The North American Trend Report

From new resourceful strategies that cohere rigorous sustainability with reinterpreted handicrafts to a renewed appreciation for playful yet historically referential ornamentation, several streams of exploration are defining today’s scene. With the advent of social media now well entrenched, the single trend model of yesteryear has now been replaced with a more stratified zeitgeist and yet certain guiding preoccupations seem to run through this varied output: a sense of challenging the status quo, radical practicality, and of course, marketability. Distilled from the WANTED showcase at ICFF 2024, we identified five tendencies currently pushing North American independent practices forward.

Refreshed Resourcefulness 

With the mounting threat of climate change looming but also the ever-volatile nature of the economy, many talents have one-upped sustainability and ad hocism—the practice of bringing disparate, often discarded and found elements together and imbuing them with new meaning or purpose. Case in point: Look Book exhibitor Lauren Goodman’s Good Catch collection—a series of functional furnishings fabricated out of disused lobster traps. The Montreal-based talent has established a more localized “waste stream” by sourcing much of her material from the shores of nearby Maine. Transforming this “raw matter,” she’s developed adapted and entirely nascent craft techniques all her own.   

Metal Machinations

It’s hard to deny that sleek mono-material metal furniture is all the rage. While the aesthetic of polished steel or brushed aluminum aligns with certain aesthetic trends driving interior design at the moment; many emerging designers have chosen to work with this suite of materials simply for its sheer affordability and the cost-effectiveness of its fabrication, if not also its malleability. With so much metal furniture, accessories and lighting currently out there, it’s hard to stand out. Some do, however. At WANTED 2024 Launch Pad, Ryan Kahen—at the helm of his eponymously named Brooklyn-based studio—introduced Nonus, a collection of celestial-inspired tables and luminaires that demonstrates the full conceptual and technical potential of blackened steel. 

Tacit Touchpoints

While minimalism might be driving a large segment of the industry right now, there’s still a large appetite for the more romantic and self-expressive modes of explicit historically referential ornamentation, even if implemented with cheek or irreverence. Riffing on and mashing together identifiable symbols or simply reinterpreting a specific age-old technique, like inlaying or marquetry, has won over many designers and their customers. In a Postmodern tradition arguably first established by the Radical Italian Design movement decades ago, young talents have gone so far as to imbue their work with spiritual or even behavioral dimensions. Saint Louis-based Look Book exhibitor Daniel Shapiro charges his oversized ceramic luminaires with the Pop-Art-esque quality of semiotics—the onomatopes (words) of certain common sounds.  

Estimated Experimentation

Expression still carries through unfettered experimentation but perhaps to a more restraint degree than say a decade ago. Long gone are the days of sloppily heaped together piles of trash deemed armoires and chaise lounges or so many hopes. As demonstrated in the work of Juntos Projects, designers are more closely adhering to the inherent properties of the material they’re working with before making their move, allowing these often-noble elements to guide the process if just initially. Made evident in the ICFF 2024-debuted Raja chair and Parallel desk is the New York-based practice’s ability to push incredibly ubiquitous wood in entirely new structural, formal, and aesthetic directions. For this studio, like others, there’s no need to go wild but rather take nuanced steps in uncovering new properties of this material.

Consummate Collectibles 

While perhaps less groundbreaking and provocative than two decades ago, the collectible design sphere continues to expand; encompassing an ever growing and diversified roster of talents. What this sector of the market affords is the ability to fully explore conceptual or personally expressive themes and not to bear the burden of producing in serial or mass. The tradeoff: the risk of selling these bold one-off pieces as art and maintaining an engaged collector base. There’s more room to utilize sumptuous materials, push the limits of form, make obscure references, and challenge the conventions of function than in other areas of design. 

Take WANTED 2024 exhibitor Platalea Studio. Hailing from Mexico City, this practice embodies many of the qualities of the aforementioned trends but does so in an incredibly playful and evocative way, certainly in the way Mexican design tends to channel its richly diverse craft heritage in especially unrestrained and radically nascent applications. One examples of this is the studio’s hand-gilded Somatic Chair, which takes on an almost ancient shell-like formation.   

To discover all the designers and studios part of WANTED, click HERE