Ennio Morlotti: Vesconia
Issue #00024: April 23rd, 2026
This week, Mr. Thread hands the microphone to our correspondent on the ground in Milan, our Italian spy, who spent six straight days elbowing her way through Design Week. Names have been changed. Opinions have not.
P.S. Read to the end to find out who won our PLAYTIME quiz!
Milan Dispatch: Our Guest Editor Files from the Fuorisalone
Ciao lettori,
Okay, please keep my name out of this, I don’t want my clients to read it.
Let me start by saying the weather in Milan was perfetto. Sun, mild air, the type of April that makes you feel guilty for spending six days inside Palazzos.
But let me tell you the truth: Milan Design Week is basically a networking event now. Fuorisalone has turned into a competition over who can stage the most deranged installation of the week. Moncler built a giant octopus. I will not explain it because there is nothing to explain. It is a huge octopus. People queued to stand next to it and post a Reel.
One installation moved me: Loro Piana put on a show with all the heritage and craft: embroidery, needle punching, appliqué, Jacquard, hand-weaving, baby cashmere. I mean, it was really amazing. They were showing works of art. No octopus required.
The parties were the same parties, the same people, the same Gucci bags. I went to the Vanity Fair party at Piscina Cozzi, which I heard is hosting its final installation before the building converts into a spa, so enjoy it while you can. Da Vittorio catered and it was out of this world. I cannot tell you what I ate because finger food at this level does not look like what it tastes like; you put things in your mouth and say wow. I do not drink. That is how I survive on my feet until half past midnight.
Kelly Wearstler brought her H&M collaboration to one of the Palazzos. I knew before I walked in that the Palazzo would outshine the installation, and it did. Kelly wasn’t there. If she did show up, it was at a VIP party away from the masses. I knew that I wasn’t going to be impressed by what she had done, and I was right, but what was I expecting from H&M? What else. The Door la Repubblica party at Palazzo Crivelli worked because the garden was so incredible.
No one talked about Trump or America, or even the war in Iran. They did talk about the war in Ukraine, which feels more immediate in Europe. But mostly people ask each other where did you go? What did you see? What am I missing? You cannot see everything. This year Milan tipped past overwhelming into absurd. Jewelry brands, fashion brands, everyone doing something because everyone is afraid of not doing something.
The longest line I saw was for ‘Polish Modernism: A Struggle for Beauty,’ hosted on the 16th floor of the iconic Torre Velasca. I can’t waste one hour of my life on a line, just for that. It’s crazy. Without a press pass or VIP pass, you will spend half the week in a queue and the other half hunting a taxi at midnight that does not exist. There are no Ubers, no taxis. Friends of mine walked home for an hour in heels. I will not name them because they have suffered enough. I had to get home in a van last night. Hardly a sophisticated mode of transport for such a grand event.
My advice if you go next year: skip the octopus madness, find the craft, wear flats, RSVP to everything, and book your taxi before dinner.
Baci,
Your friend in Milan.
Economy
Ennio Morlotti: Girasoli Verdi
Luxury dies without the USA
America is the one luxury market still holding its nerve, thank goodness. Any talk of New York City’s downfall looks foolish right now, as it just retook the crown as the world’s top destination for luxury store openings, with activity up 23% year-over-year. WWD reports that 56% of New York’s new openings landed on Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue, and North America carried 27% of global luxury expansion activity. Watches of Switzerland grew 20% in the US in its first fiscal half despite the wretched tariffs. LVMH called American client behavior “quite homogeneous,” with improvement every month of the quarter. (“Quite homogeneous” is probably a compliment in France.) Even Gucci, bleeding almost everywhere else, called the States a bright spot in this terrible moment.
However, Morningstar’s Jelena Sokolova says the recovery is young and fragile — US luxury sales grew 25% a year from 2019 through 2022, then the hangover arrived. The canary in the coal mine is the stock market. If the AI-driven top of the Dow wobbles, the ultra-high-net-worth customer wobbles with it. For now, the Dow traded above 49,000 this week and the rich are spending. Everyone has been betting against America for a decade, but it goes to show: don’t write off Uncle Sam yet.
“The best thing [luxury brands] can do is give people a reason to come to you. The luxury houses need to double down on service and that dream of luxury. Make people feel special, give them a reason to come to you. In the last few years with luxury, the regular price increases, the lack of innovation in the market has sort of made people a little bit disenchanted with the industry.”
Inside the LA land grab
A Redfin analysis of purchases in Los Angeles’ fire-scarred zones found that real estate investors — LLCs, corporations, and offshore buyers — are now buying roughly 40% of the land changing hands. In the 90272 zip code of Pacific Palisades, 48 of 119 lots went to investors, up from zero the year before. In Altadena, 27 of 61. In Malibu, 19 of 43.
Los Angeles magazine is reporting that a single anonymous overseas buyer has already dropped $65 million on nine burn-scarred oceanfront lots along the Pacific Coast Highway. And in a clip circulating on X via @WallStreetApes, Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt (yes, the former reality television star) tells Joe Rogan that the number-one buyer of Palisades dirt lots is China — routed through New Zealand shell companies to mask the money. The federal data lines up: Chinese buyers account for 15% of foreign purchases nationwide, 36% of their US buying lands in California, and 71% of those deals close in all cash. Ka-ching.
However, a friend of Mr. Thread’s in Malibu construction says this is a repeat of what happened after the 2018 Woolsey fire: foreign buyers scooped up burned lots sight unseen, not knowing that California Fire Code rules had made some of these parcels effectively unbuildable. (There’s no way to widen a driveway to fit a fire truck without pushing into environmentally sensitive habitat or Coastal Act territory.) Some of these foreign buyers spent tens of millions on useless dirt.
Either way, the broader impact on our industry is bad. The people buying burned properties blind probably don’t invest heavily in bespoke interiors. They will never hire a California artisan wallpaper shop or splurge on a custom sofa from a local workroom. They see these plots as a financial instrument, chips scattered on a roulette table. For the bespoke high-end part of our industry, this is a loss.
“The number 1 buyer of Pacific Palisades dirt lots is China. China is taking over Los Angeles and Karen Bass is just letting them take it.”
The furniture suffering continues
Last week we walked through the body count in furniture retail: Conn’s liquidating 550 Badcock stores, American Freight shuttering all 328, At Home’s $2 billion write-down, Big Lots closing most of 900 locations. RH, Williams-Sonoma, and Ashley are scrambling to stay right-side up. This week the same pain has arrived at home decor and storage.
Modern Retail reports that Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. just closed its acquisition of the Container Store — along with Elfa and Closet Works — for $150 million. This is the same Container Store that was $264 million in debt, entered bankruptcy in 2024, and needed a $40 million lifeline from Beyond Inc. just to keep the lights on. Now it’s one more piece in a stitched-together portfolio alongside Kirkland’s.
I usually skim the news about companies like these, but this development completes the picture of headwinds in the sector: home sales are the worst in three decades, the median home price is up 30%, and housing turnover is at near-record lows. The survivors are the ones with clean balance sheets, strong cash flow, and a premium customer. Everyone else is a victim.
“Companies like Container Store and Kirklands failed for a reason. Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. now needs to pause, really solidify the proposition and get operational discipline to some of these businesses in order to grow. Buying a lot of quite weak things and putting them together, it rarely generates success unless you really work on reengineering the proposition.”
Tariff refunds
US Customs and Border Protection’s CAPE portal went live April 20, and every importer in the country is scrambling for a piece of the pie. CBS News reports the federal government may owe up to $175 billion to companies that paid tariffs the Supreme Court ruled illegal under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in February. Initially, CBP will process about 63% of claims within 60 to 90 days. The other 37% could take years. My claim is already in.
But the truth is, this refund creates a real dilemma. At one of my brands, we itemized our tariff surcharge on every invoice, deliberately, so we could remove it cleanly. Other companies passed the expense on through higher prices. Some did both. Then I remembered what Kyle Bunting told us in Mr. Thread issue #00019: “The only statement we issued was direct and succinct: my tariffs are not your problem. We absorbed everything. And used it as a moment to improve.”
Either way, the tariffs cost us millions. If we get the refund, should we give it back to our clients? Do they then give it back to their clients? This will be a very interesting debate to watch play out. I currently don’t have any answers, and wish we had a community where we could discuss this together. It is a tough problem, with no easy answers. The money was never really ours to keep.
💡 Quick Poll: If you received a significant tariff refund, and you had previously raised prices to absorb them, would you give those refunds back to your customers?
Tech
Ennio Morlotti: Calendole
Fabric is harder than steel
Amy Pretzel, a former Apple product design engineer, dropped a powerful thread on X this week arguing that softgoods (textiles, leather, foams, laminated woven composites) are among the most demanding disciplines in product engineering, and almost nobody is building tools for it. A block of steel is isotropic. Pull it in any direction and it behaves the same way. CAD can model it in a single line. A piece of woven nylon has a warp and a weft with completely different mechanical properties.
This really hit home for me, as the owner of a company that is still hand-printing fabrics in an Italian factory. Meanwhile, the Patagonias, Arc’teryxes, Nikes, and luxury brands of the world have whole R&D floors dedicated to what a fabric does over a million flex cycles. We do not. If I had twenty minutes with Amy, I’d ask how handmade and high-tech textiles can reinforce each other. The future of textiles belongs to the houses that put both kinds of brain in the same room.
“Softgoods means anything flexible: textiles, leather, foam, films, woven and knit composites, the laminated stacks inside your shoes, the fabric on your headphones, the case on your laptop sleeve. It’s the part of the product that has to bend, stretch, breathe, drape, and hold its shape across years of human abuse. And it’s much, much harder to engineer than rigid parts.”
Trends
Ennio Morlotti: Landscape
Collectibles, human made
Critic Debika Ray just published the sharpest essay of Milan Design Week. In a Dezeen opinion piece on the rise of collectible design at Salone, she walks through the new Salone Raritas pavilion — featuring Sabine Marcelis, Milanese gallery Nilufar, Dubai’s Collectional, Herzog & de Meuron, and Italian glassmaker Salviati. She argues that as mass production has become morally compromised, prestige has shifted to rarity. Per ArtTactic and Bank of America, design, furniture, and decorative arts sales grew 20% in the first half of 2025 (we’re talking high-ticket sales at auctions and galleries, not at Container Store, of course). In fact, design is outpacing several fine art categories. Who’s buying? Minted millennials.
We’ve been writing about this for months. The luxury giants are overexposed and the handmade renaissance is real. The market is quietly rewarding work that is slow to make and hard to find. When Ray writes about someone pouring their own personal identity and culture into an object they make by hand, she is describing the exact economic engine our industry runs on. Read the piece twice.
“There is no greater luxury than getting someone to spend hours skilfully building something for you by hand with scarce materials, pouring their own personal identity and culture into it while doing so. That’s why collectible design is so often defined by the aesthetic of craft: fingerprints suggest a human touch, imperfections imply a laborious process, and natural materials hint at sustainability.”
On the other hand — here’s more enshittification
If collectibles are the top of the market, here’s the bottom. The Wall Street Journal reports that US home builders are systematically stripping the quality out of new construction. Particle-board cabinets replacing hardwood, countertops going thinner, and hollow-core doors replacing solid wood. KB Home now builds 65% of its communities with footprints under 1,600 square feet. The median new-home size has fallen from 2,466 square feet in 2015 to 2,153 in 2025. John Burns Research expects the average number of windows per home to drop from 21 to 18 by 2027.
I’m living this one at home. I just replaced every interior door handle in my own house after the mechanisms started squeaking within a year. Real handles run $1,000 each. The enshittified version runs $100 and dies in 12 months. This is the quiet tragedy of American housing — and it’s exactly why craftsmanship matters. (Check out @inspectorjordan on Instagram. He finds everything wrong with American new builds, especially wobbly kitchen islands.)
“Many new homes now feel very cookie-cutter and very much like they’re just slamming them together as quickly as possible. It’s just kind of that feeling that we get that things aren’t built as well as they used to be.”
Opportunities
Ennio Morlotti : Paesaggio di Brianza
Golf sims are the new game room
There were more than 9 million golf simulator players in the US in 2025 — a 150% jump from 2019 — and the National Golf Foundation forecasts another 60% growth over the next one to two years. The Financial Times reports that just over half of those “sim players” have not set foot on an actual course in the past 12 months. The average installed sim costs $45,000, and custom residential built-ins run $70,000 and up. Trackman’s global sales grew 300% between 2019 and 2025. The Pendry Residences in Nashville are building three Full Swing bays into a 146-unit building. The Ritz-Carlton Residences in West Palm Beach include golf sims as standard.
This is a lane interior designers should be running in. A good sim requires an entire room: Flooring, acoustics, lighting, seating, bar, wall treatments, a finished ceiling high enough to swing a Callaway. I put one in my own office, did most of the build myself, and saved $10,000. Pick up the phone and call the client whose kid is trying to shave three strokes off a handicap. Call the developer in your Rolodex. This may not be the Versailles you signed up to decorate, but a $50,000 install a few times a year keeps the lights on and opens the door to the next real commission. Fore!
“The reasons for wanting a sim vary — sometimes it is ‘I want to be better at golf’, sometimes it is ‘I want my kids to be better at golf’, sometimes it is even to help enhance a child’s college admissions opportunities by having a low golf handicap.”
Loose Threads
USM x Labubu: Swiss modular godfather meets viral kawaii in a Milan capsule. Buy it for your niece. Or yourself.
Issey Miyake and Ensamble Studio pressed waste paper into marbled furniture — looks like stone. This is where softgoods could go.
Check out how thousands of years of foot traffic have worn down ancient marble stairs.
Mexico rerouted a high-speed rail line around 16 newly discovered cave paintings. Bravo.
Playtime
After weeks of clever guesses and suspiciously confident DMs, we have a champion. Congratulations to Parker W. Well played!
Runners-up who came achingly close: Chad S. in first and Erin F. in second. Nice try, but no cigar. You live to guess another week.
Parker, check your inbox. You’ll get a calendar link to book your 1-hour private Zoom with Mr. Thread (bring your toughest business challenges), plus a mystery gift from Mr. Needle in the mail.
And for everyone else — tune in next week. Mr. Needle has been thinking up something new.
Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle
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