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Design Week London 2025

Design Week London returns for its annual celebration of British and international design talent. Across nine days, the festival takes over venues throughout the city—from established institutions like the V&A and Design Museum to pop-up spaces in Shoreditch and Clerkenwell. **What to expect:** - **Exhibitions** spanning furniture, product, graphic, and spatial design - **Talks and panels** with leading designers and studio founders - **Open studios** offering rare access to working design practices - **Installations** transforming public spaces across the city The festival has become essential for anyone working in or adjacent to design. It's equal parts trade show, cultural moment, and networking opportunity. Whether you're sourcing for a project, scouting talent, or just want to see what's shaping the field, this is the week to be in London.

Isamu Noguchi: Sculptural Design

Isamu Noguchi refused to choose between art and design. This exhibition argues that was the point. The Japanese-American sculptor spent his career moving between worlds—Brancusi's studio and Herman Miller's factories, Japanese garden design and Broadway stage sets, playground equipment and museum commissions. His Akari light sculptures remain in production seventy years later. His coffee table is in every mid-century modern home. But he insisted he was a sculptor, not a designer. This retrospective brings together 150 works that blur the distinction. Stone sculptures sit alongside furniture prototypes. Paper lanterns float above architectural models. The exhibition design itself—by Jasper Morrison—treats the space as one continuous environment rather than discrete galleries. What emerges is a vision of design as philosophical practice. For Noguchi, every object was an investigation: how does form relate to use? How does material shape meaning? These aren't questions you answer. They're questions you keep asking.

Beijing Fashion Week AW2026

## The Eastern Color Wheel Beijing Fashion Week AW2026 brings together more than 120 events across the Chinese capital, with new product launches up 75% year-on-year. The opening show featured 80 models in a visual spectacle the organizers call the "Eastern Color Wheel" — a statement about China's fashion identity that goes far beyond imitation of European houses. The defining tension this season: quiet luxury versus conceptual design. Chinese Gen Z and millennials are rejecting logo-heavy branding in favor of authenticity, sustainability, and cultural connection. The result is a generation of designers who are fusing traditional Chinese craft — embroidered heritage, Hanfu-inspired silhouettes — with frontier technology: 3D-printed latticework, AI-assisted tailoring, and sustainable fabrication. This is the split personality of Chinese fashion in 2026. On one side, whisper-quiet luxury rooted in refinement and restraint. On the other, conceptual design that treats the runway as installation art. Beijing Fashion Week is where those two impulses collide, and the collections emerging from it are unlike anything coming out of Paris, Milan, or New York. ## Why It Matters China isn't just the world's largest luxury consumer market — it's becoming a design originator. The shift from consumption to creation mirrors the broader creator-class transfer: Chinese designers are no longer interpreting Western aesthetics. They're building their own design language, exporting it, and finding an audience that values cultural specificity over global homogeneity. Beijing Fashion Week is smaller and less hyped than its counterparts in Paris or Milan. That's the point. The work here is rougher, more experimental, and less concerned with commercial viability. If you want to see where fashion goes next, watch the edges, not the center.

Salone del Mobile Milano 2026

The world's largest furniture and design fair returns to Rho Fiera Milano with 1,900+ exhibitors across 169,000 sqm — completely sold out. This edition features biennial showcases EuroCucina (106 brands, 17 countries) and the International Bathroom Exhibition (163 brands, 14 countries), plus SaloneSatellite spotlighting 700 designers under 35 from 23 design schools. The debut of Salone Raritas brings 25 exhibitors of collectible design including Nilufar and Salviati × Draga & Aurel. Major exhibitors include Poliform, Flou, Lema, Meridiani, Visionnaire, and FORMITALIA. Public access Saturday April 25 and Sunday April 26.

Dieter Rams: The Complete Works

The definitive retrospective of the designer who shaped how we think about products. Dieter Rams spent forty years at Braun creating objects that influenced everything from Apple's design language to the very idea of what "good design" means. His ten principles—less but better, honest, unobtrusive, long-lasting—became the manifesto for a generation of designers. This exhibition brings together over 300 objects from Rams' career: the iconic SK 4 record player, the T3 pocket radio, the 606 Universal Shelving System. But more than a retrospective, it's an argument. In an age of planned obsolescence and feature bloat, Rams' work asks whether we've lost something essential.

Beijing Fashion Week AW2026 — China Chic and 120 Events

Beijing Fashion Week runs March 17-23 with over 120 events celebrating the collision of traditional Chinese craft and contemporary design. The headline theme is China Chic — ancient embroidery techniques, Qing dynasty silhouettes, and Song dynasty color palettes reinterpreted through modern tailoring. This isn't costume; it's a design philosophy that treats 5,000 years of textile heritage as living material rather than museum artifact. The tension between quiet luxury and conceptual design runs through every collection, reflecting China's broader identity negotiation between heritage reverence and global ambition.

On Deck London: Design + Product

On Deck gatherings feel different because everyone has skin in the game. The community started during COVID as a fellowship for founders, then expanded to include designers, writers, and operators. What makes their events work is the filter: everyone in the room is actively building something—a startup, a practice, a body of work. The conversations skip the "what do you do" preamble and get to the interesting parts. This London edition brings together their Design and Product fellowships for an evening of structured introductions followed by open conversation. The format includes "lightning intros" where attendees have 60 seconds to share what they're working on and what help they need. It's networking for people who hate the word networking—but recognize that the right introduction can change a trajectory.

Aesop: The Residence

Aesop doesn't do pop-ups. Except when they do. The Residence is a two-week takeover of a Georgian townhouse in Mayfair, transformed into a living exploration of the brand's philosophy. Each room focuses on a different sensory experience: a reading room with a curated library, a listening room with vinyl selections, a bathing room where you can trial the full body care range. The design is pure Aesop—warm materials, deliberate lighting, objects chosen for their craft rather than their branding. There's no hard sell. Staff are trained to leave you alone unless you want conversation. The entire experience feels more like visiting a well-designed home than shopping. Appointments are free but limited. The format encourages you to stay for an hour rather than browse for five minutes. It's retail as hospitality—and a reminder of what physical stores could be if brands stopped optimizing for throughput.

Figma

Figma is a collaborative interface design tool that runs entirely in the browser, enabling real-time co-creation for product teams.

Aesop

Aesop is an Australian skincare company known for its botanical formulations and distinctive retail design.

Broadcom

The Hock Tan franchise-consolidation machine — custom AI accelerators co-designed with Google, Meta and OpenAI, the dominant AI networking franchise, and a VMware software annuity. The arms dealer to the companies trying to escape NVIDIA.

Cerebras Systems

Cerebras Systems designs wafer-scale AI processors — the WSE-3, a single chip the size of a dinner plate with ~900,000 cores and enough on-chip memory to hold large models without external DRAM. It sells on-prem CS-3 systems and a hosted Cerebras Inference cloud, competing with NVIDIA on inference latency. Founded 2015; went public on Nasdaq in May 2026 under ticker CBRS.

TSMC

The only pure-play foundry at the leading edge at scale — it manufactures the chips it does not design for NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom and Apple alike, and owns the CoWoS packaging that governs how many AI accelerators ship. The chokepoint the entire complex depends on.

Cadence Design Systems

Founders & Builders: NYC January Meetup

No panels. No pitches. Just conversation. The Founders & Builders meetup brings together people who are actively building—startups, studios, solo projects, side hustles. The format is deliberately unstructured: show up, get a drink, find someone interesting to talk to. What makes it work is the curation. Attendees skew toward design, product, and engineering rather than pure finance. The conversations tend toward "what are you working on" rather than "what's your valuation." It's the networking event for people who usually hate networking events. January's edition focuses on anyone building in AI—not the hype, but the actual product challenges. How do you ship when the models keep changing? How do you price when costs are unpredictable? Bring your unsolved problems.

NIGO: From Japan with Love

The first-ever museum retrospective of Japanese creative director NIGO outside of Japan. The exhibition traces his trajectory from 1990s Harajuku streetwear pioneer — founding A Bathing Ape — to his current role as Artistic Director of KENZO. Visitors encounter vintage clothing, Americana collectibles, and works from his personal archive alongside pieces documenting his influential collaborations across fashion, music, and design. A definitive survey of one of streetwear's most important figures.

MenFem Maker Meetup – NYC

Our second US meetup brings together creators, freelancers, and founders who are building in public. **The format is simple:** No keynotes. No pitches. No name tags with job titles. Just good conversation with people making interesting things. We're keeping it to 75 people to ensure everyone can actually meet. The venue has a bar. The drinks are on us for the first hour. **Who's coming:** A mix of the community—designers running studios, developers shipping side projects, writers building audiences, founders in early stages. The common thread: people who make things and want to connect with others doing the same. **What to expect:** Arrive when you want. Leave when you want. Talk to whoever seems interesting. Maybe something comes of it. Maybe it's just a good evening. RSVP required. We'll send venue details closer to the date.

MenFem x Soho House: New Year's Networking

Start 2025 with intention. Join MenFem and Soho House for an evening designed for the people actually doing interesting things—not just talking about them. **The Format:** - No name tags. No forced icebreakers. No pitch deck presentations. - Curated guest list (50 max) - Structured 1:1 rotations (optional) - Open networking with purpose **Who's Coming:** Founders, creatives, operators, and investors who read the newsletter and want to meet the others. **The Vibe:** Drinks. Conversation. Maybe something comes of it, maybe it's just a good evening. Either way, you'll leave having talked to people worth knowing. Dress code: Smart casual. Soho House standards apply. --- *We're keeping this small and intentional. No sponsors, no agenda, just the community meeting IRL.*

Transformers and attention

The transformer is the design nearly every modern AI model uses. Its key move is attention: while processing each word, the model looks at every other word at once and weighs which ones matter. That parallel look is what made models trainable on enormous amounts of text.