How Gilda Bojardi helped define Milan Design Week and foster international collaboration
‘Interni’ editor Gilda Bojardi is a mainstay of the Milanese design scene. She spoke to Monocle while providing a tour of the Oscar Niemeyer-designed palazzo which the Italian magazine calls home.
Gilda Bojardi is a Milan design titan who seems to know everyone on the scene. A resident of Brera since she graduated from university, she began working for interiors and contemporary-design magazine Interni in the 1980s and has been its editor since 1994.
She welcomes us just outside Milan at the Segrate headquarters of publishing group Mondadori, which owns the magazine. The building, an Oscar Niemeyer-designed palazzo from 1975, was inspired by the Brazilian architect’s foreign ministry building in Brasília. “It was almost an obligation to make you see this place,” says Bojardi on Interni’s editorial floor, which was recently refreshed (including a refit of the original USM furniture).
Bojardi was a key player in the development of Fuorisalone. She has published a guide to its events since 1990 and, at one point, even helped to organise buses to the centre of Milan. Since 1998, she has been putting on her own events under the Interni banner. This year’s showcase, called Materiae, features a collaboration between Audi and Zaha Hadid Architects, as well as installations by the Bjarke Ingels Group, Snøhetta and Milan-based architect and designer Michele de Lucchi, among others. Bojardi’s services to design have been recognised by the city. In 2007 the municipality awarded her its highest honour, the Ambrogino d’Oro.
How did you start working at ‘Interni’?
After graduating in law, I worked for an important design studio but, after three months, I realised that it wasn’t for me. I then worked for a magazine called IN: Argomenti e immagini di Design and got to know design entrepreneurs, from Mario Bellini to Ettore Sottsass. After that I lived in Mexico City for a year. When I came back to Italy, at the end of the 1970s, I started to work for Artemide, alongside art director Roberto Beretta. I was offered a job at Interni after it was bought by Electa, the most important cultural publishing house in Europe. I started as an apprentice.
You must have got to know so many great designers.
I had friendships with Ettore Sottsass, Alessandro Mendini, Ugo La Pietra and Vico Magistretti. And with Michele de Lucchi, Antonio Citterio, Giulio Cappellini, Paola Navone, Rodolfo Dordoni and others. We grew up at the same time. Everyone was either living on, or had a studio around, Via Solferino in Brera. We’re still very close but don’t see each other as much due to everyone’s work schedules.
How has your work changed?
It’s not that it has changed. It’s more that we do so many different things. Now we work with New York, London and Paris. We hold a lot of events with Italian cultural institutions. In January last year we organised an event celebrating the 2025 international edition of Interni at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. Our mission has always been to take Italian experiences abroad.
You have been instrumental in developing Fuorisalone. How did it all come about?
I invented the term. Salone del Mobile didn’t want its name to be used for outside events. I was staying at the Paramount Hotel in New York, just off Broadway and I said to myself, “Off-Broadway, off-Salone: Fuorisalone.”
Tell us about your work leading up to Design Week.
The April edition of Interni has more than 430 pages. And then there are the events that we organise at the State University and Brera’s Botanical Garden.
How do you have the energy to keep doing it?
The work is stressful but you also get so many stimuli from the extraordinary people you meet, whether it’s architects, designers or journalists. How will you discover new things without meeting people?
