★ NYCxDESIGN

01Pourquoi c'est important

New York is the largest market for design services in the United States and the week is when its industry is visible to itself. For manufacturers and importers, ICFF is the principal North American selling fair; for the studios and galleries, the festival week is when the specifiers, buyers and press who are otherwise scattered across the city all move in the same direction. In our reading its significance is more commercial than cultural: New York does not produce the public spectacle that Milan and London do, but it produces orders, and the week's real business happens on the Javits floor and in the showrooms rather than in the installations.

02La semaine environnante

May in New York is the city's most crowded cultural month and the design festival shares it with a great deal else. The spring marquee auctions at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips fall in exactly the same fortnight, as do Frieze New York and TEFAF New York; the Met Gala has opened the month; and the museums are between spring and summer programmes. Design visitors and art visitors overlap less than the calendar suggests, but the hotels do not care about the distinction, and the middle two weeks of May are the tightest of the New York spring.

03Quand arriver

Arrive Thursday or Friday for the festival's opening weekend, when the showroom and studio programmes are complete and the Brooklyn events are concentrated. ICFF's Sunday-to-Tuesday run means anyone coming for the fair needs to be in town over the weekend. Four nights from Friday covers both sides properly; a Monday-to-Wednesday trip catches the trade fair and misses most of the city.

04Où séjourner

Downtown — SoHo, NoHo, Tribeca — puts you closest to the gallery and studio end of the week and within reach of Brooklyn on the L and the G. Chelsea and Hudson Yards put you within walking distance of the Javits Center, which matters on ICFF days because the far West Side is poorly served by anything else. Midtown East around the A&D Building suits anyone whose week is showrooms rather than studios. Brooklyn itself — Williamsburg, Greenpoint — is a real option and increasingly where the design trade stays.

05Accès et hospitalité

The city programme is overwhelmingly free and unticketed: showroom openings, studio visits, talks and exhibitions are listed on the festival's calendar and most require nothing more than turning up, though a number ask for free registration and fill. ICFF is a separate ticketed trade fair with its own admission, registration and trade credentials, sold through its own site. Museums and institutions charge their usual entry. The festival publishes no hospitality tier and sells no VIP access.

06Où se déroule l'activité sociale

The showroom blocks of Midtown East around 58th Street and the A&D Building in the daytime; SoHo and NoHo in the late afternoon, where the furniture and lighting galleries cluster within a few blocks; and Brooklyn in the evenings, where Greenpoint, Gowanus and Industry City hold the openings that the younger end of the trade actually attends. The Javits Center's own bars and the Hudson Yards restaurants absorb the fair crowd. Everything here is public and most of it is free.

07Comment s'y rendre

08Informations pratiques

09Historique

The festival began in 2013 as a city-backed initiative to consolidate a design week around ICFF, which had run in New York since the mid-1990s and was for years the only fixture the American design trade organized itself around. Governance moved to an independent nonprofit at the start of the 2020s. Two shifts have shaped it since: the growth of Brooklyn's studio and fabrication scene, which moved the week's center of gravity across the East River, and the consolidation of ICFF with the smaller WantedDesign platform, which brought the emerging-designer end of the week under the same roof at the Javits.

10Qui s'y trouve

Interior designers, architects and specifiers, who make up the bulk of ICFF's floor; furniture and lighting manufacturers and their American representatives; retail and hospitality buyers; independent studios and fabricators, particularly from Brooklyn; design schools and their students, in large numbers; and a broad general public for the free city programme. Less international than Milan or London and more regional than either.