Image Credit: Miu Miu
For three days in April, the storied Circolo Filologico Milanese becomes the most intellectually charged room in fashion — and this year, the doors are finally open to all.
There is something radical about a luxury house that asks its guests to sit down, be still, and read. Miu Miu’s Literary Club returns to Milan this April 22nd through 24th for its fourth edition, and in 2026, the conversation arrives with sharper edges and a wider invitation. The theme: Politics of Desire.
Held within the frescoed salons of the Circolo Filologico Milanese, one of the city’s oldest and most patrician cultural institutions, the event has, under the authority of Mrs. Miuccia Prada, evolved into something rare in the fashion calendar: a serious intellectual event. Not a panel staged like a runway. Not a book club dressed in PR. Something closer to a salon, in the oldest and most charged sense of the word.
Desire as an act of freedom. Desire as a process of self-construction. Desire, above all, as a subject worthy of serious thought.
Image Credit: Miu Miu
This year’s edition takes its animating questions from two works of uncompromising literary force. The first is Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story, the Nobel laureate’s disquieting memoir of sexual awakening, written in the second person as an act of both reckoning and reclamation. The second is Changes: A Love Story by the late Ama Ata Aidoo, Ghanaian novelist, playwright, former Minister of Education, and one of African literature’s most commanding voices — a novel that dismantles the mythology of romantic love against the backdrop of patriarchal expectation.
Together, the books form a kind of diptych: desire examined from the inside out, and from the outside in. The speakers assembled to respond to them are equally well-chosen. Irish novelist Megan Nolan, whose debut Acts of Desperation announced one of contemporary fiction’s most unflinching voices; the feminist theorist Lea Melandri; German editor and cultural essayist Annabelle Hirsch; Liberian-American author Wayetu Moore, whose novel The Women earned the Inge Feltrinelli Prize in 2023; Italian novelist and screenwriter Francesca Marciano; and anthropologist Gloria Wekker. Moderators Lou Stoppard and Nadia Beard round out a program that reads, frankly, like the syllabus you wish you’d had.
Image Credit: Miu Miu
Program at a Glance
APR 22 | INVITE ONLY
Conversation 1: Annie Ernaux, A Girl’s Story
Megan Nolan, Lea Melandri & Annabelle Hirsch — moderated by Lou Stoppard
APR 22 | OPEN / REGISTER
Lecture: “Desire after AI”
Olga Goriunova in conversation with Jennifer Guerra, drawing on Ideal Subjects
APR 23 | INVITE ONLY
Conversation 2: Ama Ata Aidoo, Changes
Wayetu Moore, Francesca Marciano & Gloria Wekker — moderated by Nadia Beard
APR 23 | OPEN / REGISTER
Lecture: “Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again”
Katherine Angel in conversation with Elisa Cuter, on consent and desire
APR 24 | OPEN TO ALL
Public reading room — no registration required
The Circolo transforms into an open library. Visitors receive a gifted copy of either Ernaux or Aidoo.
New this year: a curated library assembled by the philosopher and feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti, gathering titles that trace centuries of women writing desire into being — and writing themselves into power through it. The library sits within the Circolo as both resource and statement, a reminder that access to ideas is itself a form of freedom.
New, too, is the third day, and this is the detail worth noting for those not on the fashion house’s inner-circle list. April 24th is open to everyone, with no invitation required. The venue becomes a reading room. Books — Ernaux’s and Aidoo’s — are given away freely at the door. Late afternoons across all three days close with DJ sets, poetry readings, and music, lest the atmosphere tip too far toward the academic.
If you’re planning time in Milan around the Salone del Mobile, the dates align rather well. And even if design week isn’t your itinerary, the Circolo Filologico alone is worth a detour — a 19th-century institution that has been hosting the city’s intellectual life since 1872, now briefly occupied by one of fashion’s most curiously literary minds. Registrations for the open lectures open on April 13th at miumiu.com.
Image Credit: Miu Miu
