A fair such as Decorex, the continent’s largest and longest-running event of its sort, requires a great deal of belief and quite a lot of make-believe.
There is the belief that thousands of moving parts can come together from around this enormous continent. That ideas can become rooms, drawings can become buildings, and materials, objects, and people can travel vast distances to meet under one roof. Then there is the make-believe required to imagine that we might one day rival the great design capitals of Italy and France, places where design has been nurtured over generations into something resembling a national language.
Milan Design Week takes over an entire city, spilling from a vast fairground into palazzos, shop windows, courtyards, former factories and improbable corners. In Paris, Maison & Objet gathers an international industry around the shared conviction that objects, materials and spaces matter. Visiting these places reassures you that, given a century or so, we might have the capacity to build something equally immense.
But perhaps scale is not the only measure of what matters.
Somewhere among the damasks, marble samples, lighting installations, deliveries, and many stories woven between more than 600 exhibitors and 50,000 visitors who come to Decorex each year, there is something larger taking shape. Not simply a marketplace, but a collective act of imagination. A temporary world in which we consider how we might live, what we might value, and who we might become next.
There are, inevitably, days in the lead-up when belief becomes difficult. Shipments are delayed. Colour palettes flop. Walls are built in the wrong place. Sponsors, speakers, workshops, traffic departments, floor plans and fire regulations begin to occupy every available corner of the mind. In those moments, it is easy to forget the wonder of what is being made.
Then the doors open.
Suddenly, the fair is seen through the eyes of the people who return each year to encounter something new within a field that can sometimes appear notoriously fixed. Design is built, after all, around “enduring classics”, chairs that are “made to last”, and objects many of us have already seen countless times. Yet somehow, each year, these familiar forms are reworked, reconsidered and placed into new relationships. The room changes, the light changes and the context changes, and, in turn, we begin to reimagine ourselves.
This year, that act of reimagining takes place through the lens of “The Soft Life”.
The idea emerged from Africa, where the phrase has come to describe more than comfort or ease. It expresses a desire for a life shaped less by endurance and more by intention, with space for pleasure, rest, beauty, ritual and care. At a time when hardness is so often mistaken for strength, “The Soft Life” asks whether gentleness might also be a serious way to construct the future.
Softness, in this sense, is not an escape from the world but a way of engaging with it differently. It can be found in materials that invite touch, spaces that restore us, businesses built with care, and objects that carry the knowledge of many hands. It is there in the work of designers who are slowing down, looking closer and questioning whether the next chapter of design must always be louder, faster or newer.
Perhaps this is where Africa’s contribution to the global design conversation begins. Not by imitating Milan or Paris, nor by pretending that the industry has the same history, infrastructure or resources, but by believing deeply in what can emerge from here.
A fair is always partly real and partly imagined. For a few days, an empty convention centre becomes a city of ideas. Then thousands of people walk through its doors and, simply by being there, make that world real.
Garreth and Alan
- Garreth Van Niekerk and Alan Hayward are the executive co-creative directors of Decorex Africa.
From the July issue of Wanted, 2026.
