Design Miami turns 20: how the fair has transformed the design world

There is something inevitable about the retrospective gaze that accompanies every major anniversary. In the case of Design Miami — which this year celebrates twenty years and returns once again to Convention Center Drive on Miami Beach, from December 3 to 7, 2025 — that gaze becomes a precise reading of how a sector changes when the culture that sustains it changes. The path that transformed the fair from a stronghold of interiors into a prime observatory on contemporary creativity is clear, legible, almost paradigmatic in its ability to narrate design’s metamorphosis. When it was founded in 2005 by Craig Robins and Ambra Medda, in dialogue with the growth of Art Basel Miami Beach and with the birth — and subsequent explosion — of the Design District, the fair hosted a handful of specialist galleries offering very high-end work. From those years I remember projects by giants like Tokujin Yoshioka, immersed in his pristine room, or the collection of hybrid furnishings by brothers Humberto and Fernando Campana.

Today the picture is completely different — expanded geographies, a frontal immersion in contemporary design and a growing permeability between disciplines, from visual arts to fashion, from music to objects. Jen Roberts, CEO of Design Miami, states it plainly: “The fair has completely changed since its inception. We’ve gone from two locations to a global footprint and interest in collectible design has increased exponentially. At the beginning we still spoke of decorative arts; today the fair is a platform for a vast amount of contemporary work coming from every part of the world.” The transformation is not only numerical. Design Miami has intercepted — and in part also generated — a cultural shift: design as an autonomous language, no longer a satellite of art nor mere functional application. Design today can be narrative, political, geological, spiritual.

Jen Roberts, CEO of Design Miami

Roberts has led Design Miami (once styled with a slash) for ten years, exactly half of its existence — a period in which the audience has radically changed and grown before everyone’s eyes. And the sector has evolved with it. “We experimented a lot, we expanded into new territories. We saw a new kind of collector emerge and a multidisciplinary designer — from Samuel Ross to ASAP Rocky, fluid figures who move between fashion, music and objects,” she adds. “I’ve seen almost unknown creatives become internationally recognized thanks to Design Miami. I believe there is today a global increase in awareness of the value of design.” A change that has been good for the market, but above all for the culture of design, treating collectible design as a free platform for expression and experimentation.

Over time, the curatorial direction has changed voices several times. After Ambra Medda, the fair was entrusted to the steady hands of Marianne Goebl (2011–2014) and then to Rodman Primack (2014–2018). From 2018 a new policy was adopted — a different curator each year — leading to the sequence: Aric Chen (2018), Wava Carpenter (2021), and, if I may allow a brief autobiographical note, the direction of the author of this piece in 2022, followed by Anna Carnick (2023). For the Los Angeles edition the curatorship was given to Ashlee Harrison, while the Korean edition was led by Hyeyoung Cho. From 2024, finally, it has been Glenn Adamson, who also signs this twentieth anniversary with Design Miami 2.0, a special project that looks to the future more than the past. Protagonists include Jack Craig, who models industrial carpets as cosmic material; Tina Frey, who fuses bronze and planetary orbits; Victoria Yakusha, who sculpts mythical beings that guard memory. In parallel, history appears as an active tension: Nakashima, Tenreiro, Zalszupin, Marie & Alexandre, Hostler Burrows, and Superhouse’s American 1980s furniture act as maps, not relics. The 2025 edition, titled Make. Believe., is organized into five thematic constellations: Material Possibility, Spirituality & Storytelling, Geology & Geography, Recrafted Traditions.

Alongside the main section, which this year counts over 70 exhibitors, the fair also maintains its Curio program, dedicated to experimental projects and immersive installations, and a solid Talks calendar that for years has been one of the event’s engines — moments of encounter and debate rather than mere side programming. The VIP Lounge, drenched in Perrier-Jouët champagne, a long-standing partner, is always interpreted by a prominent figure from the international design scene. Jen Roberts clearly defines the direction for the coming years: not only to continue presenting design as a living discipline, but to deepen the fair’s educational role — a place where one learns to read forms, processes and the stories of materials. “I really hope it will be possible to contribute to education in design and architecture, bringing ever new voices to the global stage and creating connections between makers and collectors. The goal, ultimately, is to contribute to a better world,” she says, outlining a vision that is not celebratory but constructive — the fair as a platform for transmission, exchange and traversal.

In 2023 Design Miami was acquired by Basic.Space, marking a strategic move toward a broader ecosystem. That same year Design Miami/Paris opened, hosted at the Hôtel de Maisons — the former residence of Karl Lagerfeld — in a more intimate, almost bespoke format. Until 2023 the fair also maintained a steady presence in Basel’s stronghold alongside the giant Art Basel, consolidating for a decade the dialogue between art and design from America to the heart of Europe. Today attention turns east with the first experiment in the Asian market: Design Miami/Shanghai, curated by Aric Chen and Violet Wang, followed by the fair in South Korea.

In this sense the idea of Miami as a design destination develops on a 360° axis; from the mother fair to its various international presences, from the urban district to digital and editorial channels: in Miami design no longer seems to be only an object to collect but a territory, a community, a voice. Indeed, alongside it the Miami Design District — from which everything began (born from a partnership between Dacra, L Catterton Real Estate, LVMH and Groupe Arnaud) — has continued to expand as a living cultural infrastructure: elegant showrooms of exclusive brands, high-end dining, architecture, public installations — transforming the fair experience itself into a citywide constellation. Accompanying this is Design District Magazine, an editorial platform that tells Miami through design, art, food, fashion and visual culture. A narrative that builds continuity between exhibition, territory, public and private, entrepreneurial ambitions and dreams.

Twenty years on, Design Miami does not chase time — it metabolizes it. It prefers depth to triumphalism. This twentieth edition does not only celebrate an anniversary, but what design becomes when it ceases to be merely an object and becomes possibility. Perhaps its greatest legacy is this: having transformed collecting from an act of possession into an imaginative space.