10 Corso Como

Galleria owner and publisher Carla Sozzani opened 10 Corso Como in Milan in 1990, and in doing so effectively invented the concept store: a courtyard address where fashion, photography, design objects, books, and a café were curated as one continuous editorial statement rather than stocked as merchandise. The idea proved so influential that the format was exported to Seoul and beyond, and half the world's select shops still trace their DNA to this courtyard. The Milan original remains the reference — a place to move slowly from the bookshop to the design floor to the fashion edit, treating shopping as reading. Come for the curation itself: the point is not any single label but the taste that binds the whole together. It is less a store than a magazine you can walk through, which was precisely the founder's intention.

Allow an unhurried hour and end at the café in the courtyard — the founder's sequencing of book, object, garment, and table is the store's real design.