Collectible design taking its biggest ever platform at Milan design week tells us something significant about the current state of design, writes Debika Ray.
Starchitects may have fallen out of favour, but the star designer is back on the ascent. What better evidence than the launch at this year's Salone del Mobile of an exhibition of "collectible design, limited editions, design antiques, and high-end creative craftsmanship"? This is the kind of design that screams "ask who created me!"
Salone Raritas features exhibitors including Dutch designer Sabine Marcelis, Milanese gallery Nilufar, Dubai-based brand Collectional, Brazilian gallery Mercado Moderno, Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron and Italian glassmaker Salviati. This is not an art fair or consumer sales platform: it's aimed at Salone's existing trade audience of developers, architects and interior designers. In a competitive world, the fair's president Maria Porro says, such buyers need their hospitality and corporate projects to stand out, and are demanding unique objects with a story to help them do so.
Collectible design isn't replacing Salone's regular offer. Nonetheless, its inclusion at the world's most significant design fair – and its rise more broadly – suggests something about this moment. As mass production has become morally compromised, prestige now lies in rarity. What we value as design is shifting from the useful to the unique.
Salone Raritas is no outlier. In recent years, collectible design fairs have expanded (Collectible launched a New York edition in 2024, Design Miami held an exhibition in Seoul in 2025 and PAD London is attracting an increasingly international roster of galleries), while new ones such as Matter and Shape in Paris have launched. Art fairs including India Art Fair and Melbourne Art Fair (pictured) have integrated collectible design into their repertoire, and Alcova – a platform for experimental design – has become a must-see event during Milan design week.
Meanwhile, reports by ArtTactic and the Bank of America suggest that sales of design, furniture and decorative arts grew by 20 per cent in the first half of 2025, outpacing several traditional fine art categories, and the likes of Sotheby's, Christie's and Phillips have reported strong sales at design auctions. The demand is being driven, in part, by younger, more style-conscious people looking for more affordable entry points into collecting than fine art allows and seeking work that speaks to their tastes and identities. According to the 2025 Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report, millennials are leading the interest in design.
It's worth momentarily considering what "collectible design" means – spanning, as it does, everything from vintage pieces, prototypes and limited editions to handmade one-offs.
Historically, things tended to become collectible over time, because they were epoch-defining, game-changingly innovative, reflective of an era's taste and politics, or the work of a unique visionary. The art market hacked that timeline, engineering speculative collectability for contemporary works through a choreographed dance between galleries, fairs, buyers, museums and auction houses.
In fashion, too, scarcity and desire are manufactured by drops, capsules and celebrity collaborations, while in music performers leverage superfans for premium profits by monetising exclusivity. Contemporary design isn't there yet, but it wants to be.
The secondary resale market for recent works is still nascent. Until that changes, collectability needs to be taken on trust. This is partly based on the narrative constructed around an object – its cultural associations, the mythology surrounding the designer and their identity, the thinking process that birthed it. And partly, it is grounded in an item's quantifiable physical worth – the cost of materials, the time it takes to make, the complexity of the techniques involved.
All this is often less a signal of value than price. Zeros stack up when something is not just beautiful, but luxurious – and luxury today has shifted away from mere opulence. As the illusion of planetary abundance comes to an end, what we covet most now is that which is scarce and contested – time, human attention, natural resources and connections to cultural heritage.
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.
Craft used to be marginalised as lesser – a redundant past-time of the working classes, women, migrants, indigenous people and populations of the developing world. Now it has cultural capital, representing an ethical alternative to ruinous mass production – one based in material knowledge, skill, and local, small-scale making.
Such attributes are increasingly rare and therefore desirable. But the valorisation of craft doesn't necessarily mean greater inclusion for the people who have long practised it, nor does it automatically equate to sustainable, ethical production. It is typically the individual author – the artist-designer – who reaps most of the rewards, rather than the anonymous hands whose traditional practices have long been relegated to "handicrafts".
Of course, design itself is not inherently good or bad. In the 20th century, it was envisaged as a vehicle for democratising access to the good life. Designers harnessed technology to accelerate the efficient and affordable supply of functional objects at scale, transforming lives and societies. Many artefacts of that era are now priced as collectible too.
Meanwhile, we've grown to understand that this movement – under conditions of unfettered capitalism – also contributed to planetary catastrophe, a cultural homogenisation that's being exacerbated by the current wave of AI-driven automation, and the mass exploitation of people. As the problems design played a part in creating seem increasingly insurmountable, the modernist promise of a better life for all is dissolving – even if the practices and systems it put in place persist.
It's no surprise that Western design is seeking refuge in making beautiful things for the few. The market for high-value sculptural objects offers makers the chance to flex their creative muscles, make their name, demonstrate skills and sell their vision to buyers who can afford it, rather than competing for a dwindling number of jobs.
It comes with risks, though. There isn't room for an endless number of unique objects and only the lucky handful who can invest in such careers will succeed in capitalising on rarity. For every Jaime Hayon, Studio Job and Faye Toogood, there are hundreds who haven't made it.
In pivoting away from the old ways, there was a chance to upturn age-old hierarchies and put in place a framework in which fewer objects are made mindfully and ethically to meet all our needs affordably, and where ordinary people across the world can make a viable living out of doing so.
Instead, as William Morris lamented in the 19th century, the intractable economies of craft mean consumer culture is "ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich". In our present moment, the rise of collectible design is understandable, but it does little to dispel difficult questions about who design is really for and who it now serves.
Debika Ray is an arts and design journalist based in London. Her writing has appeared in the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, Al Jazeera, Wallpaper*, Elle Decoration, Architectural Digest and Kinfolk, among others. She was previously interim programme director of the London Design Biennale's Global Design Forum, editor of Crafts magazine and head of editorial and communications at the UK Crafts Council. Before that, she held editor roles at Icon and Disegno. She is the founder of Clove, a magazine and online platform about South Asian culture, and the associated creative agency Clove Press.
The photo is from the Futureobject collectible design exhibition at Melbourne Art Fair 2026.
This article was originally written for the Dezeen Dispatch magazine at Milan design week 2026.
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