Who's afraid of the image?
Fashion, memory and artificial intelligence at Fuorisalone 2026
By Simone Cotellessa
From Prada to Gucci and Jil Sander: three visions on memory and the future of imagery
The Salone del Mobile in Milan is one of those Milanese certainties, like Christmas, Easter, and Saint Ambrose Day, complete with its rituals and pilgrims—a week when the city decides to take itself seriously in the most spectacular way possible, with plywood installations in courtyards, DJ sets in bathroom fixture showrooms, and everyone walking briskly from one happy hour to a vernissage with the air of someone about to attend a religious function, without necessarily needing to exchange a sign of peace. Amid all this white noise, it has become standard practice for fashion to step in and have its say.
But while what fashion thinks about design is ultimately a minor issue, what fashion thinks about itself is far more revealing—and this year, more than ever. The theme, never officially declared but clearly readable to anyone moving between cloisters and sacristies with open eyes, is the image: as a philosophical problem, as unstable material, as a territory where the real and the generated blur until the distinction becomes not only difficult, but perhaps irrelevant.
Prada Frames and the power of images between real and artificial
This year Prada brought its Prada Frames symposium to the sacristy of Santa Maria delle Grazie—the one by Bramante—with Leonardo’s Last Supper acting as a cosmic counterpoint just a few meters away, alongside the inlaid wardrobes by Domenico and Francesco Morone. The title is “In Sight” once again curated by Formafantasma, featuring a series of talks addressing image production as a dominant force in contemporary culture: representation overtaking reality, the image as a political and material construct rather than a neutral mirror of the real. The choice of location is far from decorative. Discussing true versus false images, machines generating pixels more real than reality itself, in a room covered with images created in a premodern era to show God to those who could not read—that alone is already a statement.
During the opening evening, speakers take turns at the Basilica altar: Momtaza Mehri, Somali-British poet and Forward Prize winner for Bad Diaspora Poems, one of those voices emerging from the blind spots of Anglophone literature, catching you off guard even when you think you’re prepared. Her voice enters the corners once filled by Latin and, through the persuasive power of poetry alone, confronts you with how photography today both documents and betrays. Then Kate Crawford, author of Atlas of AI, who for years has patiently explained—almost like a forensic investigator—that data centers consume water like entire cities, and that artificial intelligence has a physical infrastructure more akin to colonial extractivism than technological innovation, leaving you with the sense that the world is heavier than it was an hour before, under the judging gaze of saints and Madonnas. Finally, Polish composer Hania Rani does what only music can do: she takes everything that has been said—the weight of arguments, images, and responsibilities—and carries it somewhere words can no longer reach, which is ultimately the only place where certain things can truly be absorbed rather than simply understood.
Gucci between memory and representation
At the Cloisters of San Simpliciano, Demna answers the same question with an opposite method: he takes Gucci’s 105-year history and embroiders it onto Botticelli-style tapestries, in a nostalgic operation that moves backward along the genealogy of the double G—from Guccio Gucci to Sabato De Sarno, passing through Tom Ford, Alessandro Michele, and Frida Giannini. Modernity thus becomes readable only in reverse, and the present dresses itself as the past to be observed without discomfort. Demna appears in the final panel wearing a leather jacket and baseball cap, a self-portrait among the saints, with the precise irony of someone aware that what they’re doing could be ridiculous, yet executes it with disarming precision. The very choice of the pre-digital—fabric, slow craftsmanship, embroidery—is itself a commentary on the image, as if the only way to halt it, to give it weight, were to return it to the hand, to thread, to material that AI cannot touch.
Jil Sander and the value of the past
It is precisely at this point that Jil Sander enters the conversation. On Via Luca Beltrami, sixty books rest on chrome lecterns, each illuminated by its own light. White gloves are handed out at the entrance as in a museum of ancient art, and a recorded voice occasionally goes “shhh,” like old-school librarians—those who existed before libraries became coworking spaces with matcha lattes and colorful armchairs. The sixty volumes were selected by Sofia Coppola, Lykke Li, Dan Thawley, designers, thinkers, and unlikely, complementary figures, each defending a book as one defends something on the verge of disappearing—simply because today the image has won, scrolling has won, and the brain has learned to crave short, luminous fragments instead of pages that endure.
The result? In a week where every brand competes to produce the most memorable image, choosing to oppose visual noise with the silence of a printed page becomes, paradoxically, the strongest—and also the most melancholic—gesture.
Three responses to the same problem, three cultural stances that could not be more different, yet converge toward the same anxiety: how to represent identity in a moment when images cost nothing, last thirty seconds, and can be produced without human hands.
Prada analyzes it in a symposium, with the seriousness of those who know that understanding a problem does not mean solving it. Gucci preserves it, hangs it on the wall, and calls it memory—which is already an answer, even if not the most reassuring one.
Jil Sander locks it between the pages of a book and hands you white gloves so you won’t damage it.
Meanwhile, artificial intelligence watches from somewhere offstage, takes notes, and waits.
