The Design Year Starts Now

Hello friends!

For our new subscribers:

The Design Release started in 2016 when Leo Lei of Leibal and I (Julia) were working in NYC and travelling to overseas furniture trade shows to discover new designers for the fair I was producing, and for Leo’s store. We quickly realized the most interesting designers were often presenting work outside the larger shows, and there was no single resource for tracking design exhibitions and smaller events. So, with our third co-founder, tech genius Zack Kollar, we built one. Today, TDR is a global calendar and newsletter built around the idea that community turns design lovers into design insiders.

If you want to learn more, one of our favorite Substacks, Departing Now, written by brilliant travel writer Imogen Green, recently featured an interview with me about the story behind TDR, navigating the global design circuit, my favourite design cities, and more. Read it here.

On to our newsletter!

Summer is a very slow time for us here at TDR. Typically, there are barely any exhibitions after 3daysofdesign in Copenhagen in June, until September comes along and slaps us awake.

However, summertime is starting to feel a little less sleepy: along with bigger shows like PAD St Tropez, Villa Noailles, also in the South of France, as well as Chart in Copenhagen, more exhibitions are popping up in summertime tourist destinations. We get into that a little further down.

The calendar continues to grow, which is unfortunate for me because I’ve just enjoyed the first summer of my life without panicking daily over what to do during the slow months. I leaned tf in!! I’m writing this from the caves of the Algarve after a few weeks in Mallorca visiting family, getting spoiled and fed. It’s been wonderful!

My emails have started up again (as well as my palpitations upon seeing my notifications) as we prepare for a big start to the design year kicking off with Frieze Seoul, and the bigger official launch of Design Miami Seoul.

If you’re in Seoul for the fairs, I’m extremely jealous, and be sure to also check out So Koizumi Collection, the designer’s first solo exhibition in South Korea.

Moving on: September 10th is the start of Paris Design Week, which is still finding its international footing after the pandemic, and the trade show we are hearing about less and less as the industry starts to favor more curated shows: Maison&Objet.

There is a lot more happening in September - and you can find it all on TDR, updated daily. I am adding the entire year of trade shows and design fairs to the calendar from now until the end of the month. There are over 100! And the hundreds of exhibitions will follow.

Our upcoming newsletter (not today’s - I’m trying to re-grow my attention span with this one) will focus on the new Shoreditch Design Week in London, taking place September 15-20.

London’s larger, city-wide Design Festival, which runs most of September, has been the subject of our newsletter a few times, and in our explainer last year I got into how it used to be a great month of dynamic fairs and satellite events throughout the city. All the fairs closed down - most of them pre-Brexit and pre-pandemic, for what I presume was the good old-fashioned reason that they simply weren’t profitable - and the big trade show (Decorex) that barely anyone talks about anymore either, moved to October.

London Design Festival is organized across a network of independently run neighborhood design districts, each with a dedicated opening night. While some have been interesting (Brompton aka South Kensington, Mayfair, and Shoreditch being my favourites), there are 100s of events that aren’t relevant, which makes it easy to waste your time trekking all over the city.

There has been some tea about the larger organization taking sponsors away from the smaller districts, and not being the easiest to work with. From personal experience, they don’t seem collaborative :-/ sad!

So I was very excited to hear that Shoreditch Design Triangle (one of the district names) has rebranded to Shoreditch Design Week, becoming “LDF’s Largest Official District,” a more cohesive neighborhood of trade fairs, exhibitions, and pop-ups.

This gives LDF what it’s really needed all these years: an anchor location. Shoreditch is such a fun part of town, and very tourist-friendly, which helps the community grow. It also has an A-list of designers presenting work: Jasper Morrison, Lee Broom, Rio Kobayashi, Andu Masebo, Bethan Laura Wood, and many more.

Next month we will publish an interview with Shoreditch Design Week’s creative director Duncan Riches, where we discuss the new format, the challenges of coordinating events in a city as large as London, and what Shoreditch can offer as a more concentrated destination for both the local and international design community. Plus a guide for what to see.

We look forward to sharing that with you!

If you find yourself in Tuscany or California, we have two exhibitions presenting design in a beautiful outdoors setting:

In Tuscany, Don’t Call Me Collectible! takes over Villa Marie in Vorno, presenting contemporary design and sculpture. The exhibition questions the limitations of what we call “collectible design” as a category, bringing together practices that explore studio craft, material experimentation and research.

You can read more about Don’t Call Me Collectible! in our journal here.

Verdant Phenomena is the first group exhibition hosted by Sonoma and Los Angeles-based interior and architecture studio The Bureau. Taking place in founder Sarah Giesenhagen’s Sonoma garden, the show brings together more than 13 artists and designers from Los Angeles and the Bay Area, with over 60 works of art, sculpture, and design.

And if you find yourself in Copenhagen at the end of the month, the annual art fair CHART is taking place from August 27 - 29. The city lights up as it does for 3daysofdesign, and there is so much fantastic art to discover.

Aligned with that time frame is friend of TDR, Innenkreis, presenting two side by side shows: Vanitas in Use II and Extrude, Bridge, Fill.

Innenkreis is located right across the street from the new Copenhagen Soho House, so if you find yourself in that area make sure to pop in and say hi to Zeynep.

To close things off - did you hear about how Substack is allowing you to scan for AI use in newsletters? And did you notice Pinterest allows you to filter out AI? Thank god!!!

I just read this article by NYT (gift link here) that spells it all out.

TBH: if you need to rely on chatgpt to write a listicle, I respectfully ask that you please stick to posting on instagram!!!

We are proudly using our own words here, for better or worse. (We do use Grammarly, which is set to British English for my other work, so that can explain our spelling inconsistencies. Grammarly is great, highly recommend!)

And finally, a reminder: If you are a designer or producer with an upcoming exhibition, we would love to have it listed on TDR. Our base price for a listing is $10 (and it’s best to upload before the show goes live so it stays on the website as long as possible). $10 adds up and helps us keep the website alive. We wanted the most democratic price possible, so the support can go both ways. We also offer add-ons, like adding a link to your press kit (helpful for journalists who use our site to create their event picks), plus featured listings on the home page, etc.

As always, we are grateful for your support - Thank You!!!

Big abrazos

Julia and Leo