Venice Design Week (VDW) transforms Venice into an exclusive design platform across prestigious galleries, historic shops, stunning gardens, museum spaces, and luxury hotel lobbies. It is where contemporary design meets history, and where international creatives connect with buyers, press, and design enthusiasts in one of the world’s most iconic cities.
VDW takes place over ten days in October, activating the entire city through a curated program developed in collaboration with museums and cultural institutions. Designers and companies from all over the world are invited to take part in exhibitions, installations, and special events.
Visitors are offered the opportunity to discover contemporary design while also exploring the hidden side of Venice, uncovering how objects were historically conceived, designed, and crafted. The VDW team also organises unique guided visits both inside museums and in lesser-known spaces throughout the city.
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Collective exhibitions (Interior Design, Lighting, Outdoor, Contemporary Jewelry)
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Guided tours, talks, and networking events
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Awards in collaboration with international institutions
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City-wide visibility through an interactive map and press coverage
Concept and vision: Venice Design Week was founded with the aim of strengthening the relationship between design, arts, and craftsmanship. For centuries, Venice has been an important crossroads where goods, ideas, and cultures from East and West were exchanged. Many objects, mechanisms, and inventive ideas were developed or circulated in Venice, contributing to its unique cultural and productive identity. October, the month dedicated to design, positions Venice as a unique stage where locals and international visitors can experience both Venice Design Week and the Biennale of Art. Exhibitions and events are spread across the entire city, and the VDW map guides visitors through exhibitions, museums, workshops, and artists’ studios, creating a dynamic dialogue between past and future.
Responsibility, precision, respect, and slowness define the conceptual framework of Venice Design Week 2026.
“100%” is not a symbolic percentage, but a position. Venice, a fragile and visionary city, both ancient and contemporary, becomes an ideal laboratory for imagining new models. In this context, design cannot be ephemeral: it must be conscious, necessary, and measurable. “100%” becomes a method for VDW. Percentages are used as a tool to express the internal balance of each project, starting from the reduction and synthesis of its individual components up to reaching a total of 100%. Each designer is invited to present their work not only through images or texts, but also through a map of percentages that makes explicit the forces that compose it. There is no correct combination, only an honest one. Percentages thus become: a tool for transparency, an act of responsibility, an invitation to read design as a production process rather than a finished object
In a time of extreme simplification, VDW chooses exploration and measurement. Design 100%, because in Venice nothing can be partial.
