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Fashion

by Dara Morgan

Fashion Brands Are Into Interior Design Now. Why?

14 Aug 2025

Source: eliesaabmaison.com

If your sofa looks suspiciously like it belongs on a runway, you aren't imagining things. Fashion has been styling our rooms almost as long as it has been styling our bodies. Hermès has made furniture and objects, on and off, since the inter-war years — the Maison launched a furniture line with Jean-Michel Frank in 1928, translating saddle-stitch rigour into armchairs and tables that whispered understatement rather than screamed status.
Armani stepped in with Armani/Casa in 2000, using Milan as a base to export a lacquered, low-lit vision of domestic calm (and later, entire hotels and private residences). Fendi formalised its interiors love affair with Fendi Casa in the late 1980s, long before “fashion-furniture” became a hyphen in every press release; that lineage has just been reshaped again through new ownership and distribution.
And of course, Louis Vuitton’s Objets Nomades programme — begun in 2012 — recruited star designers to create ingenious, often nomadic pieces that turned travel into furniture poetry. Bottega Veneta’s 2023 Gaetano Pesce collaboration during Milan Design Week 2023 — somewhere between a surreal grotto and a handbag showcase — showed how immersive, artist-led installations could blur retail, art and interior architecture.
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Source: louisvuitton.com

Still a boom

If the last decade was a flirtation, 2025 is a committed relationship. During Milan Design Week this spring, the cross-pollination was not a subplot; it was the plot. Louis Vuitton expanded Objets Nomades and, crucially, launched a full Home Collection across five categories — furniture and lighting, decoration and textiles, tableware, gaming, plus the existing Nomades — with a palazzo takeover that made pinball machines and leather-petal record players feel almost inevitable.
Fendi Casa went big at its Piazza della Scala flagship with a mixed-material collection that tightened the dialogue between fashion detailing and living-room scale; the 2025 line continued recent design collaborations and framed new pieces as part of Fendi’s centenary narrative. Hermès, ever allergic to noise, staged minimalist, museum-quiet displays at La Pelota, placing exquisite objects in near-clinical white to let materiality do the talking. Gucci, meanwhile, turned a 16th-century cloister into Bamboo Encounters — a material essay and live exhibition curated by 2050+ that threaded fashion history, craft and furniture through one hardy stalk. Missoni unveiled a dedicated Missoni Home boutique on Via Solferino and a 2025 collection that scaled its textiles into furniture and accessories — a tactile zigzag habitat rather than a mere cushion story.
Beyond Milan, the fashion-home axis is multiplying. Saint Laurent reopened Rive Droite in Paris with a formal partnership with Donald Judd Furniture — yes, the Judd — introducing Maison-coded finishes to canonical designs, effectively arguing that a minimalist chair can be a fashion statement without any fabric. Dior Maison has kept pace with seasonal riffs (from Cruise 2025’s sea-dream tableware to limited glass editions), ensuring that the Dior storyline now runs seamlessly from dress to dinner setting. Prada continues to fold home objects into its universe — candles, porcelains, decorative pieces — a quietly strategic bridge between boutique and bookshelf.

The MENA dimension

The Middle East is not merely a client; it is becoming a stage. Elie Saab has formalised his interiors imprint with Elie Saab Maison, complete with Dubai showrooms and a Salone-timed Milan flagship — a Lebanese couture eye translated into sculptural seating, cabinets, and lighting. Armani’s commitment is literally architectural: Armani Hotel Dubai inside the Burj Khalifa uses Armani/Casa language at urban-monumental scale, while Armani/Casa joins a cluster of luxury interiors showrooms at Dubai Mall Zabeel. Luxury Living Group, custodian of several fashion-home licences (Dolce&Gabbana Casa, Bentley Home, Bugatti Home), has doubled down on the region with a Bentley Home flagship in Dubai Mall Zabeel — part showroom, part manifesto for the Gulf’s appetite for branded interiors. And with Dubai Design Week growing into a leading showcase for the region each November (by the way, here is what to expect this year, November 4 to 9), the platform for fashion-design crossovers is only getting larger.
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Source: armanihotels.com

Why is this happening?

Because handbags are fabulous, but homes are forever. Several forces are converging:
1. Macro economics and diversification. Personal luxury goods hit a wobble in 2024, with Bain & Company flagging a slowdown and a more polarised market. Brands under pressure to protect margins are pushing into categories with longer replacement cycles and broader ticket ladders. Homeware and luxury furniture, by contrast, show steady mid-single-digit growth expectations through the decade.
2. The social media interior. Instagram, TikTok and remote-everything turned our living rooms into public avatars. Backdrops became outfits by another name. Aesthetic fluency in interiors now signals taste capital as loudly as a logo bag, and brands are only too happy to curate the frame.
3. Creative gravity. Furniture is a perfect theatre for the artist collaboration — slower, more sculptural, and less seasonally perishable than apparel. Vuitton’s designer roster on Objets Nomades and Gucci’s material-led commissions illustrate how fashion taps design culture to borrow longevity and seriousness.
4. Customer lifetime value. A sofa or dining table sits in a home for a decade; a dress gets retired by next season. Branded interiors deepen daily contact with the Maison, translating intangible “worlds” into hours sat, meals shared, and rooms seen — an intimacy apparel alone cannot achieve.
Put bluntly: the runway is now a room.
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Source: themattressstore.com

So where is this going?

Expect more flagship-style showrooms and immersive installations that function like exhibitions (Gucci’s cloister, Vuitton’s palazzo) and more hospitality that locks in a total-environment aesthetic (Armani’s Burj Khalifa template remains instructive). Expect the Gulf to keep rising as a testbed for monobrand interior retail and fashion-led residential projects. And expect the objects themselves to swing between quiet craft (Hermès-style minimalism) and maximal material theatre (LV’s “exceptional gaming,” Missoni’s tactility), as brands search for a domestic signature that feels inevitable once you have seen it.