Icon, Mondadori’s upscale male lifestyle magazine, edited by Michele Lupi, is celebrating the Milan Design Week with a special issue, Icon Design, that will be free for all readers of Panorama. In fact, the special issue of Icon will be published as a supplement to the 16 April issue of the weekly, right in the middle of the Design Week.

“We started from the characteristics of Icon and have put together an original and uncompromising magazine that is both strong and has a vision that goes beyond the norm, an approach perfectly in line with the best design products,” declared Michele Lupi. “We have scoured the planet, contacted talented designers and hunted down stories to tell and houses to photograph, as well as small-scale designs able to change the quality of our lives, design items and genial prototypes: a focus on design in its broadest sense, applying the style that has always distinguished the personality of Icon,” Lupi concluded.

The cover of the magazine is dedicated to the Italian designer duo of FormaFantasma, who, according to the New York Times, represent the most interesting current in the design panorama in Italy. The two young designers offer an account of their ideas concerning the stylistic search applied to their creations directly from their studio in Amsterdam.

Meanwhile architecture becomes art, industrial design and storytelling of a unique excellence in the pages that Icon Design devotes, for example, to a house built on an extinct volcano that has a dreamlike quality; a small printing that produces books like no other using machinery that is part of the history of typography; the 40 metres of the world’s deepest swimming pool in Veneto; and the “missile with sails” that is Luna Rossa, catamarans developed with military aerospace technology, because – despite the withdrawal of the Italian team from the 2017 Americas Cup following changes to the technical regulations requested by the Defender Oracle – Luna Rossa will forever remain one of the great masterpieces of Italian design.

The issue will also feature record producer Rick Rubin – the rock guru behind the success of U2, Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers and many more – who tells Icon Design about the plans for his new home in Malibù.

Thanks to its upmarket positioning, Icon Design has attracted a positive response from the advertising market and includes leading Italian and international brands in the living sector and other sectors too. The magazine will be presented exclusively this evening at the PAC in Milan, where an exhibition by world-famous photographer David Bailey is currently running.