“A first look at the fabrics, colorways, and studios shaping next season’s fashion and home collections”
Photo courtesy of Paris Prints
Twice a year, before a single print shows up on a runway or a rack, it passes through a room in the Marais. Paris Prints, the bi-annual textile design show held at Espace Saint-Merri, gathers more than 30 international studios — all showing original prints, embroideries, and surface treatments to the buyers who will decide what fashion, home, and accessories collections look like next season.
This edition ran August 30–31, steps from the Pompidou Center, and the work on the tables told the story better than any trend report could.
The Buying Process, Up Close
At one table, a designer worked through stacks of florals with three buyers — florals dense enough that solid ground barely showed, then a shift into geometric weaves in ochre and clay, patchwork-style patterns bordered in blue. This is the real mechanics of print buying: not a single hero image, but hundreds of options fanned out and narrowed down by hand, one swatch at a time.
Trend Forums, Decoded
Paris Prints partners with Pattern Curator for its trend forums, and this season’s boards mapped two seasons at once — Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter — pairing fabric swatches directly with Pantone references. Visitors moved along the wall the way editors move through a lookbook: color story, then texture, then pattern family, each one labeled and cross-referenced rather than left to interpretation.
Studios Worth Watching
Ludico Estampas showed under a red-and-white banner stacked with patchwork florals and folk motifs — bold color-blocking that reads as ready for both apparel and home textiles. Nearby, a rack hung with jewel-toned scarves and shawls drew a steady rotation of buyers pulling pieces down to check drape and hand-feel against the light.
Why It Matters for What You’ll Wear Next
Trade shows like Paris Prints are the layer of the industry most shoppers never see — the point where a print gets licensed, a colorway gets adjusted, and a pattern that started as one designer’s sketch becomes a decision six or seven brands make independently, all pulling from the same room. The florals, the ochre geometrics, the patchwork borders on view this week are a reasonable preview of what’s coming to shelves in the next one to two seasons.
Reporting from Paris Prints, Espace Saint-Merri, Paris.
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