Matter and Shape, the first design salon to take place during Paris Fashion Week, opened Friday in the Tuileries Gardens.
The trade fair brought together furniture and homeware propositions from fashion favourites like Rick Owens, Sacai, Charlotte Chesnais and Fendi’s Delfina Delettrez alongside manufacturers like De Sede and Flos.
Sacai, which shows its womenswear collection Monday, collaborated with cult Paris homeware brand Astier de Villatte on a line of ceramics using the Japanese technique of kintsugi, fusing together fragments of the house’s signature white-glazed black porcelain pottery with gold leaf. Rick Owens showed the latest versions of his macabre, sculptural cowhide ottomans; while Delettrez showed a collection of objets de vie including silver teabags and drinking glasses that integrate crystals to spiritually charge water.
More commercial design brands like Italian lighting giant Flos and French patio furniture specialist Tolix were also present, as well as niche creators like Italy’s OLDER Studio or Guild of Saint Luke (a firm that has recently outfitted a spate of buzzy restaurants in Paris and London with top-end custom furnishings).
Matter and Shape was put on by trade show organiser WSN to complement its neighbouring Premiere Classe accessories show, amid mounting interest in designer homeware. In recent year’s Milan’s Salone del Mobile has grown into a major international event, and more more retailers and luxury brands have piled into the category.
In a sign of the industry’s swelling interest in the intersection of design and fashion, Jil Sander partnered with the fair to sponsor a series of talks, while Zara Home staged a café. Restaurant collective We are Ona put on a pop-up restaurant with chef Pierce Abernathy.
WSN created the event in partnership with Mathieu Pinet, a trade show executive who initially started Matter and Shape as a digital design platform, and journalist Dan Thawley as its curator. The Paris fair will initially be an annual event, but WSN is exploring taking the concept on the road with editions during other cities’ fashion weeks in the future, Pinet said.
