There is a gate on a street in Milan’s Brera district that opens onto a different world. Step through it and the noise of the city softens, the pace changes, and you find yourself in a courtyard laced with vines where the boundaries between shopping, eating, reading, and looking at art dissolve so gradually that you stop noticing they were ever there. This is 10 Corso Como, and it is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most influential retail spaces in history.
10 Corso Como: A Gallery First, Everything Else Second
Carla Sozzani opened the Galleria Carla Sozzani in a vacant garage at 10 Corso Como in 1990, originally as only an exhibition space. The street was far from Milan’s fashionable centre at the time; Via Monte Napoleone was where the serious shopping happened, and Corso Como was, in Sozzani’s own words, just an anonymous artery at the northern edge of the city. She had spent two decades in publishing, launching Italian Elle and directing special editions of Vogue Italia, and she had grown restless. What she wanted was something a magazine couldn’t be: a place where people could interact with the content, move through it, linger in it. She looked at 10 Corso Como as a living magazine, based solely on her own choices and vision.
A design and fashion store followed in 1991, then the 10 Corso Como Café in 1998, a small hotel of only three rooms in 2003, and the Roof Garden in 2009. Each addition felt less like expansion and more like inevitability, the natural consequence of a vision that had always been too large for a single room.
The Space Itself
What makes 10 Corso Como so difficult to replicate (and so many have tried) is that its atmosphere is not designed so much as accumulated. You don’t go to 10 Corso Como just for shopping. You come here to take a pause from the world outside. The courtyard café, shaded by vines and unhurried in a way that Milan’s centre rarely manages to be, is as central to the experience as anything on the shelves. The gallery upstairs has hosted more than 250 photography exhibitions over the years, with artists including Helmut Newton, Annie Leibovitz, and David LaChapelle, and continues to mount shows that sit at the intersection of fashion, photography, and contemporary art, with recent exhibitions exploring experimental jewellery, landscape photography, and cross-cultural design dialogue between Italian and Korean makers.
The shop itself is a study in curation taken seriously. The selection spans luxury fashion, independent design, homeware, books, and music; not as separate departments but as a single, continuous proposition about what a considered life might look like. Recent collaborations have included a capsule bag collection blending minimalism and elegance alongside independent design pieces.
The Idea That Changed Everything
When 10 Corso Como opened 35 years ago, it seemed very far away to people. Every store in Milan had marble floors, so people didn’t even understand what made this store special. Within a few years, they finally understood, and so did the rest of the world. The concept store as a format, the idea that retail could be experiential rather than transactional, that a shop might also be a gallery, a café, a hotel, a cultural programme: all of this traces back, in one way or another, to a garage on Corso Como and the instinct of a woman who wanted to make a magazine you could walk around inside.
More at 10corsocomo.com and on Instagram at @10corsocomo.
Foto in header: 10 Corso Como
