Design got its edge back.
NYC x Design Week field notes
A dispatch from the NYC x Design Floor: on the death of the soft palette, the return of material conviction, and why the most interesting things I saw this week had absolutely nothing to do with comfort.
Back in January I wrote that the wellness aesthetic was over. Walking the Javits floor this week felt like the evidence arriving. The bouclé is gone. The sage has been retired. What’s there instead is harder to name but easy to recognize once you’re standing in front of it. Objects with positions. Rooms that ask something of you rather than absorbing you into them.
Here is what I saw, and more importantly, what I think it means.
The most interesting things I saw this week had absolutely nothing to do with comfort.
Material as argument
The first thing that struck me, and it struck me immediately, room after room, was how declarative the material choices felt. Not material as backdrop. Material as the entire thesis.
The clay and cement vessels I kept stopping at had no interest in being finished. Ribbed, stacked, geological. Things that looked excavated rather than made. One piece wrapped in rope and white fringe, the textile almost fighting the clay form underneath it. That tension, two materials at odds with each other sharing the same object, is exactly what I find most interesting right now. Not harmony. Productive collision.
