What Makes a Great Design Press Tour?
Our analysis of recent fairs in Madrid and Paris - and why the smartest fairs are building markets, not just selling objects.
One of the biggest perks of writing about design is the press tours Leo and I go on, and it’s fun to analyse what separates the good ones from the great ones.
They’re rarely “bad” (although I’ve heard stories). Schedules can be extremely back-to-back, morning to midnight. Presentations you’re required to see might be pointless for your coverage… your tour guides could be kinda mean and militant… they could forget to feed you, and someone faints… that type of thing.
But even then, the benefits far outweigh any feeling that your time is being wasted. You’re meeting other journalists in your field, networking, making friends, eating delicious food in glamorous restaurants, and typically staying at wonderful hotels. And being flown there and home.
Most of my design week press trips have been great. Leo says his favourites have been Miami and Singapore, mostly because they gave journalists a lot of freedom while still ensuring they saw great things. Stockholm is up there for both of us. I loved Antwerp because it was intimate and relaxed, and I got to know the wonderful coordinators very well.
The best one yet was for Madrid’s Design Festival last week, and I’ll get into the reasons why.
I was invited to discover the inaugural Forma fair, which ran from March 5th to 8th. Marketed as the city’s first collectible design fair, I was initially sceptical. How many more “collectible” fairs can exist in the world? And more importantly, would the works on view actually live up to the title? Would they truly be excellent examples of design-art, worthy of being collected?
Well, it was great. The fair, the city, and the off-site activations.
The conditions for collectible design in Spain are very different from places like Paris, Brussels, or New York. Rather than plugging into an established ecosystem, the organisers are creating one. It’s a risk, but according to them, the timing feels right. Madrid Design Festival now attracts around 300,000 visitors, and the broader Spanish design industry is clearly gaining momentum, with support from major cultural institutions and brands like Cosentino, Amazon, and Loewe.
The first edition functioned very much as a test case. There were around 50 exhibitors, alongside Forma Extramuros - a programme of off-site projects “beyond the walls” of the fair. In total, roughly 200 participants took part, mostly independent designers, with just seven galleries represented.
The curators described the fair through three guiding principles: contemporary craft; art-furniture (where form transcends function); and collectible pieces produced in limited editions or as uniques. Some of the work occasionally drifted into familiar territory, maybe a bit reductive: burnt wood, brutalist gestures, chains, cube-ish chairs, plenty of concrete. But the works that leaned more into the craft and artisanal side of things really stood out beautifully.
For me, one of the most meaningful parts of the trip are typically the people. As mentioned, press tours are usually made up of other journalists, but this group included curators, directors of other fairs, gallerists, and design thinkers, which made the conversations more diverse and created a collaborative environment.
I spent time with people like David DeValle, the Colombian architect/designer and co-founder of Medellín Design Week; Emily Marant, a design consultant and curator; and Fahad Al Obaidly, director of the Design Doha Biennial.
Unsurprisingly, our conversations kept circling back to collectible design itself, and how the term has increasingly become more of a marketing label than a meaningful, definable category, and that the market conversation is changing. B2B relationships are increasingly where the real activity happens
We also kept returning to craft.
It reminded me of when I first started working on the AD Design Show. The first “cool” New York designer I invited declined immediately. She told me, “I don’t want to do a craft fair,” and in my mind immediately gave craft a negative connotation (I was 23 - so very new to all this). I began focusing on pushing the show to feel as contemporary as possible.
But the tides have shifted. Craft - once described to me as Vermont-gift-shop-aesthetic - is now arguably the most interesting space in design.
Forma’s focus on craft, through their excellent off-sites and fair, gave me a preview of where they are heading. Craft is becoming the more desirable side of design, with a focus on material intelligence, process, and the kind of mastery that only comes with time - rather than avant-garde gestures for the sake of novelty.
In this Issue
News News News 📰
Exhibition of the Month⚡️
Fair of the Month 🇧🇪
What we can learn from Matter & Shape 🪑
News News News
Dudd Haus and The Future Perfect are collaborating on DUDD LITE, a group exhibition of artist-designed nightlights. Submissions are open until the end of March. Jonald Dudd
The Barbican Centre is approved for a £231m renovation. The plans look incredible. BBC
The rise of the destination art fair. The Art Newspaper
A new seminal chair is in reach: BD Barcelona is celebrating the centenary of Antoni Gaudí by reissuing a selection of his furniture designs. Hypebeast
Could this Sotheby’s design auction be the most valuable of all time? Wallpaper
Fair of the Month:
COLLECTIBLE Brussels, one of our favourite shows for discovering avant-garde designs and talent, opens today in Brussels! Wish we were there.
Espace Vanderborght
Rue de l’Ecuyer 50, 1000 Bruxelles, Belgium
On View March 12 - 15
Exhibition of the Month: Lima Charlie
For those in Brussels, be sure to visit Laurids Gallée new solo exhibition presented with one of the most exciting design galleries today (in a stunning space worth seeing), Objects With Narratives.
The exhibition presents a new body of Gallée’s resin light works alongside a series of aluminium wall pieces, forming the studio’s largest light sculpture installation to date.
Opening on March 11 at 6 PM
Place du Grand Sablon 40, 1000 Bruxelles, Belgium
What we can learn from Matter & Shape
Matter & Shape might be the most interesting fair happening right now. In just three editions, the Paris-based event has carved out a position distinct from the gallery-collector model dominating the design calendar.
Below, I break down why Matter & Shape’s B2B structure, brand curation, and exceptional production make it stand out. Speaking with founder and managing director Matthieu Pinet and creative director Dan Thawley, two themes quickly emerged: a structure that expands beyond the collector-driven fair model, and an aesthetic approach that prioritises minimalism over branding.