MCM LANDS ON MARS AT MILAN DESIGN WEEK

MCM was born in Munich in 1976, a city that was then the epicenter of disco — Giorgio Moroder essentially invented electronic music there, and Diana Ross and Freddie Mercury were regulars at the clubs. Fifty years later, the brand has landed on Mars, though it hasn’t forgotten its nightlife roots. For Milan Design Week 2026, MCM and Atelier Biagetti turned the 16th-century Rotonda del Pellegrini into a three-level spaceship — and it was exactly as over-the-top as that sounds: a ground floor presentation of limited-edition pieces — a weightless hand-weight, a robot-inspired pouf, and a futuristic helmet — displayed alongside archival pieces from the brand’s five-decade history; a roller rink presided over by a robot DJ spinning music curated by Berghain residents Sound Metaphors; and a "diva dome" where soprano Laura Baldassari — who is also Biagetti’s partner and co-founder of Atelier Biagetti — performed Bellini’s Casta Diva beneath a monumental avatar of a woman from the future, sculpted from recycled materials.

This is the third consecutive year MCM has shown at Milan Design Week, and the third time they’ve done it with Atelier Biagetti — the Milan-based interdisciplinary studio founded by Alberto Biagetti and Baldassari, known for maximalist, theatrical installations that often campy, often ironic takes on our society’s obsessions with sex, power, and consumerism; they’ve made furniture whose supports re sculptural dumbbells, gilded punching bags, and Elvis-inspired tables that take the form of guitar cases. Their first MCM collaboration, in 2024 at the 17th-century Palazzo Cusani, presented seven portable, multifunctional objects — a convertible daybed, a modular armchair that could reconfigure into a stool or coffee table, a lantern that doubled as a hat, a backpack designed to carry a small pet — alongside a metaverse counterpart where the objects changed size, material, and function entirely. Last year, they created a garden installation at Giardino delle Arti featuring sculptural poufs shaped like cats and dogs, oversized cat sculptures doubling as lamps, palm tree lights, and a pet-inspired fragrance collection — all designed with Biagetti and Baldassari’s then-11-year-old daughter Altea under her brand Pet Therapy. This year they’ve landed, somewhat improbably, on Mars.

The concept, MCM CEO Sung-Joo Kim says, came from a journey she had defined over several seasons — from Munich to Mars, from heritage to future — that arrived at its natural destination in the brand’s 50th year. The focus on the future at a moment when the brand is celebrating its longevity is an unusual decision, which Kim says is about defining a new version of luxury for younger generations. “The new generation doesn’t relate to their grandma or grandpapa’s ideas of luxury. They want something new, because they grew up in the digital era,” she says. “Their definition of luxury is freedom.” In Kim’s concept-turned-reality, the luxury of the future is a disco on Mars — and unlike many fashion brands that descend on Milan Design Week with dubious claims to the design world, MCM’s Global Chief Brand Officer Dirk Schönberger knows exactly what this is and what it isn’t. “I really love that it’s not such a serious approach to design,” he says. “We are not an interior design brand, so it’s quirkier, more playful.”

Biagetti, for his part, wanted to work on the idea of functionality itself — how the objects we live with today might transform, and how we might interact with technology in ways we can’t yet fully anticipate. The result is neither strictly design nor art. “Creativity with MCM means experimentation and magic — not only research on materials, but experimentation in terms of how you can approach the idea behind the creativity,” Biagetti told me during a walkthrough of the installation. The pouf on the ground floor, he explained, might not be a pouf at all. It might be a companion robot, found on Mars — waiting for a function we haven’t invented yet. And despite this interest in pure concept, Biagetti says he was also just tired of designing tables and chairs. “It’s more interesting to build something that can be used in the future,” he says.