What makes a creative city?
✨ Watch on YouTube or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Ask most people to name the world's great fashion capitals and the answer comes quickly: Milan, Paris, London. Ask Diego Mattiolo the same question and he will pause, smile, and suggest you might want to add Tokyo, Singapore and India to that list. It is a small moment that reveals a great deal about how he thinks.
Mattiolo is head of education at NABA — Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti — one of Italy's most prestigious creative institutions, with campuses in Milan and Rome and, most recently, a third home at Here East. That London outpost is not simply an expansion. It is the first move in what NABA intends as a genuinely international story, and the choice of location was anything but accidental.
Growing up in Milan, Mattiolo admits he took the city's creative density for granted. Fashion weeks, the Salone del Mobile, the constant hum of design culture woven into everyday life — it was simply the backdrop. It was only when he moved to the UK that he began to see it clearly, the way you only ever see a place properly once you have left it. Milan's creative power, he argues, is not just institutional. It is cultural in the deepest sense: a city where aesthetic attention is a social practice, where the way you dress to go to the supermarket is a form of self-expression, where conformity and non-conformity are both, inescapably, choices.
As for where the next surprising creative hub might emerge, Mattiolo is ahead of the conventional wisdom. The Asia-Pacific region, he thinks, is already producing creative energy that the West is only beginning to notice. The cities that will matter are the ones willing to stay in the conversation — restless, hungry, unafraid to question what they are and what they are for.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
What actually makes a city creatively great — and why the answer has less to do with institutions than with a deep cultural willingness to pay attention, take aesthetics seriously and stay hungry for the conversation.
Why London was the only logical first step for NABA's international expansion — and how the collision of cultural heritages in a city like London produces creative work that no single tradition could generate alone.
Where the next creative capitals are emerging — and why the fashion world's default answer of Milan, Paris and London may need to make room for Tokyo, Singapore and India sooner than the industry expects.
Watch the episode on YouTube below, or listen via your preferred podcast app.
