Image Credit: Baccarat
For Milan Design Week 2026, the French crystal Maison conjures a science fiction universe in the heart of Brera, where 260 years of savoir-faire collide with alternate timelines and dancer-artisans.
For its return to the Salone, Baccarat has handed the keys of its creative vision to Emmanuelle Luciani, artist, art historian and curator, who has conceived something closer to a total artwork than a brand activation: an immersive science fiction experience set across multiple timelines, in which movement, film, scenography and sound converge around the singular material that has defined the Maison for more than two and a half centuries. The result, on view in the Brera district from April 21 to 25, is as serious an artistic proposition as anything else on the design week calendar.
Luciani’s point of departure was Philip K. Dick’s short story The Crystal Crypt, in which matter becomes a threshold between reality and fiction, past and future. She envisioned Baccarat’s Manufacture as a temporal bubble, inhabited by dancer-artisans, and built outward from there. The space is conceived as a galactic cathedral, in which crystal reveals the invisible: crossing eras, transforming light into substance, holding visitors in suspension between heritage and futuristic vision. Revisited icons and Haute Cristallerie pieces take on their full dimension within this context, asserting themselves as what Luciani calls manifesto-objects, carriers of a memory in constant transformation.
Image Credit: Baccarat
“A total artwork, like a science-fiction short story blending movement, film, scenography, and sound. The crystallization of an alternate time.”
Image Credit: Baccarat
The scenography provides the stage for three distinct new offerings, each approaching Baccarat’s heritage from a different angle. The most visually arresting is Mille Fleurs, a collaboration with British designer Bethan Laura Wood, who has made a career out of finding the baroque possibilities inside rigorous craft traditions. Her subject here is the Zénith chandelier, originally designed in the mid-19th century. Wood deconstructs it into a modular system of rings, arranged horizontally or assembled vertically, enriched with floral elements and saturated with color: olivine, parma violet, amber, turquoise. The rings form a vortex of light that Baccarat’s press materials describe, rather wonderfully, as a vision suspended between a science-fiction wormhole and the interlacing of Elizabethan garters.
Alongside Mille Fleurs, Baccarat presents two new expressions of the Harcourt glass, its ultimate icon since 1841. Harcourt Color pushes the intensity of the form through crystal, colored in full: incandescent red obtained with 24-carat gold, deep blue, vibrant green with emerald accents. Harcourt Nomade takes the icon in an entirely different direction, translating it into a lightweight, 100% bio-based material suited to contemporary and nomadic lifestyles. The palette here is pastel and combinable: powder pink, lilac, sky blue, vanilla, pistachio, and cream. Visitors to Milan Design Week will find an additional exclusive colorway, selected by Luciani herself to echo the scenography.
Rounding out the presentation is the Haute Cristallerie collection, which calls upon the Maison’s Meilleurs Ouvriers de France to push the limits of the material. From the Parure decanter to the Trocadéro coupe, these are pieces that exist at the outer edge of what crystal can do, and what human hands can ask of it.
Image Credit: Baccarat
What’s On Show
Crystal Crypt
Immersive scenography by Emmanuelle Luciani. A galactic cathedral built around movement, film, sound, and Baccarat’s revisited icons.
Mille Fleurs
A collaboration with Bethan Laura Wood. A modular reimagining of the 19th-century Zénith chandelier in colored crystal: olivine, parma violet, amber, turquoise.
Harcourt Color
The 1841 icon in crystal colored in full. Incandescent red with 24-carat gold, deep blue, vibrant green with emerald accents.
Harcourt Nomade
The icon reborn in lightweight, 100% bio-based material. Pastel palette plus an exclusive Milan Design Week colorway by Luciani.
Haute Cristallerie
Historic reintroductions and archive dialogues by the Maison’s Meilleurs Ouvriers de France—the Parure decanter, the Trocadéro coupe, and beyond.
Image Credit: Baccarat
Crystal Crypt is on view at Via Marco Formentini, 10, in the Brera centro storico, from April 21 to 25. In a design week that can feel relentlessly product-forward, it is a reminder that the most compelling reason to walk into a room is still the possibility of being transported by it.
