The site-specific installation designed by THiRTYONE for Uniqlo, within INTERNI MateriAE, at the University of Milan, during Design Week 2026.
THiRTYONE’s multidisciplinary team, in dialogue with the context hosting this temporary installation, decided to highlight one of the characteristics of Uniqlo’s AIRism fabric: its lightness.
This choice stems from the desire to translate into spatial form a quality often perceived only physically: comfort. Uniqlo’s AIRism fabric, known for its breathability, softness and ability to adapt to movement, becomes a design tool here to create a welcoming and relaxing environment. Its lightness is not only physical, but perceptual: it contributes to generating a sense of widespread well-being, capable of accompanying the visitor into a slower and more intimate dimension, where the body can regain balance and ease.
«The design choice was to engage with the student community who passes through these spaces every day, offering a shelter», explains Claudia Campone, CEO & founder of THiRTYONE. «A suspended place that takes shape in the space like a light breath, conceived as a pause that releases pressure, a place to stop, breathe and be enveloped by the sensory experience».
Made of AIRism fabric, the work invites the public to engage with the material: to touch it, walk through it, inhabit it. The surface moves with the air and gestures, reacting to presence, conveying a sensation of fluidity and lightness. Transparency becomes a threshold, fabric becomes atmosphere. AIRism is not just material, but experience: breathability that creates space, softness that becomes gesture, comfort that becomes a sensitive landscape. An environment that is activated by contact and completed through interaction.
The work presents itself as a cube, an iconic shape for Uniqlo, made with concentric bands of AIRism fabric. Within the volume, a change in height creates a void to inhabit, where one can pause and settle. The color and tone change, and this is discovered only by entering with confidence and embracing the slowing pace.
THiRTYONE has been pursuing a theoretical and experimental research approach for years, which it deploys at times of the year when the general public’s attention on the world of design is greatest: as in the case of “Neuro-philia”, which investigated the relationship between neuroscience and creativity at the 2024 edition of EDIT Napoli, “Identity Multipliers” for the last Design Week 2025, and POSThome, a manifesto reflection during the 2020 lockdown.
