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Let's go to Paris - Maison & Objet

Siobhan Lam
Sep 17, 2014
2 min read

Last week I had the pleasure of roaming about Paris with the purpose of finding new exciting design brands to introduce to the store.

Sounds nice right?

Don't be fooled!

Now don't get me wrong, Paris is lovely and the brands I discovered thrilled me to my very core but trade shows as a rule are fairly horrendous. They go a little something like this - you wake at 4.45am from a crap sleep, cab it to the airport, frantically put on make up in airport toilets only to smear it all off when slumbering on the plane. Arrive at ENORMOUS trade show, try to formulate some sort of plan for seeing all the stands you want to, try and find something relatively meat-free and affordable to eat (an impossible task), discard plan and run about the show trying to find best brands, throw your business card at them before you have to high-tail it back to the airport to sleep on the plane again.

This is the reality.

Having said all that this, Maison & Objet was fabulous - full of awe-inspiring stands, terribly helpful French people and deliciously decadent interior delights. Without giving too much away, the stronger trends included metallic home accessories (copper obvs), geometrical prints and a preoccupation with putting animals on well ... everything. This fact filled me with much glee.

One of the highlights of the show was the 'Sharing' installation, one of which explored how digital cultures are using video games, music and digital art to connect and communicate.

Apologies for shoddy picture quality. Paris = no camera.

There he is now.

Another of the 'Sharing' exhibitions (by Elizabeth Leriche) explored how letters and words are resisting the all powerful digital landscape. This was particularly interesting - one of the rooms was entirely white and filled with a row of vials which were full of rain water. It explained that in Japanese there are many different words used to describe rain and each vial described the word and what type of rain it referred to. Totally fascinating.