in their home, through that tiny screen you could carry everywhere, and you could immediately buy the exact same things without even getting off your sofa!

Amazing, wasn’t it?

Now, don’t get me wrong. You certainly didn’t need to be an architect to have excellent taste. Some of these people had beautiful homes, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with finding inspiration in them.

But having a beautiful home and knowing how to design one are two very different things.

And here’s what makes this even more curious….At the very same time, there were thousands of incredibly talented architects and interior designers sharing their actual projects online. People who had spent years studying architecture, design history, materials, proportions, colours and different ways of living.

People whose job was literally to design homes. And yet, somehow, people were taking more inspiration from the kitchen of someone who was famous for reviewing face creams.

Quite fascinating, isn’t it?

When familiarity becomes good taste

Of course, architects and designers were also using Instagram to promote themselves. But instead of trying to sell you a new sofa every Tuesday, they were showing you what they could actually do with a space. And perhaps, just perhaps, you could have hired one of them. ( ask me for some very good ones to follow!)

Because a good designer didn’t simply choose furniture or tell you which colours were fashionable. They brought something much more valuable: a design culture that went far beyond the references you already knew.

They could take your personal taste, your habits, your memories, your favourite objects, and introduce you to possibilities you had never even considered. An unexpected material. A strange colour combination. A vintage piece next to something contemporary. Something that might have looked completely wrong in a showroom but worked beautifully in your home.

Of course, not every professional worked this way. Some were perfectly happy to reproduce the same fashionable formulas as everybody else. And some probably hated doing it, but had little choice if they wanted to keep working….then doing this all-the-same-looking greige homes.

Because here’s the thing: people had become so convinced that these were the most beautiful homes imaginable that they started asking designers to reproduce them, over and over again.

Without realising that what they considered beautiful was often simply what their eyes had become used to seeing.

Every single day. On those tiny screens. The same kitchens, the same bathrooms, the same colours, the same materials. And eventually, familiarity started to feel like good taste.

So, if I could send one little piece of advice back to the people of 2026, it would be this…

Before spending another three hours watching somebody’s skincare routine and taking notes on their bathroom renovation, perhaps spend some time looking at the work of actual architects and interior designers. I have many to suggest you…

You might discover something much more interesting than another beige bathroom.

And who knows, you might even find someone who could help you create a home that actually looked like you. Not like the one of a complete stranger appearing on your phone to sell you stuff so they could afford to buy even more stuff for themselves.

PS: And just to be clear, I have herringbone oak flooring in my own home, and I absolutely love Ceppo di Gré. So no, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with these things. ( the Bimby, on the other hand, I can’t stand. But that’s another story… ahah)

The thing is, the more we see the same things, the more our taste gets used to them, often without us even realising it. And suddenly, what is simply familiar starts feeling beautiful, desirable and, above all, safe.

So perhaps the real question isn’t whether your home will look dated in fifty years. Who cares? Who knows what our lives and homes will even look like by then?

It’s whether it already looks like everybody else’s today… Wouldn’t it be nicer to live in a home that reflects who we are, rather than the taste of some complete stranger on Instagram?

And now I’ve finished my moka coffee. And absolutely nothing against you if you had a matcha latte instead!

I’m curious, though: what does the aspirational home look like in your country? This is a very Italian story, but I have a feeling it’s not just Italian…

Leave a comment

PPS: Follow me on Instagram @italianbark!

I’m joking!!! Ahah.

But seriously, have a look at my trend platform, TRENDBARK. Here’s the link.

And I’m also writing a book all about COLOUR & HOMES! If you have a project, or live in a home where colour plays a distinctive role, I’d love to hear from you! Just get in touch and tell me a little about it. Who knows, your home might end up in the book. And no: it will not be a coffee table book ( spoiler ).

About This Series

Taste Decoded is where I look more closely at the colours, materials and aesthetic directions shaping interiors right now.

Each edition starts from a trend, but then goes deeper: where it comes from, why it feels relevant, how it is changing, and the different ways it is showing up in real design.

It is also a small window into the way I …

Read more

About This Series

Taste Decoded is where I look more closely at the colours, materials and aesthetic directions shaping interiors right now.

Each edition starts from a trend, but then goes deeper: where it comes from, why it feels relevant, how it is changing, and the different ways it is showing up in real design.

It is also a small window into the way I …

Read more

I’m writing this on a perfect Saturday afternoon in my garden, under our very handmade built-in pergola that looks a little like one you would find at the beach. It is finally fresher, still sunny, exactly how September days should be. And I’m still having ice cream, which is one of my small acts of resistance against the end of summer….No, I am not one of those people who cannot wait for hot tea and blankets. And if I see another Halloween email in my inbox right now, I will throw my computer over the fence.

September is always quite a busy month, so a few years ago I introduced a good habit into my business: I dedicate this part of the year to one of the things I love the most. Colour. There is a practical reason too. This is the time when many companies and design teams are already working on future collections, and when colour forecasts for the coming years start appearing.

If you are new here, I’m an Italian interior architect and trend strategist. I’ve been writing about interiors and design on ITALIANBARK since 2013, and today I run TRENDBARK, where I turn my research into professional trend intelligence for designers, studios and brands.

So every September I go deep into colour at TRENDBARK: first with a trend seminar for Studio members, looking ahead to the directions I see emerging for 2028, and then in October with a new edition of my colour workshop, CASACROMIA.

TRENDBARK is obviously not a giant trend agency, and it was never meant to be. But I have built a very specific position for it: independent, woman-run, started from zero and grown out of a community, while working professionally with designers, brands and companies around the world.

And probably the biggest flex of running my own trend platform is exactly this: I am completely free to follow the research wherever it leads, and to say what I genuinely think will be relevant and useful. I don’t need to make the conclusion fit a sponsor, please a company, protect a relationship or follow whatever the industry has already decided we should all be talking about.

So, as someone who is a bit of an outsider but also very much an insider, every year around this time I look at how major agencies and companies still communicate colour and wonder: with such enormous budgets, how are we still using a format that feels designed for 2010 rather than for the world we are living in now?

And with the Pantone Color of the Year 2027 announcement approaching, I find myself asking the same question again: do we really still need one?

My answer is simple: we really do not need a Color of the Year anymore.

The hard truth is that times changed….A LOT

But there were also times when I actually loved covering the announcement of the Colour of the Year on ITALIANBARK, creating inspiration around the chosen colour and sharing possible combinations and pairings. Those posts travelled everywhere. They were read internationally, shared thousands of times and became especially popular on Pinterest. Looking back, I realised only years later how much my own content had contributed to amplifying those colors and making certain shades feel suddenly much more present in the visual landscape.

But when I look at the Color of the Year format now, it feels a little like posting a quote on Instagram saying GOOD VIBES ONLY.

Ehm…..

Like, it is one of those things that simply feels out of time now. It pretends there is one single truth, one mood, one direction, one colour we are all somehow supposed to follow, and preferably love, adopt and, of course, buy something new in, even if we very much do not need it at all.

We keep hearing that the “woke years” are over, and politically there is clearly a strong backlash against much of the language and thinking associated with them.

But culture does not simply reset because the political wind changes.

Whatever you think about that period, one thing happened: we became much more conscious of how many different perspectives, cultures, identities, references and ideas of beauty can exist at the same time. You can reject the language of diversity, nor cannot really unsee diversity itself. And once the idea of one cultural centre has been broken, it becomes very difficult to go back to believing that one universal colour can somehow speak for everybody.

What a decade of “IT COLOURS” actually tells us

BTW, I also have to say that the Color of the Year was a brilliant formula for those very naive times.

Pantone introduced the program in 1999, choosing Cerulean as the first Color of the Year for 2000, basically right at the beginning of a new millennium, when the idea of one colour capturing the mood of the moment still felt fresh, optimistic and somehow believable.

And over the following years, the formula became super powerful.

A single colour was instantly understandable, highly visual, easy for media to reproduce, easy for brands to turn into products and content, perfect for Pinterest, blogs and early Instagram, and a very simple entry point into the much more complicated subject of trends.

And it also helped make people pay attention to colour. Colour became something people actually talked about, saved, shared, commented on, something that entered mainstream conversation. And that is definitely a good thing.

I guess we all remember at least a few Colors of the Year. And if you don’t, I am here to refresh your memory with a small dose of nostalgia, together with some of the boards I was sharing back then on ITALIANBARK. I selected four of them.

Color(s) of the Year 2016

The super-tender and naive pairing of pastel pink and baby blue. Awww. These were the years when life somehow just felt good ( and I am not just saying this only because I was ten years younger so in my early 30s….)

Can you believe there was a time when social media did not feel permanently full of bad comments and fights? Yes. And when all those lovely comments were actually coming from real people, not bots, not AI agents, not whatever is behind half of what we see online now. Yes.

And honestly, these colours feel like a pretty perfect translation of that moment: soft, optimistic, reassuring. We all wanted those light, airy interiors, lots of white, pale woods, powdery colours, everything looking calm, clean and perfectly put together.

Color of the Year 2019

I remember that with this colour, a lot of the communication naturally went towards coral reefs and raising awareness around the fragility of our oceans. But honestly, looking at it now, what I see first is something else: energy.

2019, in my memory, was just full of it. I don’t even remember how many trips I did that year. Everything felt more open, faster, more optimistic, more social. We were moving around, discovering places, going to fairs, travelling for work and for pleasure, without having any idea that this freedom was about to become something we would suddenly miss so much.

And interiors were changing too, as those were the years when I really started noticing spaces becoming much more confident with colour ( yes I am a forecaster so I see things much more in advance ) I wrote about this shift later in my Ten Years of Milan Design Week article too. Looking back, the second half of the 2010s was really the moment when colour started moving away from the very controlled aesthetic of the earlier decade and becoming much more expressive.

It is not now, it was then…

Color of the Year 2020

As much as ultramarine blue is probably my favourite colour, I have never been particularly into Classic Blue. And looking at it now, years later, I can’t help seeing it as a very good, and very bad, premonition of what came next.

Stable, safe, reassuring, timeless…..this was around the moment when the whole idea of “timeless” started getting louder again in interiors. Timeless colours, timeless materials, timeless homes. Another reassuring word used to make us feel that choosing something safe means choosing something that will somehow remain good forever.

Spoiler : nothing in this world is timeless (and certainly nothing created by humans)

Taste changes, culture changes, technology changes, the way we live changes. Even the things we once considered the ultimate expression of timeless good taste eventually become a very precise portrait of the period in which they were created.

And we are allowed to change too… do you know this, right?

This is also why I sometimes have a problem with the way personal style is explained. Having preferences is one thing, but turning them into a fixed identity you are supposed to perform consistently is another… You can love something for years and suddenly feel done with it. You can love two completely contradictory things. You can change because you travelled, got older, got bored, changed your mind, or because your life got into a mess. And none of that makes your taste less authentic. Nope. Nobody gets to tell you that…and definitely not strangers on social media.

And consistency is also very convenient commercially: the moment you can be neatly defined by an aesthetic label, it becomes much easier to sell you everything that supposedly belongs to that identity. But people are messier than that, and taste should be allowed to be messy too.

By the way, a few months after Classic Blue was announced, the world was about to become anything but reassuring. The lesson I have learned since then is simple: never trust anyone wearing a Classic Blue suit.

Color of the Year 2022

This periwinkle of 2022 still had that strange post-Covid optimism. People were rediscovering life outside the office, but also discovering the importance of the home in a completely different way.

Those were incredibly good years for design. During and immediately after Covid everybody wanted to paint, renovate, restyle, move things around. We had all suddenly understood that there was a life outside the office , and that a huge part of that life was going to happen at home.

I actually understood this much earlier, in 2015, when I started my own business and began working from home. Back then, people looked at me with a kind of pity… basically: so you are not really working. Say the same thing in 2025 and suddenly it is: Oh, I would love that too. How much do we change?

And this is when ppl started understanding that if home felt nicer, more personal and more colourful, everyday life could feel a little nicer too. People started paying much more attention to interiors not simply as decoration, but as something that could actually affect how they lived and felt, and colour strated to be a big part of this.

However, I needed to include this colour because the name itself would honestly be perfect as a nickname for one of my dogs. Now imagine launching Very Peri in 2026. It feels almost impossibly innocent for the mood we are living in now.

And then, it came 2026

Everything has become much more fragmented. We no longer live in a world where the same few magazines, brands, cities and cultural references define what everybody is supposed to like next. Trends come from everywhere, move at different speeds, overlap, contradict each other and often exist at exactly the same time. And colour works in exactly the same way.

Believe me, I would also love to keep doing things the way I always did. It would be much easier for me to pick one or two colours and tell my people: these are the ones you should use next. They trust my gut feeling. It would be simple to communicate, easy to market and, frankly, much easier to sell.

But intellectual honesty is another story.

If the research is telling me that several directions are happening at once, that different markets are moving differently, that context and application matter, then reducing all of that to one nice, seductive swatch would simply be dishonest.

And maybe this is where we should start making a difference: not by making forecasting easier to consume, but by making it more truthful. Because this is also where we need to separate two things that have been mixed together for too long: forecasting and marketing.

Forecasting should help us understand complexity. The Color of the Year does the opposite: it compresses that complexity into one highly communicable idea… one headline, one image, one product story, one swatch.

And that is fine as marketing. ( even if, personally, I find the format outdated even as marketing…) The real problem starts when we treat that marketing device as if it were the forecast itself.

And colour got more complicated too

At the same time, the way we understand colour has changed enormously.

Especially in interiors, we no longer look at colour simply as something decorative, or as a nice shade to put on a wall or a product. We are becoming much more aware of how the whole environment around us affects the way we feel, and colour is a big part of that.

There is also much more research around perception, psychology and neuroscience, so I think we are going to talk more and more about colour not simply in terms of what looks good, but in terms of how it makes us feel inside a space.

People react differently, personal taste matters, cultural context matters, light, materials and the function of the space matter. So even colour itself is becoming harder to talk about as one isolated swatch.

But within all this complexity, we can still recognise broader directions of change ( aka trends ), and that’s where the fun part is.

So what are trends actually for?

If we think of a trend simply as a direction of change, then our growing refusal of one universal aesthetic, one universal taste and one universal idea of what is right is actually a trend in itself.

This is also where I think trend forecasting has been misunderstood for a long time.

Trends are not things forecasters invent to make people buy something new. They emerge because everything around us changes: the materials we use, the technologies we live with, the images and media we consume, the places we travel to, the cultures we discover, the way we work, live and spend our time. And colour moves with all of that.

This is exactly why I still love looking at colour as an expression of how the zeitgeist is moving: why certain colours become relevant at a particular moment, why others disappear, how combinations change, how one shade evolves into another, how materials and finishes completely alter the way we perceive it.

Colour trends exist. They just no longer move neatly from Marsala to Rose Quartz to Greenery because the calendar tells us it is time, and because somebody needs us to buy something new….

So maybe it is time to move beyond this strange hegemony of someone declaring which single colour is supposed to represent all of us for the next twelve months.

And BTW, please tell me we are not going to remember this period as the brown years. The metaphor would be almost too perfect.

Color Directions 28

This kind of thoughts are also what shaped my latest COLOR DIRECTIONS 28 research.

Instead of selecting hero shades and building themes around them, I looked at several emerging colour directions and at how each behaves as a system: palettes, combinations, material expressions and, especially, how they translate differently into Homes and Contract spaces.

Because the same colour can become something completely different depending on what surrounds it, how much of it you use, what material carries it and what kind of space it inhabits. And the questions I find useful now are different: How is the way we combine and apply colour actually changing? How can we create spaces that feel relevant now and in the near future, without becoming quickly outdated? And how can we work with what we already have rather than constantly replacing it?

COLOR DIRECTIONS 28 is available as a recorded seminar and professional reference, and is also included inside TRENDBARK Studio.

Explore more

PS: my ice cream was smaller, unfortunately, and I finished it already after the first paragraph.

About This Series

Taste Decoded is where I look more closely at the colours, materials and aesthetic directions shaping interiors right now.

Each edition starts from a trend, but then goes deeper: where it comes from, why it feels relevant, how it is changing, and the different ways it is showing up in real design.

It is also a small window into the way I …

Read more

About This Series

Taste Decoded is where I look more closely at the colours, materials and aesthetic directions shaping interiors right now.

Each edition starts from a trend, but then goes deeper: where it comes from, why it feels relevant, how it is changing, and the different ways it is showing up in real design.

It is also a small window into the way I work on trend forecasting through TRENDBARK Studio: connecting signals, references, changing taste and practical applications rather than stopping at a trend label.

Made to save and come back to when you want to understand what is really happening behind a colour, material or aesthetic direction.

What do we really mean when we say “chrome is back”?

Chrome is technically a finish, not the whole silver-metal family. And this is exactly where the conversation becomes more interesting. Today, this shift is becoming almost mainstream here in Europe, strongly confirmed at the last Milan Design Week.

But the point is not only that metallic surfaces are back, but how they are coming back. Because a material trend is never just about the material itself. It changes meaning through finish, tone, scale, detailing and application.

Silver metal can feel cold and technical, but also nostalgic, atmospheric, glamorous or almost handcrafted. The material family may be the same…the feeling is not. So the real question is not only whether a material is back, but is, how do you want this space, object or material detail to make someone feel?

In this note I am giving you some interesting variations to get inspired for your projects and designs.

The Variations

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The taste of this Substack is coffee.

So read it while enjoying a short espresso, or maybe a long Americano, or a cappuccino. I actually prefer the traditional Italian moka coffee, and that is what I was drinking while putting together this draft, inspired by a beautiful experience I had last month, now that I am finally having some slower days to write about it.

In June, I had the opportunity to give a workshop session to a group of Interior Design students from RMIT University Melbourne, that were travelling through Italy under the title “Design in Time: Tracing the Past, Designing the Future.”

Together, we explored trend directions emerging from Milan and then translated them through a hands-on creative exercise. I was invited by the teachers, who have been following my blog ITALIANBARK for a long time (the original version of Travelling Taste, born much before than this Substack as a place where I could share my design discoveries).

The workshop took place in Venice, one of the most layered, old-style, almost open-air-museum cities in the world. And maybe this is also why the whole experience stayed with me: I studied architecture in Venice and later became a trend strategist, so I probably learned to look at the future through the past: places, memories, layers, and what came before. Maybe this is exactly what brought me into this job.

And now that the future feels increasingly out of control, with everything accelerating so fast because of AI, algorithms and digital sameness, I feel that the past, stories, places and real cultural roots are becoming even a more valuable and source of inspiration. Because when everything starts to look, sound and behave the same, what becomes precious is exactly what cannot be fully standardized: like local rituals, memory, climate, habits, materials, humour, language, taste.

This leads me to another reflection I have been having a lot lately: how disconnected the idea of “global trends” is from the present reality of things…disconnected enough that I would now call it a very lazy marketing shortcut.

Because if you work with trends, you know that macro trends can be global. I mean things like climate anxiety, ageing populations, digital acceleration, loneliness, uncertainty, and many other large forces that affect people across different countries and cultures. But how can their expressions be global?

They cannot, unless we completely ignore the context in which they appear. A macro trend is always filtered through local rituals, climates, habits, spaces, materials, memories... The direction may be shared, but the way it becomes visible should never be the same everywhere…and when it is, it usually means someone forced it. Or an algorithm suggested it.

To make this idea less abstract, let’s start from something we all recognise: the coffee shop aesthetic.

You probably know the visual code already: think of beige minimalism, tiled counters, plants, laptops, maybe a curved bar, maybe a matcha, maybe someone quietly working in the corner…

Then let’s do together now a translation work in Milan and in Melbourne.

To think about this, I would like you to start from something very simple: where coffee is served, in both cities.

Because in Italy, the coffee shop is usually a bar. Not the kind of bar you are maybe imagining if you don't live here, not a cocktail bar, not a wine bar. A bar. The place where you go in the morning in your neighbourhood, you say good morning to the person behind the counter who already knows what you want, you drink your espresso standing up, and you leave. That's it. And this is not a niche experience reserved for a particular kind of person or a particular kind of neighbourhood. This is just how most people in Italy drink coffee, every day.

I say "most people" because I want to keep this real: not everyone lives in a fancy city centre with a beautiful historic bar on the corner. Many people live in ordinary neighbourhoods, in places that will never appear in a design magazine. And considering where housing markets are going in most cities right now, fewer and fewer people probably will live in those photogenic areas anyway. So when we talk about Italian coffee culture as a design reference, we should probably remember what it actually looks like for most Italians, which is a lot more ordinary, and a lot more interesting, than the aesthetic version.

A bar. That place where you get an espresso, have breakfast with a brioche, hear people talking in dialect, read a paper magazine (yes). No halo-dressed people performing quiet productivity in the corner or Instagramming their matcha. And yes, in many places here in Italy, you can still have breakfast for three euros, and please, let's not destroy this.

This already tells you that the design brief is completely different. And what makes this even more interesting is that the Melbourne café culture was not invented from scratch, it was exactly born from Italian immigration in the 1950s, and from that moment the Italian coffee started travelling, transforming, and eventually becoming something with entirely its own taste: the flat white, the specialty coffee culture. The Italian origin is still present somewhere in the DNA, but what grew from it is a completely different thing.

A Melbourne café, from what the students described and from what I understand of Australian café culture (I have never been there in person, so feel free to correct me ) often has a different role from the Italian bar. It is a place where people stay longer: to meet, work, have brunch, sit outside, return regularly and feel part of a neighbourhood. It carries more time, more informality, more indoor-outdoor life, and a different relationship with light, street, climate and community.

One student told me that in Melbourne you can have five climates in one day. I loved this detail because it immediately made the design question more interesting, because climate is not just weather, it is a spatial condition. It changes how you relate to a threshold, to a window, to an outdoor seat, to the light at a certain hour. It is something we do not have here in the same way, especially in Venice or Milan where seasons are more clearly defined.

In Melbourne, coffee is rarely just a quick drink. It belongs to a broader café culture of barista craft, brunch, neighbourhood life and longer stays, less about the fast gesture at the counter, more about the atmosphere built around the cup. Unlike the Italian bar, where the counter and the fast espresso ritual dominate, the Melbourne café usually invites people to stay longer, talk, eat, observe and belong.

So the point is that each city has a different coffee ritual, and the space should translate that ritual, not a general idea of “nice” you got somewhere because of algorithms.

The “coffee shop aesthetic” is exactly what happened when places stopped translating culture and started translating the algorithm.

This feeling was already described through the idea of AirSpace: a term coined by journalist Kyle Chayka to describe the ubiquitous, homogeneous aesthetic of coffee shops, boutique hotels and rental properties. “Blanding” is another word used to describe the copy-paste model of consumer product development and brand marketing: repetitive patterns in the name of modernity, often at the expense of authenticity and originality.

Some trace this global sameness back to the iPhone, around 2007, or to Airbnb, founded in 2008, not to mention Starbucks and to all the big phenomena that contributed, on a global scale, to making us feel almost the same whether we were in Tokyo, New York, Milan or anywhere else.

I should be honest: I was part of this too. In the early 2010s, walking into a café in Melbourne or Copenhagen or Lisbon that felt vaguely familiar, , with a similar aesthetic everywhere, was actually comforting, like you felt at home somewhere you had never been.

Get inspired by Seoul coffee shops

But now, in 2026, that same sameness gets a totally different taste.

And now it feels like a mistake we made together…not a bad intention, nobody was trying to flatten anything. But in the pursuit of feeling connected, of belonging to something global and tasteful and recognisable, we quietly traded away the thing that actually makes a place worth being in. Authenticity, specificity, the sense that this place could only exist here, in this city, in this street, for these people. But again, times are changed and so is our perception of things…

Actually I think we got very good at making things that felt familiar everywhere. And somewhere along the way we forgot to ask whether familiar was actually what we wanted, and familiar for whom. For the people actually living in a place, working in it, returning to it every morning? Or familiar just for a feed? For a photograph that would perform well in a context with no address, no climate, no neighbourhood, no smell?

The bitter point is that now, with AI, this logic is accelerating too fast.

We are living in a moment when local realities, smaller voices, niche references and independent knowledge are genuinely at risk of disappearing. Not because they stop existing, but because AI models tend to privilege what is already most visible: the biggest agencies, the most indexed magazines, the most referenced platforms. The already loud gets louder, and everything else becomes harder to find.

I recently had a conversation with Gemini that was quite interesting, but also unsettling btw, that I’m including the screenshots below to share them with you ( btw I have always been a person with a good attitude towards technology and quite an early adopter. My current researches on architectures for data centers ( not opening now this topic that is too hard honestly) made me put into further discussion many things and as always I do it with logic and with no drama)

Think now about something as simple as Google Search.

It was messy, full of noise and bad results, but if you were willing to keep digging, page ten or twenty was sometimes exactly where the weird, small, independent thing appeared, like the local blog, the niche reference, the source that nobody had thought to index properly yet. Now research is increasingly filtered for us, and this feels like a form of quiet hegemony, and only now, looking back, I realize how lucky we were to experience the web when it still felt genuinely open: messy, chaotic, imperfect, but democratic.

You can still use AI to go deeper, of course, you can ask for niche references, local sources, alternative perspectives: but to do that, you already need to know what to ask, you already need your own filter, your own culture, your own references, your own BRAIN. And this is exactly why creative intelligence matters more now, not less, and why as creatives we have a real responsibility to pull ourselves out of this flatness.

Maybe they should have called instead of Artificial Intelligence simply a super-Fast Data Aggregator but I guess it would not have had such a big appeal. It is always about selling, in the end. Always about the marketing, always about the money. Sad truth

The reaction to flatness cannot be more flatness.

It has to come from the tools we still have: observation, taste, context, memory, culture and human behaviour.

The teachers themselves told me how much Pinterest has, in a way, flattened the design process, with the same inspirations available to everybody. I told them I actually use Pinterest too. It is not about the tool itself, and the same goes for Instagram, or even AI. It is about how you use it. But still, there is no doubt that when everyone starts from the same visual pool, things can easily become very similar.

But if you work with trends and understanding them you already know how much human behaviour and taste and how they change are shaped by contrasts and opposition. So, as much as systems try to blend us into sameness, the reaction will often move in the opposite direction.

The time spent with the RMIT students from Melbourne proved this point for me again. Even if our cultures can feel close in many ways, and even if we all look at the same images, the same design fairs, the same references and the same platforms, there are still so many differences between us. And those differences are exactly what make design interesting.

In my case, this means working with trends and interior design in a different way: not as global formulas to apply, but as directions to translate.

That is what the RMIT workshop was about, and it is also the approach I am now bringing to companies and organisations through LAYERED FUTURES™: a workshop format by TRENDBARK where we move from trends to translation, applying future-facing directions to real projects, products, spaces and contexts.

For more information, feel free to write me. I would love to bring my workshop into your company, school or organisation.

Back to my experience with the students…

now with some good things that I also want to share, because you know I do not like the taste of bitterness, and mayyybe there is still hope, things are not as bad as they might seem/might makes us think, and our human brains still work pretty well, and the youngest ones’too. So:

• They loved hand drawing

• The materials table quickly became one of the most important part of the room, the place where people kept returning

• They were genuinely curious about trends, not in a passive way, but in a way that felt personal.

• And almost every concept they developed, regardless of the trend direction they were working with, ended up being about connection: with other people, with a place, with community, with everyday life.

One group was working around the idea of heritage, and instead of choosing the most obvious image from the material library, they were drawn to a photograph of a dog looking out of a window. Not a design detail, not an interior, not a historical reference…

But that image opened something up. What made it interesting was not the dog itself, but what it suggested: curiosity, attention, the act of looking outside, being alert to what happens in the street, being present without being closed in. And from that, almost naturally, came one Italian word: Curioso.

And I keep thinking about that word since. Because maybe curiosity is exactly the antidote to the flatness and sameness we were talking about: not another aesthetic to apply, not another trend to follow, but simply the ability to look outside again, or maybe also backwards, to all those things we skipped and missed while we were too busy accelerating, scrolling, sharing, commenting. There is so much we didn't stop for. So much that passed while we were performing attention rather than actually paying it. And whatever is being built for us now, the filtered feeds, the optimised results, the generated references, I feel like it will force us more and more into the opposite direction….

Simply like a dog at the window: curioso.

I’ll leave you with this word. By now I obviously have finished my long coffe, and maybe you did too.

About This Series

Taste Decoded is where I look more closely at the colours, materials and aesthetic directions shaping interiors right now.

Each edition starts from a trend, but then goes deeper: where it comes from, why it feels relevant, how it is changing, and the different ways it is showing up in real design.

It is also a small window into the way I work on trend forecasting through TRENDBARK Studio: connecting signals, references, changing taste and practical applications rather than stopping at a trend label.

Made to save and come back to when you want to understand what is really happening behind a colour, material or aesthetic direction.

Glass blocks were never really gone.

But in the last few years, and especially across recent observations from Milan Design Week and other design events, they have started to reappear, but with a different design language.

No longer limited to the traditional glass block wall, glass masonry is now being reinterpreted through many news ways, that proof how what makes this return interesting is not the material itself, but the way it is being reframed.

In this note I am giving you some interesting variations to get inspired for your projects and designs.

The Variations

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If you are into design and colors, you probably started noticing a big presence of reds tones lately. Especially those dark and deep ones, and no longer used for accents ( like cushions, accessories, etc ) but to fully define surfaces and spaces - that become intense, almost cinematic. A color direction that was clear also while observing the latest Milan Design Week, both in the product offers and in the installation setups.

Bright reds behave very differently. These darker tones do not simply demand attention; they build atmosphere. They invite a slower, more immersive experience of space.

This is also why looking at their variations matters: I am sharing some of them below for you to save and get inspired.

The Variations

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If you read my previous piece on what ten years of Milan Design Week taught me, you know that my perspective is built on years of walking, watching, and showing up in person. And that my business has also been built starting from a blog then on social media.

Today we do a different travel.

We can travel through places, eras, cultures…. but there is a border we cross every day without even realizing it: the line between reality and digital perception. This year, I ran an involuntary experiment: I lived something for real, then watched it again through social media. And the two versions were so different that I felt I had to write about it.

The sweet &savory taste of the imperfect experience on the ground

I returned from Milan Design Week genuinely happy. Less exhausted than usual, because I had decided from day one to enjoy my time, to see what I actually wanted to see and what I actually could. After ten years I know where to go, I have a circle of insiders sharing tips, I receive previews and invitations, and I have learned to distinguish signal from noise.

And also, I actually spent very few time on social media. I posted some stories on my Instagram and the @trendbark account, and just scrolled very quickly in the evenings. Honestly, I still don’t understand how people manage to stay on their phones while they’re in Milan, with everything there is to see, people to meet, and miles to walk. Sleep and rest time must fit there too, somewhere, for those of us who aren’t robots.

So I came back with lots of interesting discussions, some of them quite controversial like noticing how design has become more and more “collectible” and eliterian, but also full of new names also from places I did not know well, and then with clear directions to point out to my members and clients for the coming year. Yes definitely this was not a revolutionary design week, but nobody who knows a bit expected this edition to be a revolutionary one, for many reasons.

I also saw the queues, some big brand installations too ( and skipped many of them…), but on the whole balance, they did not disturbed on my whole experience. One thing I also learnt from years at MDW and that I also recommended to my TRENDBARK group, is that no installation is probably worth hours of your time there waiting on a line, with all the nice things you can see around, maybe also unplanned and by accident…and also, what’s the point of going where all others go, if you are going there to scout what’s new and interesting?

The bitterness of the same experience on social media

And then I came home, went back to my daily routines, and started staying more also on Instagram. Post after post, or I saw always kind of the same installations, or then I came into full criticism. “Design Week isn’t about design anymore.” “It’s only for the rich.” I know how the algorithm works: the moment I paused on the first carousel about this to read more, it decided for me that I was interested on that point of view, and kept feeding me more of the same. And so also the posts of the good content creators I know and follow, suddenly did not appeared anymore to me.

But still, even knowing the mechanism, I started doubtung myself. I started asking: maybe my experience wasn’t that good, why I’m always the too-optimistic one ?! Where had my week gone? The one where I touched furniture as rare and crafted as fine art, where I discovered brands from Uzbekistan and Vietnam that no algorithm had ever shown me? The one when I discussed with young designers, explaining to me about a new material or a solution…Or that evening where we openly shared our first key takeaways of the week, suggesting to many others where to go already on the Tuesday, easy, free, genuine… at The Forecast Club event?

What happened next is that I realized: no. My experience was real and legitimate, but what had happened was that I had slipped into that dystopian bubble that makes you believe what others believe, making you question your own direct experience. I was experiencing this dinamic by myself.

It had been suddenly submerged by the narrative of people who, in many cases, had never even been to Milan at all…and that’s the paradox I observed this year and that inspired me to write this article.

Is Design “Democratic”? Let’s be honest.

We hear this since the last years, “Milan isn’t democratic anymore.” And this year the conversation got sharper, partly because of what was visible at the Salone del Mobile itself with the Salone Raritas, a new section dedicated to collectible design, galleries, unique pieces with prices to match. Collectible design has been the dominant direction for a couple of years now, and in 2026 it felt more consolidated than ever.

My honest answer to the democratic question starts with a definition. Design, at its core, is not art. It is close to it, sometimes very close, but by definition it is different. As Charles Eames put it: “Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as to best accomplish a particular purpose.” Design has a function, it serves people, so it exists in relation to use, to life, to how people actually live, and its purest definition, yes, it should be for everyone.

But there is a sad truth, and is that design also follows economic reality. And this is exactly why what happened in Milan is such a precise mirror of the times. When wealth is more distributed, design becomes more accessible. So before blaming Milan, or the Salone, or collectible design as a category, it might be worth blaming the genuinely difficult geopolitical and economic situation we are all navigating right now.

Milan is a mirror of the world right now: polarised, with hyper-exclusivity on one end and mass-market on the other, and the middle slowly disappearing. I would genuinely prefer a more equitable distribution of wealth. That is not a controversial position.

But then there is something more subtle happening alongside the economics, which is where social media makes everything worse and that I am also reflecting on these days. The algorithm thrives on comparison. It creates a constant background hum of inadequacy, like if you don’t own the €10,000 sofa, maybe you are somehow failing.

But here is what nobody talks about enough: Design Week is actually one of the most generous events in the world, if you approach it right. Have you ever tried to get into a luxury fashion runway show for free? Impossible. At MDW you can walk into a palazzo and spend twenty minutes with a piece of furniture that is the craft equivalent of a haute couture piece. Touch it. Sit in it. Understand how it was made. How cool is this??

Appreciating beauty you will never possess is not a consolation prize. It is a form of taste. And taste, unlike ownership, is available to everyone willing to develop it.

What the body understands that the feed cannot

There is something that only happens in person, and that I find genuinely hard to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it: design changes completely depending on how close you are to it. And especially if you work with interior design, how you feel inside a space is totally different from the perception you get from social media.

Simply because one is a 3D experience, one is a bidimensional one. In one you can understand the human scale of things, you can touch, you can see the details…in the other you see a partial and always filtered by someone vision of it. Always.

So many times in these years has happened to me that some of the most extraordinary things would have looked like nothing in a photograph. Some of the most viral installations, in person, instead were a little uhm….

It is just the nature of the medium. But it becomes a real problem the moment the feed becomes your primary source of information about where design is going: because then your taste, and your professional judgement, are being shaped by a filter you didn’t choose and are probably not fully aware of.

And this is exactly where those quick trend reels become genuinely misleading. I get it, they still work for growing an IG profile. But if you are making product or design decisions based on what you see in those reels, you are working with a map that doesn't match the real territory. The aesthetic landscape is too fragmented now to be packaged into a 15-second "top trends of the moment" video. It creates a false sense that there is still one direction to follow, one safe bet, one thing everybody is doing. Spoiler: there isn't.

Why being on the ground matters now more than ever, and the end of going viral as a strategy

And then there is something else to consider… What gets amplified on the feed, unless very few exceptions, is a specific, curated, well-funded version of the event. Not a neutral one.

The most visible activations and showrooms belong to brands with the best locations, the best set designers, and the most strategic PR partnerships. Smaller brands, independent designers, manufacturers from less obvious geographies, they are there, often doing extraordinary things, but they are structurally invisible online.

I understand how frustrating this must be. But here is the thing: if you are a small brand trying to compete with those giants on social media, you might be playing the wrong game entirely. Because here is also the thing nobody talks about: real business does not happen via social media alone. One view of your product in Milan from the right person, someone maybe quiet online, not very active, not loud, - can give you far more than thousands of social media views. And most of the smartest people I know have already moved their sources and their judgement back to the ground, precisely because of the emptiness and the dynamics I’m describing here.

Design is not a song that needs to go viral…That’s an option, but the logic is different. And as a trend strategist, I’m feel confident saying this: we are reaching peak viral. The saturation is real, there is already a visible wave of rejection toward things that go viral, become overshared, become mainstream too fast. So which kind of game do you want to play?

This is also why I still go, every year, on foot. And why after ten years I am more convinced than now more than ever there is no substitute for being on the ground, or for having someone there who knows what to look for, and how to translate what they find into something you can actually use.

Understanding the Milanese engine, and its limits

I am an “outsider” from the Veneto countryside, and I truly admire the Milanese relentless energy and their ability to build something this massive year after year. And if you’re shocked by the astronomical budgets spent on activations, you’re probably forgetting that Milan is the world capital of Marketing and PR. There is a super high percentage of people living in Milan who are marketers or PR specialists or social media something, many of whom moved there from other parts of Italy looking for better opportunities, people who put in the hours, the effort, and the work. It’s the city’s heart, and it’s why MDW is the global giant it is today.

And then there's the harder thing to say. The week if you experience it in the wrong way can tip into something uncomfortable. And by uncomfortable I mean: thousands spent on installations that exist for few days, designed not for people but for content. Installations built for Instagrammable moments, for gadgets, for queues, with no circular thinking and no substance underneath…that sounds sooo 2018/19 to me ( again, I send you to my 10 Years of Milan Design Week article to understand why ). And the world has changed quite a lot in the meantime. Our awareness of its big problems, ecological, political, economic…,has changed too. So why, with all those big budgets and presumably big minds behind, does some still resonate like we are in 2018?

Imagine now if those massive budgets were redirected into design competitions, material research, or supporting emerging talent that actually has something to say.

How cool would this be?? Again: am I the too optimistic one? Let’s see in 2027….

So I partly agree with the critics I read. My hope is that after the wave of cynicism we’ve seen this year on social media, the big brands will finally realize that empty virality has hit a wall.

But again, this point made me also think about this: are we forced to do the queues, to get the gadgets, to see the things everybody is seeing? Is not the FOMO and the way you consume contents on social media, that is forcing you to see something?

At the end of the day, it’s all up to us. You decide where to go and what to see. If you have a clear sense of purpose, and a critical eye that goes beyond the screen, you can simply choose to bypass the noise. And maybe, if we all bypass the noise, something will start changing for real.

You don’t have to wait in line for a branded installation just because it’s trending, you don’t have to let “viral” dictate your schedule.

I also know this is the hardest part for those with less experience at these kinds of events. If the version of me from ten years ago had visited MDW, I’d probably have been queuing and following exactly what social media told me to do. So I say this without any judgment,just with the hope that having someone point it out might save a few people some time.

The New Bitterness , aka, Black Mirror in reverse

Do you remember the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive”? The one where everyone performs happiness for a digital rating, curating their lives into a constant stream of smiling perfection?

What I observed this year in my MDW experience on social media was almost the opposite, and I find it equally disturbing.

Seems like the performance has now inverted. Now, the sophisticated move is cynicism. Criticising has become the new way of signalling taste online, like a proof that you’re too smart, too knowing, too real to be impressed by all this spectacle. The bitter take is the new aspirational take. Saying what is good, instead, sounds like you are not that smart.

Let me explain better: I am not here to say that we should not criticize things when they are unfair. That would be really a big problem. But the problem is also that bitterness, performed at scale, is just as distorting as performed happiness. Both are poses, and both flatten the complexity, otehr then distracting from the good sides that there are.

One of the most hilarious and new things I saw this year on Instagram as I mentioned at the beginnign of the article are viral “critiques” of the week created by people who never set foot in Milan. Really, never. They were judging an entire industry based on what they saw from a screen and from a social media algorythm, - not from friends stories, for instance, that would have more sense to me. And obviously their feed was full of queues and just overhyped installations, for the reasons I mentioned above. Most of the goodness was out. Again, the dystopian bubble…..

The only antidote

I am not anti-social media. I use them, I need them, I believe in them as tools. I started my business many years ago from a small city with a blog, and then amplified it on Instagram, so this is really the point of view of somebody that work with these tools. I am for sure not a trust fund baby, nor married to someone who is (my husband is an architect who actually practices the profession in Italy, which - trust me - is not the glamorous thing you might imagine), I love my job but it’s how I pay my bills. And social media is part of this.

What I do believe is that social media literacy should be taught in schools. How to read a feed critically. How to understand what gets amplified and why. How to distinguish between a paid activation and an authentic perspective. How to protect your privacy. And that’s before we even get to the thousands of other points that matter especially to the most vulnerable people online - like teenagers, for instance. Nobody ever taught us this, unless you studied specific topics. But everybody uses these tools daily. And that’s exactly where the problem is, I think.

And here is something I also think about a lot: if you are reading this on Substack, chances are you are part of that very small percentage of people who actually understands how social media and digital communication work. But are we aware that most people are still completely in the dark about how any of this functions? And I am not talking about people without education. I am talking about friends of mine, people with jobs that are simply not into communication or anything similar, who I know for sure have no idea how many of these systems work or why they see what they see. How are we expecting them to educate their kids on using these tools responsibly? WTF, how is it possible we are kept so ignorant on these points?

I hope this article gave you some points to reflect on, or why not ,also some inspirational points already from the Milan Design Week of 2027.

You may agree or not, but if I made you think twice about something, I'm happy. Let me know in the comments if you visited MDW this year and how you felt it.

Leave a comment

BTW: I have always been a fan of candies. I use to eat lots of them especially while writing (I know I shouldn't). So if choosing between sweetness and bitterness, call me stupid, I will always be on the first side.

P.S.

Travelling Taste explores how taste moves across time and space. But the distance between Milan in person and Milan on a feed has never felt wider , or more important to understand. One version shapes your perception, but the other shapes your work.

If you want the field intelligence, the real aesthetic shifts, the macro-directions for 2027: I’m processing it all for you in TRENDBARK Studio. That will soon include:

• The Milano Trendbook: 200+ pages of actionable directions from Milan, filtering the noise and clustering signals into impactful insights.

• The Live Strategic Seminar: A deep-dive session where we unpack this intelligence and look at how to navigate these industry gaps. End of May.

Join TRENDBARK Studio

And if you’re new here, the blog where it all started in 2013 is ITALIANBARK.

Since 2016, I’ve been documenting Milan Design Week. Let’s say I have been visiting it much earlier, since I was a university student at architecture in Venice….a number I prefer not to calculate too precisely!

This year, inspired by the 2016/2026 trend that was around at the beginning of the year, and also since 2016 was a truly decisive year for my own work, I decided to open that huge personal archive from Milano and share it with you. Not just to see what changed, but to understand how trends actually form, and how taste shifts over time.

Because there is a big difference between spotting a trend and understanding taste. One is noticing what becomes popular (which, in reality, is not that easy if your eye isn’t trained in doing it). The other is understanding why it had to become popular, what cultural pressures, collective needs, or aesthetic fatigue made a certain color, material or form emerge at that exact moment.

Milan, in particular, offers a very specific vantage point: it’s where you can start to see things that will enter the market only years after, and eventually people’s homes, if you know where and how to look and if you understand the why. With this article, I’m also opening up my way of looking at trends, something that I developed over the years, through practice, and that is what turns into insights that are actually useful in real work. 2026 update is also now included at the end of the article.

So sit down. Favorite snack strongly recommended. This is going to take a while.

2016-17 // The taste for control

Looking at 2016 now, it really look like ages ago. Those were years with a really strong Scandinavian influence, that became reinterpreted here in Italy as white spaces, clean geometries, quiet palettes, very balanced compositions. The material language followed the same logic: raw oak, matte ceramics in neutrals, smooth concrete, white lacquer. Texture existed, but restrained. Nothing was allowed to shout.

With a trained eye, I can now catch a clear rising direction towards Japanese design - and in fact that is also the year I first wrote about the Japandi aesthetic, that fusion of Japanese wabi-sabi sensibility and Scandinavian functionalism. I remember I interviewed Oki Sato from Nendo that year, too.

But, naming and aesthetics apart ( that honestly can be kind of boring ) what is cool to see is that design felt… careful. Minimalism wasn’t just an aesthetic, it was almost a rule.

And even the way we documented it ( bloggers, early Instagram ) was so “static”. Those were the early years of Instagram, when a perfectly framed cappuccino felt like a valid creative act. Documentation was all about capturing a beautiful moment: static, composed, intentional. The image had to be controlled, just like the spaces we were photographing.

But minimalism wasn’t the whole story. Alongside the controlled surfaces, something more experimental was stirring, and you had to know where to look for it. At 5 Vie, I remember the Raw Edges exhibition and that particular use of color felt different, it was the kind of thing that doesn’t make the main trend reports but stays with you, and that you recognize years later as a signal that was simply early.

And then there was Ventura Lambrate, in its final years as an active MDW district, still bringing some of the most genuinely experimental work to Milan: first experiments with recycled fabrics, raw pigments, materials that felt unfinished by intention rather than by accident. That energy was specific to that place and that moment.

From 2017,

something else started to appear,quietly, in specific places, if you knew where to look.

Studiopepe decorated the Brera Design Apartment that year, and I remember walking through it and feeling that something had shifted. The color palette felt new and different: dusty pinks and salmon walls, deep burnt orange blocking the architecture, warm mustard, teal as an accent. Not a Scandinavian palette at all,something warmer, more layered, more rooted in Italian sensibility. Walls treated as planes of color, rooms defined by tone rather than by furniture. Looking at those photos now, so many interiors of the following years are already there.

Around the same time, Dimorestudio was doing something similar, and bolder, in their Via Solferino apartment, which over the following years would become one of the most visited destinations of the entire design week. Total color immersion, an eclectic mix of vintage and contemporary, every room with its own distinct identity and chromatic logic.

2018 // When taste became experiential

Then, just a couple of years later, something started to shift. Spaces became more and more immersive, more visual, more theatrical, and yes because in the meantime the devil took the world, and his name is Instagram (LOL) . The mainstream arrival of Instagram actually changed not just how we documented Design Week, but what Design Week decided to be. Spaces became explicitly designed to be photographed and shared. A space now needed to produce a shareable moment.

I still remember installations like the Louis Vuitton ceiling filled with flowers. You didn’t just walk through them, you looked up, you took a photo, you shared it. That’s when design started to move beyond the object. ( BTW flowers were pretty much everywhere that year, reflecting a general mood of the moment. Remember the era of "Good vibes only"? eheh

Design became something you experience. And with that, taste itself became more performative. I remember that was also the starting of the long queues we can see today. The cultural crossovers were accelerating too, with fashion houses arriving at Design Week in growing numbers, art and design dissolving their boundaries, non-design brands claiming a right to speak the design language. The fair was expanding its definition of itself.

But if you looked carefully, underneath all the flowers and the Instagram moments, other things were starting to move.

Marni brought to the city one of the most joyful installations, with chairs and stools woven with recycled plastic cord in clashing multicolor combinations, displayed on bare earth floors. It didn’t look like a luxury brand presentation. It looked like craft, like color as pure pleasure, like design that wasn’t taking itself too seriously. Tactility in fact was also quietly arriving. Surfaces were becoming more physical, more varied , with ribbed textures, rough stone, fluted details. I remember at Dimorestudio apartment corridor entirely covered in acoustic folded pyramids, walls, ceiling, everything,with a vintage floral carpet on the floor. Pure texture as experience.

Ventura Centrale chose a genuinely unusual location that year: the vaulted caves under the railway arches of Stazione Centrale, a space that felt rough, industrial, almost hidden. The location itself was the message: design was actively looking for spaces that weren’t made for it. And this was also the first year of Alcova, the exhibition format that would go on to become one of the most talked-about destinations of Fuorisalone, that shares a similar phylosophy.

Biophilic design was also starting to move beyond the aesthetic and becoming a design methodology. Carlo Ratti’s Living Nature Salone’s city-based installation brought a different kind of argument, with furniture literally placed among living plants and trees inside a greenhouse structure, furniture and nature as one continuous system rather than decoration and backdrop.

I remember also the first serious experiments in 3D-printed architecture, with a full-scale home with the horizontal striations of the printing process left completely visible. At the same time, the first serious material ethics conversation was starting. Rossana Orlandi launched her Guiltless Plastic initiative that year, which would become a fixture at MDW in the years following, one of the first times the question of recycled and upcycled materials moved from the experimental periphery toward the main discourse.

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2019 // The year everything became bolder

If I had to choose one year where everything really clicked, it would be 2019. I remember it as the year design stopped apologizing for itself.

The signals that had been circulating at the edges in previous years moved decisively toward the center. Instagrammable concepts raised the bar, with installations filling historical buildings with butterflies (L’Ora Dannata by Carlos Amorales) or with recycled polystyrene (the Austrian Design Exhibition Pleasure & Treasure). The word “immersive” started appearing everywhere.

Colors became deeper, genuinely saturated, not just accented. Spaces became bolder. And decoration was no longer something to justify or minimize: it became the point. Playful Living and an early movement toward a new “More is More” aesthetic was one of the directions we mapped in the Trendbook that year, as a strong reaction against minimalism, through new experimentations in color, shape and material that were visible here in Milan but hadn’t yet reached the stores and the homes. And it’s exactly this gap between what you see at MDW and what lands in the market two or three years later is one of the things I find most fascinating to track.

Color: The palette broke decisively away from Scandinavian restraint. Deep forest greens, warm terracottas, dusty roses, vivid yellows, not as accents but as full commitments. The first serious appearances of what we would later codify as “color drenching” were there: walls, ceilings, trim, and furniture unified in the same enveloping tone. It felt bold at the time. Within two years it would be everywhere, and people started bringing it into their homes. The Perfect Darkness apartment installation by studio H+O by Elisa Ossino and the PalermoUno showroom perfectly captured this.

Materials: A more explicit material storytelling was emerging. Stone with visible geological history. Marble used not for luxury signaling but for its individual character, with the vein, the imperfection, the unrepeatable pattern. This was beautifully expressed in Les Arcanistes, the installation curated by Studiopepe, inspired by history and the world of past alchemists, that was a very early example of what would become a broader trend toward otherworldly, mystical-inspired interiors.

But other conversations were starting too, and some of them were genuinely ahead of their time. Google brought A Space for Being to the Salone, a multi-room installation built entirely around the principles of neuroaesthetics. Three rooms with different lighting, sound, scent and texture, designed to show how environments produce measurable effects on the body , and they were then actually measured in real time with a smartwatch on your wrist. I also remember early discussions around AI, with the first AI-designed chair by Philippe Starck presented by Kartell that year. Two topics that, looking back, pointed very clearly to where the conversation would go.

Circular design became a serious topic too, with first experiments in biomaterials, upcycling, and dedicated locations like BASE in Tortona, one of the first spaces to give this conversation real architectural weight rather than just a corner of a stand.

2020-21 // A different kind of silence

I guess I don’t need to recall why the event did not happened in 2020, when everything paused and people here in Italy was making pizzas all day long. And when Design Week came back in 2021, it obviously was different. Super small, obviously not crowded. But I remember I appreciated so much the effort. It felt like a fresh air… and something interesting was happening: the trends that emerged were super clearly tied to collective emotional need.

Color: The palette turned inward. I started to note chocolate browns, deep walnuts, earthy ochres, warm terracottas, all tones that felt grounded, containing, almost protective. The cool grays and crisp whites of the previous decade felt suddenly old, they were too clinical and people wanted warmth.

Materials: They were raw, imperfect, upcycled. There was a renewed interest for materials that showed their age and origin, like handmade ceramics with irregular forms, textiles with natural irregularities. The perfect and the machine-finished felt simply not right for the moment.

Forms: Curves accelerated so much! The straight line and the hard corner, dominant for years, began retreating in favor of rounded edges, soft arches, organic shapes that felt less rigid.

Domestic scale: With the world having spent a year reconsidering the home as a total environment, becoming work space, rest space, social space, refuge, design responded with objects designed for a more complete kind of living. Spaces within spaces. Functional layers. The idea of a home as a system rather than a backdrop. So many interesting things in this regards started exactly from one of the most challenging moments.

Design was doing what design always does in times of rupture: it translated the cultural mood into material form. The taste for protection was not decorative. It was genuinely functional: a collective need for environments that felt safe, warm, and human.

2022-23 // The rebel reaction

2022 was a bit of a strange year, with Milan Design Week happening in a super warm and sunny June and this strong need to meet people again, to be outside, to do things together. And then, almost suddenly, the energy came back. Color exploded again. Bold, almost excessive, dopamine color. Design came back with urgency, with the specific energy of people who had been forced to hold still for too long. From what I tracked back in 2022:

Color: After the warm, earthy protection palette of 2021, color became loud, think electric blues, acid greens, hot pinks, intense oranges. The concept of “dopamine dressing” that was circulating in fashion translated directly into interiors.

Tactility: Touch came back with intensity. Boucle fabric, already appearing before the pandemic, accelerated dramatically. Ribbed surfaces, tactile wallcoverings, textured plasters, pile rugs. After a period of not touching things, of sanitizing surfaces, of maintaining distance, the body was reclaiming its relationship with material

Hybrid spaces and early phygital signals: At the edges of the fair, something was rising around the intersection of physical and digital. Generative design, digital n aesthetics, NFT art entering design spaces. Not yet integrated, but the question was there: what does physical design mean when everything can also exist digitally? For us, at that time, actually digital was synonimous of something good, with the Zoom calls that helped us not only to carry on our own jobs during a pandemic, but to feel a bit more closer to our families and friends, in times when we couldn’t. Moooi presented a multi-sensorial show featuring collaborations with LG OLED and the Hortensia chair by Andrés Reisinger & Júlia Esqué, digital artists.

But what I remember the most is a big shift towards sustainability, that finally became a mainstream topic. Mario Cucinella's Design With Nature installation at the fair, with 1,400 square meters is one key example of this. Materials were the protagonists everywhere. At Alcova, established studios like OMA displayed alongside experimental newcomers in a former military hospital, and Sabine Marcelis worked with SolidNature to create Monumental Wonders with nine types of onyx transformed into something between sculpture and furniture. Alcova started to be one of the key locations where to see emerging designers and experiemntal products.

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From 2023,

new changes started to appear. If I had to choose one year when single-label categorization & trends was starting to feel inadequate to explain the complexity - it was exactly 2023.

The design landscape become plural, with multiple aesthetics, multiple value systems, multiple time references coexisting without resolution. Terracotta next to mirrored surfaces. Seventies references alongside tech-driven compositions. Craft next to aluminum. Softness next to hard reflection. It felt like multiple timelines running simultaneously in the same rooms.

The craft conversation deepened significantly. Loewe commissioned 30 pieces from multiple artisans, , a quietly radical argument about what luxury means when it is defined by irreproducibility rather than price. The fashion world's presence at MDW was no longer a novelty, with Bottega Veneta and Gaetano Pesce transforming the brand's Milanese boutique into a resin-and-fabric grotta.

Colors at the fair ranged across stone, neutral, natural, and dark blue tones, and the resurgence of burgundy - that was already the starting of a quieter, more controlled palette than 2022's explosion, as if the dopamine release had run its course and something more considered was reasserting itself. The seventies references were being handled with more sophistication than in previous years, as a genuine reexamination of what that decade understood about comfort and domestic pleasure that had been lost. Curved sofas with generous proportions, warm amber tones, smoked glass, brass with a more yellow cast. That’s when the retro-inspired wave of decor really started to took off.

Underneath the eclecticism, a quieter signal was forming: what we would begin to call quiet luxury in interiors. Less statement, more quality in the texture of a material, the proportion of a detail, the weight of a handle. This would sharpen considerably in the year following. What that experience confirmed is something I believe deeply: the most useful trend intelligence doesn't come from watching from a distance, but it comes from being in the room, year after year, and knowing what to look for.

2024–25 // When design started questioning itself

Many things that once felt experimental are now simply expected. Biomaterials. Bold color. Retro references. Curved forms. Visible craft. They’re the new normal.

The same thing happened to sustainability as a concept, and it’s worth saying out loud. Somewhere between 2022 and 2024, the criticism became impossible to ignore. Too much of what was labeled sustainable was closer to sustainability theater, with “natural materials” that had no supply chain transparency behind it. The word had stopped meaning anything precise. It’s the starting point of topics like regenerative systems, local production, material honesty, that are less declaration, more about autenticity and practice. But above all, there was a big need for honesty and clarity.

What I felt distinctly in 2024, and even more in 2025, was a broader resistance to acceleration. A kind of questioning of newness for its own sake. I felt tired. My colleagues told me they were tired. Visitors looked tired. Brands were tired. There was a growing appetite for things built to last decades, not seasons, for spaces designed to get better with time rather than stay forever fresh and forever replaceable.

Nature was coming back, but differently than before. Not as decoration, not as the obligatory plant wall or the biophilic accent, but something more fundamental: the starting point of a reorientation toward natural processes as a design method.

And then in all this tiredness, there was AI. In 2025 it was impossible to avoid the conversation. In design this actually meant double down on the handmade, on the irreproducible, on the specific knowledge that lives in a craftsperson’s hands and cannot be prompted.

Meanwhile, the queues got longer. The exhaustion after a week in Milan became the most universally shared post-MDW experience, much more then the FOMO of the previous years, something you heard at every dinner, in every cab, on every flight home. We started questioning very much on the prices, too high, and on inclusivity, just apparent.

We will see this April what comes next. I am super curious, excited, but at the same time full of supplements to be ready for the most intense week of the year. If you want to follow what I observe in real time,and how I translate it into strategic directions: that's exactly what happens inside TRENDBARK after every MDW.

I hope you enjoyed this piece and my way of looking at design and trends over time. It took me quite a while to put it all together, going back through years of images, notes and memories…If it resonated with you, feel free to share it with someone who might enjoy it too.

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2026 // When the distances became impossible to ignore

If 2024 and 2025 were about tiredness, 2026 added something new on top: noise. A specific kind of noise that in some cases had nothing to do with being in Milan at all.

This was the year I felt the biggest distances: the distance between those who can access design and those who can’t. But also, the distance between what happens on the ground and what appears on the feed. I wrote a post specifically about this dynamic and the thoughts it provoked on me, if you feel like reading something a bit more different, here is the article: Milan on the Ground vs Milan on the Feed

On the ground: warmth, connection, extraordinary craft from places most people in this industry had never considered. Yes also queues and big installations…but the lattest are the one that dominated the feeds, together with cynicism, carousels about a Design Week written by people who hadn’t been there. Like if the bitter take had become the sophisticated take. We had moved from performing happiness to performing bitterness: and, to me, both are equally exhausting.

But back on the aesthetic side, something I had been tracking for a while finally felt official: the end of the one ruling aesthetic. This was not a revolutionary edition, but it’s the one when to me the fragmentation appeared to be more clear then ever. Collectible design consolidated, with Salone Raritas making that statement loud and clear, but alongside it you could find rigorous minimalism, maximalist layering, deep color work, craft from unexpected geographies. Like if any aesthetic can work if done with intention. Freedom, yes. But also: the shortcut of following one dominant trend no longer exists.

Materials having their moment too. Glass has been to me the dominant material to mention,not the eighties version, but something going back further, to modernism and rationalism and the original logic of light. Chrome and white aluminum obviously too, and something more interesting and experimental also coming….

And then, the big question of these years: what is this week actually for, and for whom, feeling more urgent than ever. The answer, I realized, depends also on whether you experience it on the ground or through a screen. In 2026, those had become two very different events, part of a distopyan bubble we are all daily experiencing.

What I Realized Looking at All This

For a futurist, the instinct is always the same: look ahead, identify signals, imagine what comes next. It’s like a continuous crave for what’s new, what’s next…and while my mailbox is now filled with hundreds of previews for the upcoming MDW2026, with this article I decided instead to stop, breath and look back. And I realized something important. We often underestimate the value of the archive, of looking back.

Because the future becomes visible only when you look carefully at how things evolve over time. Milan Design Week is one of the most fascinating places to observe this, you see movements, you see taste forming, in response to the world. Design moving from minimal → to expressive, from controlled → to immersive, from object → to experience, from material → to meaning , from certainty → to questioning, from speed → toward duration …..

And underneath each of these shifts, I noticed one key thing: there is always people, what we feel, how we live in the world.

That’s why I like so much doing this work. It’s like giving a shape to the changes we see around. The most interesting question, the one I find myself asking after ten years of this, is not “what is trending” but “what is actually working, and why.” What is genuinely changing the way designers, brands and clients see and decide. That step, between a trend that passes and one that stays, is where taste lives.

Ten years ago I was photographing cappuccinos and writing blog posts at 6am. Today the same curiosity of observing things form the foundation of TRENDBARK, its publications, its membership platform, its advisory work for brands and studios across the design industry. The method grew directly from the practice of paying attention, consistently, over time.

The name of this space here on Substack instead is Travelling Taste because that’s what both taste and trends actually are: things that move, that are built in transit, that cannot be understood from a single moment or a single fair. They change in time and place, with people.

And Milan Design Week, for ten years, has been my most loved place to ask it. Despite all queues, despite the most terrible proseccos of my life, despite a weather that you can never guess. See you in Milano, very soon.

Curious to know how this feels from your side: did you ever visit the Milan Design Week? Do you have a memory to share or something you enjoyed the most? What do you expect from this year? Or maybe you never visited it?

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P.S.

If you loved this trip across ten years and want to go further, by understanding not just what happened, but where things are heading in the next 2-3 years and how to apply these signals to real decisions in design, product and interiors, that’s what TRENDBARK Studio is for.

Members get also access to the MDW 2026 Trendbook and to a live seminar at the end of May where I’ll unpack this year’s signals in depth: what’s real, what’s noise, and what it means for 2027.

And if you’re new here, the blog where it all started in 2013 is ITALIANBARK.

And actually this article came to me while I was having breakfast, I just came back from my trip to South Korea last November with a suitcase full of Korean snacks and sweets. I even created an Advent calendar out of them and basically forced my husband to eat a different treat every morning. (Poor him, it’s very clear he couldn’t care less, but to make me happy he tries all the absurd things I bring home from trips. He deserves a medal, honestly.)

I still have some snacks left, and this morning I found myself at the kitchen table with our Italian biscuits on one side and these Korean sweets meant to be dipped in milk on the other. And I asked myself: why is our packaging always so sad? Why are there almost never little characters, smiley faces, cute illustrations?

The Italian biscuit stared at me seriously, as if apologizing for existing. The Korean snack had a tiny round face that seemed genuinely happy to see me at 7am. And I remembered that this difference is not random, as it might seem…it comes from somewhere deep.

If you’ve ever been to Korea or Japan

...you will have noticed how faces and little characters are everywhere. And by everywhere I mean not only on things that are supposed to be for kids, like it happens here. They are on packaging, on street signs, on TV, in supermarkets, on the ticket machines at the train station, on the instructions for the hand dryer in public bathrooms: it’s like you’re constantly immersed in something that feels a bit like a cartoon world. Everything looks just a little softer, a little kinder, and there is a word behind all of this, and it’s called Kawaii.

What is Kawaii (and a bit of history)

The word kawaii was born in Japan and is often translated quickly as “cute” or “adorable,” but its meaning is much deeper.

From a linguistic perspective, kawaii derives from an older term, kawayushi, which indicated something fragile, vulnerable, something that evokes protection. It wasn’t just an aesthetic quality, but an emotional reaction: something that makes you lower your defenses. Think about how you feel when you see a baby animal, or a round-faced drawing with big eyes. That involuntary softening, that’s exactly where the original energy of kawaii is.

Modern Kawaii was born somewhere between the 1960s and 1970s, initially among Japanese schoolgirls who began writing in rounded handwriting filled with hearts and small drawings. An act that seemed innocent, but that actually represented a soft rebellion against a rigid, hierarchical, adult system. Writing “cute” was a quiet refusal to be serious. A small, personal aesthetic revolution happening one notebook page at a time.

In the 1980s, Kawaii became mainstream thanks to brands like Sanrio (Hello Kitty was created in 1974), and from there it transformed into a true cultural language: not only a visual style, but a way of communicating, behaving, and even designing. (Yes: if you’re a Millennial, you’ll remember how Hello Kitty was a whole moment here in Europe around the early 2000s. I had the pencil case, the wallet… I’m not ashamed ahah)

What’s interesting is that Kawaii didn’t stay contained to children’s products. It moved into architecture, transportation design, food packaging, public institutions, and eventually fashion. By the time the internet arrived, it was already a global visual language: it just hadn’t been named yet by most of the world.

Kawaii in Japan and South Korea

One of the most striking things when traveling in Japan or South Korea is that Kawaii is truly everywhere. You see it in road signs, public safety campaigns, city mascots, packaging, but also in manuals, on trains, in public bathrooms, in government communications. I could go on forever.

In Japan, every prefecture has an official mascot called a yuru-kyara , that literally means “loose character,” a kind of imperfect, slightly awkward little creature. These characters help with local marketing, of course, but they also make institutions and rules feel more human and less authoritarian. They say: we are still the government, but we promise we won’t bite. And they communicate with a broader part of the population, because children are citizens too, and they deserve to understand what’s being asked of them.

There’s something genuinely thoughtful about this. In a country where formality and hierarchy run deep, the yuru-kyara is a small, deliberate release valve. The serious adult world wearing a soft hat.

When we think of Kawaii, we immediately imagine characters and objects. There has been for a while a whole aesthetic inspired by this, sometimes referred to as “cutecore”,but the concept also enters designed spaces, and in more subtle ways than just adding lots of puppies and characters.

In interiors and public spaces, Kawaii can manifest through rounded forms, non-threatening proportions, soft or carefully controlled colors, and “gentle” signage. I noticed that many Japanese and Korean spaces seem designed not to intimidate, and even very functional places (train stations, clinics, public offices) introduce visual elements that lower stress levels. Rounded corners on furniture. Soft lighting. A small illustrated character pointing you toward the exit.

This becomes really interesting when compared to much of contemporary European design, which in recent years has leaned increasingly serious, minimal, conceptual,… and often emotionally distant. We talk so much about warm minimalism and neuroaesthetics, and yet if you actually look at most of the public spaces where we spend significant parts of our day, they feel cold. Functional, yes. Efficient, sometimes. But welcoming? Rarely.

Meanwhile, in Korea: Aegyo

In Korea, the closest cultural equivalent to Kawaii is Aegyo (애교). Aegyo indicates a tender, affectionate, intentionally “childlike” behavior, often expressed through gestures, tone of voice, and facial expressions. It’s the way someone might scrunch their nose and speak in a high, soft voice to express affection or ask for something sweetly.

Unlike Japanese Kawaii, which is very structured as a visual and design system, Aegyo is more relational. It’s something you do, not just something you see. And it’s a term that has no real equivalent in English, because it is so embedded in Korean culture that we simply don’t have the same concept. It’s not quite coquettish, not quite babyish, not quite sweet. It’s all three at once, wrapped in cultural context we don’t share.

What I find fascinating is that in Korea, Aegyo appears even in workplaces, in advertising, between adults, as a legitimate form of warmth. And you feel it everywhere, not just in behavior but in the spaces themselves.

The cafés in Seoul are a perfect example. I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere else. The one that stayed with me most was Artist Bakery, a place that somehow manages to feel like a bakery, an art studio, a library, and someone’s very beloved living room, all at once. String lights across the ceiling, white painted wood everywhere, handwritten menus on blackboards. A counter lined with scones and cakes presented on lace cloth, each one labeled in the owner’s own handwriting, not printed, not typeset, handwritten, with tiny illustrated doodles next to the prices.

And then the merchandise!!: mugs, glasses, tote bags, all printed with the same wobbly hand-drawn characters: a little dog called Gury, figures holding hands under the word HOME, a mug that just says SELF LOVE in chunky letters. On the wall, a hand-lettered manifesto by the owner, Ryo, that starts with “The courage to truly live my own way.” It reads less like brand copy and more like a diary entry someone decided to frame and share.

Not to mention the cakes, with all those cute faces formed just with eadible decoration. Such a cute ( and tasty!) experience, I could have spent hours inside this caé…and in fact during my trip to Seoul I tried lots of them, and the most unique and cuter kind of cakes and drinks.

These spaces reminded me of someone arranging their bedroom, making a space that feels like them, that feels safe, that quietly says: you are welcome here. Softness extended into physical space ( and designed for Instagram too, obviously. IG trends has such a huge impact on Seoul ).

And then I discovered a sad Kawaii

Last week, while preparing my Color of the Month newsletter at ITALIANBARK, I discovered something I didn’t know: there is also a sad Kawaii.

If lately you’re a bit tired of everything, if seeing smiling little faces irritates you instead of comforting you, maybe this is the kind of Kawaii that suits you.

One of the most interesting examples is the Mizuiro aesthetic.

Mizuiro literally means “light blue.” It’s a Japanese aesthetic that emerged around 2010 and has resurfaced strongly in recent years as an evolution of Cyber and Y2K culture. The palette is all cornflower blues, white, silver, light greys. But unlike many pastel aesthetics, Mizuiro is not joyful. It is cold, melancholic, fragile. It evokes isolation, vulnerability, a sort of sad “technological purity.”

Images are often filtered with blue-grey tones, referencing early 2000s Webcore: old Windows interfaces, pixelated fonts, screensavers, blurry photographs taken on early digital cameras. An aesthetic suspended between digital nostalgia and contemporary alienation. It’s the feeling of looking at an old chat window. Of a phone that rang and went unanswered. Of a bedroom at 2am with just the screen glow.

Mizuiro is sometimes confused with Tenshi Kaiwai (the “Angel Neighborhood”), that is a more ethereal and futuristic variation, less dark, more atmospheric than emotional. Where Mizuiro feels lonely, Tenshi Kaiwai feels like floating.

What strikes me about both is that they’re not cynical. They don’t reject Kawaii , they just find a version of it that fits melancholy where the cute survives, but it carries weight.

In the end, it’s always a matter of taste

Beyond specific aesthetics, what fascinates me lately is how deeply our taste is shaped by the environments we grow up in. Taste never emerges in isolation: it forms slowly, over years, within the culture we are immersed in,in such a subtle way that we rarely question it.

From a Western perspective, what is considered kawaii may feel very distant from our own standards of “good taste.” Excessive, maybe, a bit naïve. And in fact, we didn’t grow up having breakfast in front of packages filled with smiling characters. We grew up with oversized, hyper-real photographs of biscuits that turned out to be much smaller than advertised (and smaller every year, actually). Our aesthetic baseline was formed by different rituals, different images, different small repeated moments.

That matters a lot.

Because visual culture begins in the smallest, most ordinary rituals. On a kitchen table. In a lunchbox. In the stationery we choose at ten years old. In the cartoons that ran in the background while we ate dinner. In the shapes of the toys we touched before we could read.

It is not formed, not only, by reading thousands of articles, nor by scrolling endlessly through social media, nor even by reading the most extraordinary books. Those things may refine it. They may deepen it. They may give it language, but the foundation is older. Because there is an unconscious layer of taste inside each of us , that is powerful, persistent, and often impossible to fully trace. We carry it without knowing exactly where it began.

And that, to me, is one of the most fascinating things about design. It doesn’t start in studios or in mood boards. It starts at breakfast.

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Anyway: say what you want, but I would still rather start my morning looking at a small smiling face than at an oversized, hyper-real photograph of a biscuit that turns out to be much smaller than the one promised on the box.

See you soon for a new (tasty) trip somewhere.

If you’re interested in how cultural aesthetics translate into design trend signals, I explore this kind of research more deeply inside TRENDBARK , my professional trend intelligence platform for designers and brands. The connection between cultural micro-movements like Kawaii and where interior design is heading is something I track closely, especially heading into the next design season.

The next field research is coming. Stay close.

The occasion is Paris Déco Off week, which took place in the city together with Maison & Objet last january, but this could just as well be a showroom and shop walk you can do at any time of the year.

A small disclaimer about this selection: we’re talking about high-end furniture and décor. We’re in one of the chicest areas in the world, the Rive Gauche and the Place des Victoires areas (just above the Louvre, to give you a reference), in ateliers that talk to a high-end clientele.

And of course, most of us live in a very different reality. Me included. I’m writing this first post from my kitchen island with my laptop (because sitting at a desk all the time exhausts me), eating crostoli (galani, or whatever you call them in your region, I’m not translating this into English. if you are curious, I’m talking about these ), looking out over the Treviso countryside. Not a particularly beautiful view at this exact moment, to be honest, because it’s completely covered in fog (anyone from the Pianura Padana knows exactly what I’m talking about). Not exactly La Vie en Rose…

For me, going back to beautiful things I’ve seen around is also a way to stay inspired, especially when I’m not. And a foggy early-February day here definitely isn’t. So today, I’m cheering myself with crostoli, going back to Paris, and taking you with me.

Our walk starts at Place des Victoires, right behind one of my favourite gardens in the world, the Palais Royal. What makes this place so unique is, once again, something that was heavily criticized when it was first created and has since become iconic: Les Deux Plateaux, also known as Buren’s Columns.

260 octagonal columns, all identical with black and white vertical stripes, but of different heights, creating unique perspective effects, especially when contrasted with the historic colonnade of the Palais Royal. This is a very particular area of Paris, with its own unique history, which I really recommend exploring further online. There are many great articles about it if you’re curious.

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Back to Place des Victoires: my first stop is Maison Sarah Lavoine, a place I recommend if, like me, you love colour. Founded by Sarah Poniatowski in 2012, I found an interesting mix of inspirations that feel both on-trend and timeless.

I spotted a deep teal, and let’s be honest, even if this colour is about to come back strongly, for me it never really left. There are colours that simply work, and this is one of them. It’s intense, deep, rich, and has a nuance that pairs beautifully with many other colours and materials. So don’t be afraid to use it, even if someone “big” told you that this is the year of white…..And if you get tired of it, feel free to blame me (it won’t happen anyway).

I found the same colour on a tiled wall behind a kitchen converted as a shelving unit - now, can we talk about how beautiful it is to use tiles where you least expect them? This made me think of a comment I read recently under an Instagram post (by the way, a small tip from a trend forecaster: comments are often the most interesting part of the whole mess Zuckerberg feeds us with). Someone wrote: “tiles are only for the bathroom, at most in the kitchen.” Sorry: who is this, the Holy Inquisition of Tiles? I mean, if I like tiles, can I put them wherever I want? As always, it’s a matter of taste.

The second place I’m taking you to is completely different and just a few steps away. Hidden on the first floor of an inner courtyard is one of the places I recommend most if you really want to breathe French savoir-faire: La Manufacture Prelle.

For nine generations, Prelle has passed down historic textile-making techniques. Their Paris showroom unfolds around an inner courtyard and is the perfect setting to host contemporary design pieces and furniture, which happens during design weeks.

Here I had the chance to see Pierre Gonalons’ collection up close: clean, geometric lines, traditional materials, perfect proportions, yet still highly decorative. What struck me was the contrast, and at the same time the perfect harmony, with the surrounding space. I stayed there for quite a while, just observing details.

And no, don’t even start with “well, it’s easy with big budgets and clients who pay a lot…”

No. The French have something we Italians don’t naturally have. We can refine it, sure, but culturally and aesthetically it’s not part of our default mindset. And there’s a historical reason for this, I’m not saying this just because I love brie and onion soup.

If you look at history, decoration was institutionalized very early here in France, in royal courts. In Italy, visual culture is more rooted in architecture, proportions, volumes. What in France is defined as arts décoratifs doesn’t really exist in the same way in Italy: it’s absorbed into art, craftsmanship, architecture. But, in France, there’s even a museum dedicated to it.

So yes, in Italy you can easily have a client with a huge budget and strong cultural references, and they’ll still hesitate when you talk about decorative pattern. It’s not always a matter of money. Taste is deeply rooted in lived experience and tradition, often without we even realize it. I think it’s fascinating to see how Italy and France are neighbours, yet their approach to decoration is so different. In France there’s less fear of controlled excess, less anxiety about layering, mixing, overlapping. Pattern, colour, and material coexist without the constant fear of “making a mistake.”

It’s an interesting lesson, especially after years in which decoration was seen as something to reduce, simplify, remove, until we all ended up living in white or concrete boxes. In Italy, I think we’re much more afraid of mixing, of doing things wrong.

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A few steps from Place des Victoires, another iconic stop is Alberto Pinto’s showroom, now known as Pinto Paris. Again, a disclaimer: this is extremely high-end décor. If, like me, you feel slightly out of place when you walk in, that’s completely normal.

A small curiosity: did you know he was born in Casablanca, to an Argentine father and a Moroccan mother? Not from a poor family, I suppose, because while it’s true that taste and money don’t always go hand in hand, having economic means and the right environment does give you more opportunities to develop a refined taste. Let’s be honest about that. What I also found interesting is that he trained as a historian and initially worked as a photographer. For him, true luxury was feeling at home surrounded by beauty. A great traveller and a deep connoisseur of history, and this Paris place that is now the studio and showroom used to be his apartment. I think that’s what makes it so fascinating.

What mattered most to him were volumes, space, and light. Large patterns with small ones, geometric lines with figurative motifs, rich fabrics with smooth surfaces: if you look closely, it’s a continuous play of layers and contrasts. Colour is used to create depth, with nuanced contrasts that feel soft and timeless, punctuated by just a few more contemporary accents.

We leave this area with a fifteen-minute walk, skirting the Louvre and crossing the iconic Pont des Arts, to reach the Rive Gauche and the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Between Rue de Verneuil, Rue de Lille, Rue Jacob, and Rue Bonaparte, it’s a sequence of galleries and decorator showrooms.

My advice here is simple: walk, observe, and stop wherever your instinct takes you.

I’ll tell you about two places in particular.

Staying within rich, eclectic decoration, one stop I always make is Laura Gonzales. And I’ll be honest: every time I walk in, I think, “I wouldn’t want a house like this.” I’m Italian, I have my own taste. But every time I’m also struck by how difficult it is to balance things this well, and by how well it’s done here.

It’s interesting to note that Laura Gonzales also has an art history background, which probably gives her much more freedom than we architects tend to have. Pattern is the main protagonist here. Colour less so: never more than two or three colour families together, but an extraordinary richness of forms and patterns. It’s theatrical decoration, full of historical references, layered materials and textures, built through many different layered levels.

Last stop I’ll share with you: Popus Edition. A brand I already knew and, I’ll be honest, hadn’t particularly impressed me when I saw it at the fair. This is also to say how much spaces can amplify the experience of what we see, and sometimes fairs might not be the best place for certain products.

This is a brand that makes huge use of patterns and also of colours, but if you observe well even if spaces are colourful, they always tend to be around a similar range of tint and saturation. What I loved the most however, is this vaulted lower level decorated all the way up to the low ceiling, with wallpaper and even pom-poms on the ceiling.

I hope this Paris walk gave you a bit of extra inspiration.

In the meantime, I have almost finished a whole tray of crostoli here.