Fendi used Milano Design Week 2026 to debut the FENDI Design Prize, a new annual platform that backs emerging designers while extending the Maison’s deep ties to craft, architecture and contemporary living. The inaugural edition crowned VIA by Gustav Craft as its first winner, setting the tone for a prize that is as much about storytelling and material heritage as it is about form.
A new annual prize for emerging design voices
Launched during Milano Design Week 2026, the FENDI Design Prize is conceived as a yearly initiative to discover and support new design talents in dialogue with the Maison’s codes of creativity and craft. The project also reinforces the growing role of FENDI Casa as a laboratory for contemporary interiors, bridging fashion, furniture and collectible design.
From six finalists to one winner
From more than 70 submissions, six finalists were selected from leading design schools and independent practices, each proposing a system of objects rather than a single piece. The finalists’ works explored themes such as modular living, material reuse, and reinterpretations of Rome’s visual language through structure, pattern and tactility.
On April 19, 2026, during Milano Design Week, VIA by Gustav Craft was announced as the first winner of the FENDI Design Prize at the FENDI Casa Boutique in Piazza della Scala, Milan. Gustav Craft, a Swedish third-year Product Design student at Istituto Marangoni Milano Design, also receives a €50,000 prize to support his professional development, underlining the initiative’s commitment to tangible career impact rather than symbolic recognition alone.
VIA: Roman streets translated into sculptural furniture
The winning project VIA (Italian for “street”) starts from the sanpietrino, the small basalt block that has paved Rome’s streets for over 2,000 years, and turns it into a language for contemporary interiors. Rather than simply mimicking the stone, the collection uses its geometry, weight and permanence to explore how objects can be designed to endure in both function and meaning.
The collection includes a woven leather seat whose interlacing pattern recalls the grid of sanpietrini along Roman roads, paired with a clean steel frame where exposed joints reveal the construction. A rug translates the aerial view of an ancient city into an abstract cartography of blocks and voids, while a mirror rests on a rough-cut sanpietrino block, literally placing the weight of history beneath the image of the present. Together, these elements propose a “system” for living where furniture behaves like infrastructure, connecting people, space and memory much like Rome’s historic roads.
What comes next for the winner ?
As part of the prize, VIA will be developed with FENDI Casa and presented at Design Miami in December 2026, bringing the project into one of the key global stages for collectible design. Looking ahead, the prize framework also opens the door to a potential collection or curated group of works in 2027, extending the collaboration beyond a single showcase moment.
This trajectory from brief, to Milano Design Week debut, to Design Miami positions the FENDI Design Prize as a structured pipeline from education into the international design market. For Fendi, it is a way to translate the Maison’s Roman heritage, material experimentation and craft vocabulary into the language of a new generation of designers.
