There is something quietly radical about choosing scale as an exhibition theme during Paris Fashion Week. While the runways orbit around newness and spectacle, Matter and Shape — the business-focused design salon led by Matthieu Pinet of WSN, with creative direction by Dan Thawley — invites its visitors to slow down and look more carefully: at the size of things, the relationship between objects and bodies, the weight of materials, and the accountability embedded in the act of making.
Now in its third edition, the salon has settled into its identity with confidence. From March 6th to 9th, two pavilions in the Jardin des Tuileries — designed this year by JA Projects, the London and New York practice founded by Jayden Ali — house more than 70 exhibitors from across the globe, alongside a restaurant, a café, a reading room, a bar, and a rich program of talks moderated in partnership with Monocle.
“Scale evokes both the size of things and the scales of justice — a dual lens through which contemporary design must account for its own impact.”
Architecture & Space
A Pavilion Rooted in Place
Photo by Mickaël Llorca. Courtesy of Matter and Shape.
JA Projects has designed the two Tuileries pavilions as what they describe as a socially engaged architectural project. Drawing on the historic resonance of the garden — from its origins in mulberry cultivation to the revolutionary assemblies held on its grounds — the studio has developed moiré patterned facades (developed with Paris-based Studio Hugo Blanzat), green oil-stained pine, and hemp bricks for the exhibition booths and communal areas. Materials are locally sourced and designed for reuse: at the close of the salon, panels will be reclaimed by suppliers or donated to the École Spéciale d’Architecture for new small-scale infrastructures across Paris.
A terraced auditorium centred around a conversation pit sits at the heart of the Concorde Pavilion, turning the architecture itself into a tool for dialogue — a fitting setting for a salon whose talks program reads as seriously as the objects it presents.
Culinary & Sensory
Where Design Meets the Table
Photo by Mickaël Llorca. Courtesy of Matter and Shape.
The sensory experience of the salon extends well beyond the exhibition floor. SCALE by Balbosté — the Paris-based creative studio whose background in high jewelry informs its precision approach to food — serves as the ephemeral restaurant, offering lunch and dinner with plates conceived as visual compositions: contrasts of texture, relief, and rhythm. A select number of dinner reservations remain available.
Elsewhere, the Stereo Bar by Bang & Olufsen offers an immersive Danish design experience — the legendary Beogram 4000c turntable, the H100 headphones, and a sit-down menu by Copenhagen chef Frederik Bille Brahe — while the Zara Home x Dreamin’ Man café opens onto the Tuileries terrace with hojicha lattes and the quiet comfort of a garden in early spring.
Fragrance
Byredo’s Bibliothèque, Scaled
Photo by Mickaël Llorca. Courtesy of Matter and Shape.
Returning as the official scent partner, Byredo presents its signature Bibliothèque — leather, wood, violet, musk — across three scales: 70g, 240g, and 1.5kg candles housed in black glass votives. The gesture is both literal and conceptual: the same fragrance, the same form, at radically different magnitudes. The brand also presents a new collaborative project exploring scent through light and glass, extending its investigation into the intangible realms where Nordic restraint meets spatial experience.
Reading Room
Printed Matter, Reconsidered
Photo by LARS BRONSETH. Courtesy of Matter and Shape.
Photo by LARS BRONSETH. Courtesy of Matter and Shape.
The new Matter and Shape Reading Room — conceived with Villa Hegra, the bilateral cultural institution promoting exchange between Saudi Arabia and France — features USM furniture redesigned by Saudi artist Badr Ali, whose motifs are drawn from the choreography of traditional Saudi dances. It is a quietly radical proposition: a space inside a design fair dedicated not to selling, but to reading, thinking, and slowing down. Whitewall is honoured to be among the independent titles featured within its curated selection.
On the Theme
Photo by Mickaël Llorca. Courtesy of Matter and Shape.
It is, ultimately, a political act dressed in very good taste. The 2026 edition takes its cue from Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau‘s 1995 compendium S, M, L, XL — that great, unwieldy monument to architectural thinking at every register. Matter and Shape reads scale as both a formal and ethical question: from one-of-a-kind collectible pieces to industrial objects, from individual artisans to global supply chains, the salon insists that how something is made matters as much as what it becomes.
Matter and Shape runs March 6–9, 2026 at the Jardin des Tuileries, Paris. matterandshape.com
