NYCxDesign 2025 — 5 Strategically Strange Trends I Saw That I'm Betting Will Shape the Year Ahead

“I feel like I’ve seen everything,” a fellow editor (different publication — don’t worry) sighed to me over coffee last week. Spoken like a true jaded design journalist. And in most cases, I’d agree.

NYCxDESIGN has become a sprawling affair — less a “week” and more a full-blown month of overlapping fairs, from Frieze to TEFAF to the dozens of brand activations scattered across the city. After a while, even the most novel interior trends start to feel amorphous.

But this year, I was surprised. Genuinely. Amid the chaos, I found design that felt exciting — fresh, but also resonant. Not just the sort of high-concept work you admire, damn for probably being AI, and forget — but pieces and ideas that I actually believe will move the needle in a real way.

Three hints for the general vibe? Campy. Electric. Anything-but-square. Fitting, for a city that thrives on edge and eccentricity. So, without further ado, the streets — and the showrooms — have spoken. These are the five trends from NYCxDESIGN 2025 I’m betting will shape the design conversation through 2025 and beyond.

1. Fabricated Fixtures

Fabric-covered lighting felt like a natural evolution of the paper lantern and paper-adjacent styles that have dominated the past few years — but this time around, they’re softer. Stranger. More theatrical.

Two standouts appeared at The Family Show, Love House’s first-ever group exhibition featuring 60 artists and designers. The first was The Mother by Known Work — a surreal ceiling fixture so large you had to crane your neck to take it all in (at least if you’re 5’5” on a good day, like myself). Draped in jacquard, it hung from thick iron chains, real pearls dotting its seams, the whole thing pooling into soft folds at the base like a wedding train.

The second was a pair: Kinship I & II by Lana Launay, vintage lace fixtures that looked like heirlooms rendered as lanterns. Same material, different silhouettes — one tall, one wide — which changed the mood entirely depending on the shape. It felt like a lesson in what happens when you treat lighting like fashion. Food for thought.

And it wasn’t just happening under the Love House roof. At Colbo, also in the Lower East Side, autodidactic design practice Item: Enso (made up of Yuria Kailich and Joel Harding) suspended a painted silk pendant above a side table — both objects quietly mirroring each other in scale.

These fabric fixtures aren’t delicate, per se — nor are they simply diffusers of light — but chiefly, exist as characters in the room.

2. High Voltage Hues

I’m not a psychic, but if I had had to bet on a dominant thread ahead of NYCxDESIGN this year (besides the over-ten-miles-a-day-in-heels, per my Health app), it would’ve been electric color. Specifically: hyper-saturated blues and purples.

And I wouldn’t have been wrong. Cobalt — the kind that feels chemically charged — was everywhere. At THIS IS NOT A STRUT, the collaborative Blu Dot x DUDD HAUS show, Henry Merker’s Septa End Table practically glowed. Over at Foscarini, the new Allumette light by Francesca Lanzavecchia looked like a bundle of neon matchsticks, rendered in an asymmetric structure and that same shocking blue. Even the heritage whiskey bar on my block just repainted its facade in what I swear is the exact same Pantone.

Purple had its own moment, too — Barney with an attitude. The most memorable iteration came at ICFF, where Tord Boontje’s Shadowy collection for Moroso channeled African weaving techniques with plastic fishing nets to create sculptural outdoor chairs that read somewhere between playful and psychedelic.

But the sleeper surprise was orange. Not solo, but paired with more grounded jewel tones for contrast. Artemest’s Incanto installation — a dreamlike reimagining of its New York gallery by Nicole Fuller — used the hue sparingly: layered against plums, ochres, and silks to conjure a controlled opulence best described as 1970s glam-meets-modern romanticism.

That’s the throughline with these high-voltage hues: not chaos, but intention. Less "Brat Green," more strategic jolt. They don’t scream — they hum. Sophisticated, a little sleazy, and just disruptive enough to shake off the starch.

3. The Rule of Threes

Of all the recurring shapes that emerged during NYCxDESIGN, the triangle was the most surprising — and the most persistent.

At the avant-garde end of the spectrum was Bec Brittain’s duo of crystalline-inspired lights for Colony’s group show, The Independents. Stalagmight and Stalagtight played with vertical tension: one grounded, the other suspended — both made from brass, copper, and ripple-like optical glass. The space between the two forms was where the drama lived — two triangles drawn into balance and suspense.

At the opposite end: Erwan Bouroullec’s EMI, a stark matte form housing three separate LEDs, debuting at FLOS' SoHo space. The light projected outward in clean, directional beams — up, out, and down — each one hitting the room like a piece of drawn geometry.

Somewhere in the middle sat a series of sconces at Invisible Collection, where inverted triangles diffused soft light upward. In a particularly sharp vignette, the shape was echoed in a set of dining chairs, their backs cutting matching angles beneath the glow.

Known Works — who also exhibited with Love House — offered a triangle of their own: the Perceptions Chair, part of the Petra Hardware x Sight Unseen collection at HOST on Howard. It brought a new angle (literally) to lounge seating: unexpected, sculptural, but still inviting.

This triangle thing is equal parts a nice look and stroke of spatial logic. In a city like New York, the shape feels pragmatic: a square halved, a shape that slides into a corner or floats visually without adding bulk. A tool for living smart — and sharply.

4. Short-Haired Shag

The past few years have, quite literally, been hairy. Shag rugs got shaggier, and upholstery lengths stretched to wig-level proportions — a look that’s held strong in the artier corners of the design world. But this season, New York’s design set seems to be embracing a different kind of texture: short-haired hides, often in creamy, neutral tones, upholstered into sculptural pieces that feel equal parts wearable and strange — in the best way.

Most notably, there was a geometrically framed sofa wrapped in cream hair-on-hide with a built-in chrome ashtray (yes, really) at Invisible Collection’s La Maison du Collectionneur. Designed by Courtney Applebaum — the minimalist behind The Row’s West Hollywood retail space — it was a material flex with Upper East Side glamour and downtown grit. Smoking may not be exclusively New York, but here, the pairing of hide and hardware made an eerily elegant kind of sense.

A more compact interpretation came from OLLIN, the Brooklyn-based studio by Noel Hernandez and Victoria Luisa Barbo, who introduced a steel-framed bench with a similar tactile pull at Shelter NYC. On the more surreal end: the Hundō Lost Wax Chair by Salt Lake City–based designer Emily Thurman, featuring John Boyd’s woven horsehair fabric — long hair made short, still strange, still beautiful.

And for those who’d rather not think too hard about it — or prefer to forgo animal products entirely — brands like Sixpenny are offering soft-touch alternatives made from recycled water bottles. They look luxe, feel plush, and still capture the uncanny vibe — no grooming required.

5. Curtain Call

Curtains bordered on camp. Their presence alone felt noteworthy — another textile-forward move on the heels of the fabricated fixtures trend — perhaps thanks to the fact that design fairs are increasingly becoming fashion week’s off-season playground.

So is it the fashion crowd bringing the drama? A nostalgia for an antiquity we never lived through? Or is it, quite literally, a curtain call — a final flourish in pursuit of flowers?

Whatever the reason, curtains were everywhere. Calico Wallpaper debuted Overture, a new collection by UK designer Lee Broom, that transforms two-dimensional wallpaper into theatrical, sculptural illusions — curtains without the curtains.

At The Family Show by Love House, they appeared as actual drapery — most memorably in Inheritance by Atarah Atkinson, where sweeping fabric cascaded over a still life, adding dimension and a cinematic tension to the scene. Elsewhere, heavy velvet (or velvet-adjacent) panels in oxblood and other deep shades covered entire showroom walls throughout the city, softening spaces and signaling — in no uncertain terms — that a show was about to begin.

Sarah Spiteri, Livingetc’s global brand director, spotted a similar theatrical trend at Milan Design Week 2025, pointing to Dimore’s collaboration with Loro Piana: La Prima Notte di Quiete, a moody four-minute show-format installation inside the brand’s Cortile della Seta HQ. Think vintage cinema: red velvet curtains, leopard-print carpets, and a hush-hush atmosphere that demands you whisper and switch your phone to DND.

So yes — those heavy, arguably foreboding curtains you might remember from a grandparent’s house are back. But not just as fabric, and certainly not just to block out light. This time, they’re here as spectacle. As statement. As foreshadowing. The drama’s coming — and we’ve got the popcorn ready.

After clocking more miles in heels than I care to admit, I’m in desperate need of a martini and a plush barstool. Fortunately, our edit of the best bars in New York has just the spots — stylish hideaways for a well-earned exhale.

I’ll see you there.