Lamps as jewelry: The new lighting trend from Milan
11.5.2026
Translation: machine translated
Pictures: Pia Seidel
Silver elements that shimmer. Lamps that dangle in corners - almost like a pendant on an earring. At Milan Design Week, one trend was unmistakable: light becomes jewelry.
Milan, April 2026. Lights everywhere, but none of them are hanging where you expect them to be. Instead of in the middle of the room: in a niche and taking up the full height. Less illumination, more of a statement.
Interior designer Barbara Reimelt – known from Architectural Digest and Business of Home – already has a term for it: “Lighting like Jewelry”. Lights should feel special, curved, multi-layered, made of mixed materials – just like jewelry.
Reimelt hits on something I've been observing for a while. Designer Federico Stefanovich said it in our conversation: “The ceiling light can stay off”. Instead: various light sources at different heights, as a composition in the room. What used to be an exception is suddenly the norm.
This is also shown by these three lights from Design Week, which are my favorites.
36 hours of printing for a shadow
Studio Dérive thinks of light from the street – edges, joints, signs of wear, things you usually overlook. It combines 3D printing with industrial components. Their contribution at Design Week, shown at Comune in Spazio Ivy, was called “Stratum”: a network of 14 “Nautilus” lamps.
The chandelier looks anything but picked up from the street. Each shade is 3D printed over 36 hours, layer by layer, in fractal patterns that shape and diffuse the light.
Talisman instead of uplighter
Alcova is one of the most idiosyncratic exhibition platforms of Milan Design Week: abandoned industrial buildings, old villas – a setting that is a statement in itself. What fit perfectly there: the “Totemic” collection by Andrea Claire Studio. The pendant lamps are made of Hanji paper. The traditional Korean material is known for its durability and warm-looking transparency. The lights come in natural tones with silver leaf on brass. In various sizes, layered like pearls on a necklace, they fill the entire room. In many cultures, totems are vessels of meaning passed down from generation to generation. Here, the lamp takes on this role.
Andrea Claire Studio stands for sculptural lighting systems at the intersection of art and architecture. With “Totemic”, Claire looks back on over a decade of research into paper as a lighting material. But not everything that thrilled at Design Week was new.
A vintage find as a sign
The third example is not a new design, but a reunion: a pendant lamp called “Sirray” by Kazuhide Takahama, designed for Sirrah in Italy in 1970. It was brought back by Dimore Studio – one of the most influential Milanese interior design offices, which stages rooms that cannot be assigned to any era.
It is no coincidence that Dimore puts a vintage piece at the center: the studio is considered a seismograph. What appears there, you will soon find elsewhere.
Whether newly designed or 50 years old: what connects all three is the same idea. Lights are allowed to stand out again. They are allowed to hang where they want, numerous – and dangle like charms. The ceiling remains the starting point. But the goal is the niche.
This could also be hanging in your home
Header image: Pia Seidel
Pia Seidel
Senior Editor
Pia.Seidel@digitecgalaxus.chLike a cheerleader, I celebrate good design and bring you closer to everything furniture- and interior design-related. I regularly curate simple yet sophisticated interior finds, track down trends and interview creative minds about their work.
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