How brands Move Into Interiors (Well)

I spoke with Monocle this month for their Milan Design Week coverage. The conversation got at something I have been advising fashion houses on for some time: why the move into interiors is now a board-level question, and what separates the houses that will do it well from those that will not.

‍The economic case. Fashion's move into interiors is no longer optional for the houses thinking about the next decade. Apparel has a ceiling. The category is mature. Price elasticity is thinning, the aspirational middle has tapped out, and every incremental handbag launch competes for the same finite slice of cultural attention. Interiors, by contrast, are only beginning. They offer high margins and cultural resonance. Product lifecycles are long, and a sofa bought once can live in a household for a decade, keeping the brand resident in a customer's life long after any fashion cycle has turned. For a CFO, that is not a decorative impulse. It is a durable revenue stream. For a fashion group, it chimes with shareholder logic. People want to live inside a brand, not just wear it. Once fashion dressed the body; now it dresses life.

‍The execution trap. The design world is watching, and there is a sniffiness about fashion barging into design's temple. The distaste is not for the move itself. It is for houses that slap a logo on a chair and call it a strategy. The customer sees through that, and so does the design press.

‍Why this is a leadership question, not a product one. The temptation inside a fashion house is to treat the home category as an extension of the main collection — one more pair of hands in an already overstretched studio. It rarely works. A creative director producing six runway collections a year cannot also conceive a credible interiors language on the side.

‍The organisational answer. The houses getting this right treat interiors as its own function. Its own creative leadership. Its own P&L. A reporting line that protects it from the gravitational pull of the apparel studio. That usually means appointing a dedicated Creative Director or Design Director for the home category, supported by a commercial lead who speaks the interiors trade — longer lead times, B2B accounts, architectural specification, trade fairs that are not runway shows — rather than one borrowed from ready-to-wear. It also means the board asking harder questions about succession. If a house's interiors credibility rests on a single creative voice, what happens in the inevitable year of transition? Who is being developed two seats down? For founders and investors, these are not abstract concerns. They are the difference between a category that compounds and one that collapses with a departure.

‍The generational entry point. Craft is now positioned as proof of durability and integrity, and that message lands with younger consumers. For them, the home is often the first brush with heritage and craft — and if they discover Hermès wallpaper before they discover the Bauhaus, that is not a bad entry point.The houses that understand the difference between extending a brand and decorating a category will own the interiors decade. The rest will be selling logo chairs by 2028, and the shareholder letters will show it.Read the full conversation in Monocle