Play: Fico’s Milan Debut Put a Nearly-Extinct Bangladeshi Weave Inside a Palace That Has Migrated Owners for Four Centuries

ART & CULTURE · MILAN

Reading time: 7 min

Fico, a Bangladeshi furniture brand, made its international debut with Play at Palazzo Litta during Milan Design Week 2025, presented as part of MoscaPartners’ Variations exhibition. That year’s Variations was curated around the theme of migration. Fico’s own presence there, built around Jamdani, a weaving tradition that survived colonial-era collapse and near extinction, was arguably the theme’s most literal example.

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Play, the debut collection from the Bangladeshi furniture brand Fico, was presented at Palazzo Litta in Milan from 7 to 13 April 2025, as part of MoscaPartners’ Variations exhibition, one of the season’s more thematically ambitious Fuorisalone showcases. The collection centred on two furniture lines, the Barbara side table and console and the Ondine ottoman, alongside Woven Air, an installation pairing structured wooden panels with translucent Jamdani textile, a centuries-old Bangladeshi weaving tradition that came close to disappearing entirely under colonial-era trade policy before its UNESCO recognition in 2013.

Fico’s presence inside that specific exhibition was not incidental. Variations 2025 was curated by MoscaPartners founder Caterina Mosca around the theme of migration, framed deliberately beyond geography, as the movement of ideas, skills and cultural exchange across borders. Of the roughly twenty-four participants from twelve countries, few embodied that brief as directly as a Bangladeshi brand bringing a fabric tradition that survived exactly the kind of forced economic displacement the exhibition’s theme was built to examine.

Who Fico actually is

Fico was founded by Rayana Hossain, who had previously established ISHO, a furniture company built around affordable, functional pieces for everyday use. Fico was conceived as a deliberate departure from that model, aimed at a younger, more design-conscious audience interested in premium, statement furniture rather than accessible basics. Both brands are manufactured within facilities belonging to Hossain’s family conglomerate, which operates primarily in apparel and fashion manufacturing, giving Fico direct access to textile expertise that a furniture-only studio would typically have to source externally. Hossain has spoken about the opportunity and the gap she is working against in the same breath, describing Bangladesh as holding an exceptional legacy of craftsmanship and a growing appetite for design, while noting that design itself still occupies a peripheral role in the country’s wider industrial and educational infrastructure. Play was built, in effect, as an argument for closing that gap in public, on an international stage, rather than making the case at home first.

What Barbara and Ondine actually do

The Barbara side table and console share a visual language built on spherical forms and asymmetric, rhythmically uneven legs, deliberately positioned to suggest imbalance and movement even though the pieces themselves are entirely still, a static object built to read as if caught mid-gesture. The effect sits closer to sculpture than to conventional furniture design, with function retained but visibly subordinated to form. Ondine, an oversized ottoman, works in the opposite register: soft, generously scaled and rounded, built to function as a literal centrepiece a room can be arranged around, and designed to invite the kind of physical use, sitting, shifting, draping, that the more sculptural Barbara pieces hold at arm’s length. Read together, the two collections stage the same tension the exhibition’s title pointed toward directly: furniture that asks to be handled and furniture that asks to be looked at, placed in the same room rather than resolved into a single register.

Woven Air, and the weave it was built from

Jamdani originated in the area around what is now Narayanganj, in Bangladesh, combining cloth-making techniques with roots reportedly stretching back some two thousand years with the finer muslin-weaving tradition developed by Bengali weavers from around the fourteenth century onward. The technique itself is a supplementary weft weave: a base weft creates a sheer, largely transparent ground fabric, while a second, thicker weft is worked in by hand using fine bamboo sticks and individual thread spools to build up the pattern, which is drawn on graph paper placed beneath the loom’s warp rather than sketched onto the cloth itself. The result is a textile that can carry genuinely intricate, geometric or figurative patterning while remaining almost transparent in the surrounding ground weave, precisely the quality Fico’s designers paired against solid wooden panels in Woven Air.

The tradition reached its historical peak under the Mughal emperors Akbar and Jahangir, when the finest jamdani, then generally known as Dhakai muslin, commanded prices that placed it firmly beyond any buyer outside the aristocracy; a single piece was recorded selling for the equivalent of 56 livres in 1776. The trade collapsed from the mid-nineteenth century onward, undercut by cheaper machine-spun European imports and accelerated by British colonial trade policy that left Bengal’s handloom weavers unable to compete on price against industrially produced cloth. What survived did so through a small, unbroken line of master weavers rather than through institutional protection, until UNESCO listed the traditional art of jamdani weaving as an element of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2013, followed by geographical indication status for jamdani sari in 2016, Bangladesh’s first product to receive that protection.

One further detail is worth stating precisely rather than repeating uncritically: the specific historical cotton associated with the finest Dhaka muslin, known as phuti karpas, is generally understood to have gone extinct as a cultivated crop by the end of the eighteenth century, and organised efforts to identify and revive genetically similar plants along the rivers near Dhaka only began in 2015, discovering specimens with roughly 70 per cent genetic similarity to the historical variety. Any claim that a 2025 textile is woven from true phuti karpas cotton, rather than from the fine handspun cotton generally used in contemporary jamdani production, would need direct confirmation from Fico or its weavers before being repeated as established fact.

A theme built for exactly this kind of debut

Variations 2025 was led by a site-specific installation from the South Korean architect Byoung Soo Cho, marking his Italian debut, alongside participants spanning Deltalight’s lighting work, a Canadian studio’s tables inspired by Vancouver rain puddles, and a vertical farming installation from the Italian outfit CultEvo, all gathered under Caterina Mosca’s migration theme. Mosca, who founded MoscaPartners alongside her late collaborator Valerio Castelli, has described the choice of theme as a deliberate emphasis on the value of cultural encounter and exchange, and on how design itself is shaped by the movement of ideas across borders rather than by any single fixed tradition.

Set against that brief, Fico’s debut reads less like one participant among two dozen and more like the theme’s central case study. Every other exhibitor at Variations 2025 was, in some sense, illustrating migration as a concept. Fico was presenting the actual, material result of one: a weaving tradition displaced almost to extinction by colonial trade policy, kept alive across generations of craftspeople, and arriving in a seventeenth-century Milanese palace for the first time as part of a furniture brand’s international debut.

Palazzo Litta, hosting one more migration

Palazzo Litta itself has changed hands and function often enough to make it an apt host for a theme built around movement and transformation. Its core was built between 1642 and 1648 by the architect Francesco Maria Richini for Count Bartolomeo Arese, later President of the Senate of Milan; the building’s ornate late Baroque facade was added over a century later, between 1752 and 1761, by Bartolomeo Bolli. Richini’s own family oratory, consecrated in 1671, was later converted into a private theatre now recognised as the oldest in Milan, operating today as the Teatro Litta. The palazzo passed to the Litta family through marriage after 1674, hosted formal receptions for European nobility including Maria Theresa of Austria and, later, Napoleon, and by the late nineteenth century had been repurposed to house the Railroad Administration of Northern Italy, before eventually settling into its current role as a public cultural centre with exhibition space, offices and a working theatre.

A palace that has been an aristocratic residence, a set of government offices, and now a cultural venue hosting design exhibitions is not a neutral backdrop for a theme about migration. It is a fourth example of the same principle Fico’s own presence there demonstrated: something built for one purpose, carried forward and repurposed by successive owners, ending up doing work its original architect never anticipated.

Final thoughts

Play closed with the rest of Variations 2025 on 13 April, and Fico’s debut collection has since moved on to whatever comes next for a new brand’s international launch. What the exhibition demonstrated, staged inside a four-hundred-year-old palace under a theme about the movement of ideas, is that Fico’s own material, a weaving tradition that survived deliberate economic destruction and near extinction, was never simply decorative. It was the exhibition’s argument, made in cloth rather than in curatorial text.

Whatever Fico shows next, wherever it shows it, this debut will be difficult to separate from the specific circumstances that gave it its sharpest edge: a first international outing, staged inside a theme built around cultural migration, carrying a textile tradition whose own survival is itself a four-century case study in exactly that idea.