All the Fashion Highlights From Milan Design Week 2024

Another brand making its Salone del Mobile debut this season was Miu Miu—and in a clever variation on the format employed by its big sister brand, Prada, they unveiled the Miu Miu Literary Club, a two-day program of panels and talks spotlighting the work of a pair of overlooked women authors. The venue couldn’t have been more Miu Miu if it tried: A few blocks over from the Duomo, the event took place in the Circolo Filologico Milanese, a 19th-century library and cultural club straight out of a Wes Anderson movie. At the talk I attended, curator and writer Lou Stoppard led a fascinating and genuinely moving panel with multiple-prize-winning authors Jhumpa Lahiri, Sheila Heti, and Claudia Durastanti, in which they discussed Alba De Céspedes’s pioneering neorealist novel Forbidden Notebook, which acquired a new audience after being republished for the first time in 70 years by Pushkin Press last year.

Across their wide-ranging conversation—which involved Lahiri proudly showcasing a dog-eared paperback copy of one of De Céspedes’s novels she discovered while taking her regular Sunday walks through her local Roman market of Porta Portese, complete with a delightfully cheesy retro cover—the trio discussed everything from keeping diaries, to motherhood, to the inherent sexism of describing a woman’s writing as somehow more “confessional” than that of a man. The assembled group of listeners—which included Zawe Ashton, Poppy Delevingne, and Ella Richards, all decked out in head-to-toe Miu Miu—were captivated, and when it came time for the talk to end you could have heard a pin drop. (Until, that is, the room quickly erupted into applause.) Afterwards, guests chatted over canapés and spritzes in the charming book-lined lounge space, with many already beginning to thumb through their provided copies of Forbidden Notebook. It was a brilliantly executed new facet of Miu Miu’s tradition of championing women creatives—see their Women’s Tales film program as another example—and an unexpected highlight of Milan Design Week. —L.H.

Dolce & Gabbana