Marni takes over café

Marni is turning Pasticceria Cucchi, a Milan café that opened in 1936, into a three-month pop-up during Milan Design Week 2026, and the project is not tucked inside a showroom or behind an invite list. Wallpaper reports the takeover starts with everyday café objects like sugar packets, takeaway cups, plates, milk jugs, textiles, and staff uniforms redesigned under a joint Marni x Cucchi identity. (wallpaper.com) The address matters because Pasticceria Cucchi is not a blank event space built for fashion week traffic. Wallpaper says Luigi and Vittorina Cucchi founded it in 1936, and the café became known for drawing poets, artists, and socialites with jazz music and live performances. (wallpaper.com) Marni is staging the takeover with RedDuo Studio, a Milan-based interiors studio, which means this is being treated like a built environment, not just a branding exercise on paper cups. Wallpaper describes the installation as a “sceneography” built around co-branded objects and midcentury-style stripes and polka dots spread through the space. (wallpaper.com) Some of the pieces will leave the café and enter retail. Wallpaper says the cappuccino and coffee cups from the project will also be sold at Marni’s boutique on Via Montenapoleone, which turns a neighborhood stop for espresso into a product line tourists can carry back into Milan’s luxury shopping district. (wallpaper.com) This is landing during Milan Design Week, the citywide festival that Dezeen says runs from April 20 to April 26, 2026, around the Salone del Mobile furniture fair. That week pulls designers, architects, fashion labels, and furniture brands into one calendar, so a café takeover can sit next to museum shows, talks, and large-scale installations without looking out of place. (dezeen.com, dezeen.com) Fashion brands have been moving deeper into that Milan design week calendar for a while. Women’s Wear Daily wrote in April 2025 that labels were using the week for collaborations, product launches, and city activations, while brands like Hermès and Jil Sander used installations and furniture tie-ups to claim space beyond clothing. (wwd.com) What Marni is doing looks different because the base unit is a functioning café, not a temporary exhibition hall. Wallpaper frames the project as a celebration of the café as a “stage for gestures and habits,” which is a precise way of saying the brand is borrowing Milan’s daily rituals, from counter espresso in the morning to aperitivo at night, and turning them into the installation itself. (wallpaper.com) That also fits Marni’s recent pattern of building worlds around the brand instead of limiting itself to runway clothes. Marni’s own site has promoted projects like “Cosmos of Marni” and a permanent Marni Cafe at Ginza Six in Tokyo, so the Cucchi takeover extends an existing habit of using retail, hospitality, and installation design as part of the label’s identity. (marni.com, marni.com) So the useful detail is simple: one of Milan’s most recognizable design-week fashion projects this season is a public café with branded cups, uniforms, and tableware inside a business that has been serving the city since 1936. In a week that Dezeen says is packed with open exhibitions, workshops, talks, and showrooms across Milan, Marni is betting that the easiest way into the scene is still a coffee bar door. (wallpaper.com, dezeen.com)