While this year’s Milan Design Week festivities have presented plenty of incredible moments, one of our favorites by far was the irreverently wonderful Design Pride Parade! In honor of design week, Seletti gathered a carnival’s worth of musicians, dancers, stilt walkers, and floats to strut through the streets of Milan before an audience of thousands. The procession was the first of its kind in Milan, and it made its way through the 5 Vie district, ultimately arriving at Piazza degli Affari for one hell of public street party. A joyful energy filled the air, and the festivities set the perfect tone for another great, weeklong design celebration.

As Stefano Seletti, the brand’s art director, noted: "Design is democracy, freedom, joy; that's why we want to celebrate it with a PRIDE that involves the designers, the brands, bringing them even closer to the people. The party is open to everyone, young, old, children: in short, anyone who wants to celebrate the freedom to experiment, to develop their ideas, even when they seem crazy to most—an ode to diversity, independence of thought, creativity.” 

Participating designers included the warm and wonderful likes of Antoio Aricò, CTRLZAK Studio, Studio Job, Cristina Celestino, , Studio Badini, , Emanuele Magini, Studio Nichetto, Giò Tirotto, and Alessandro Zambelli, among others. Other collaborators included the iconic brand Gufram—whose Cacti, Bocca, and Pratone designs also proudly joined the parade—along with Toiletpaper magazine (the brainchild of Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari), and Disaronno, who hosted the street party in honor of their new collaboration, a collectable jar, with the team at Studio Job. The Design Pride project is part of “5 VIE art + design,” a campaign sponsored by the City of Milan to celebrate design and innovation in the historically rich district.