February 2026 / Data-Farmed Design


Located throughout the world, the Trendease Team continues to deliver our subscribers around the globe must-know market information and inspiration straight to their computer screens.

Last month we attended two of the world’s leading trade fairs. At Heimtextil, the trends point to making as an active dialogue between craft and AI, expressed through six directions that merge analogue, digital, human, and machine into future-facing home textiles. At Maison&Objet, four trends offer a sensory counterpoint, celebrating craft-led objects where wood, fiber, glass, earth, and stone reveal memory, transformation, and material poetry. Get inspired with the February edition!

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REPORTING TO INSPIRE,
Jennifer Castoldi,
Chief Creative Director

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Features and Articles

Jennifer's February Fables

Frankfurt — Despite the global economic state, the winter trade show season felt revitalized. Maison&Objet returned to form with improved curation, Paris Deco Off energized the city, and Heimtextil spotlighted emerging talent. This issue focuses on the countertrends between Heimtextil—exploring craft and AI—and Maison&Objet, celebrating natural, material-led design.

Heimtextil: Re-Media

Frankfurt — Re: Media is one of six 26/27 directions presented at Heimtextil; it explores a continuous loop between analogue and digital making. Hand drawings become digital renderings and return as woven, embroidered, or jacquard textiles. This is where tactile craft and digital distortion intersect and recalibrate one another.

Heimtextil: Visible Co-work

Frankfurt — Visible Co-work is the second direction and it frames AI and human craftsmanship as equal collaborators. Designs may originate from algorithms or makers, then be reinterpreted by the other. The result is hybrid work where machine precision and human intuition merge, blurring authorship and forming a new, porous craft language shaped by mutual influence.

Heimtextil: Sensing Nature

Frankfurt — The third direction, Sensing Nature, treats nature as the source of form, with algorithms acting as translators rather than mimics. Natural rhythms and textures—sea surfaces, lichen, rock—are abstracted into grids, patterns, and weaves. Digital tools mediate this process, recalibrating organic complexity into tactile textile systems.

Heimtextil: A Playful Touch

Frankfurt — A Playful Touch reasserts ornament in an era of pure functionality. Neon accents, misplaced tassels, and decorative disruptions reject restraint and optimization. These small but bold gestures prioritize visual pleasure, using playful, expressive details as a deliberate and defiant counterpoint to efficiency-driven contemporary textile design.

Heimtextil: Crafted Irregularity

Frankfurt — Crafted Irregularity celebrates textiles that reveal their making—nodules, uneven dyes, visible seams, and asymmetry. Imperfections highlight human touch as a counterpoint to AI-driven perfection, fostering intimacy, material honesty, and tactile presence. These fabrics embrace craft as a deliberate, expressive, and trustworthy element in contemporary design.

Heimtextil: The Uncanny Valley

Frankfurt — The Uncanny Valley explores textiles that feel almost familiar yet subtly strange. Exposed wires, coils, and connections become visual features, shifting focus from polished surfaces to inner mechanics. By revealing what is usually hidden, these designs inhabit a space between the known and the mysterious, creating tension and intrigue.

The Essence of Materials

Paris — Here readers can delve into four trend directions at Maison&Objet, where you are invited to experience a sensory rethinking of objects through craft-led, limited pieces. Across four themes wood, fiber, glass, earth, and stone express geological memory, growth, transformation by fire, and hidden worlds shaped by time and human gesture.