Leather belting, fringe citrus colors, playful geometric prints, Victorian styling: Those were the trends that magazines like Elle and Vogue spotted in the spring 2016 fashion collections.
So prepare to find them at NYCxDesign. The five-borough cross-disciplinary festival, which runs through May 17, celebrates the indefatigable furniture makers, weavers, jewelry artists, potters and other professionals who trot out new design ideas every spring, some marketable, others waiting for their millennium.
Because there are only so many aesthetic tropes out there and lots of nets reeling them in, we’re bound to see correspondences between the designs we put on our backs and those used for serving onion dip.
Leather belt straps? They make up the arms of Neri & Hu’s wood Capo lounge chair for De La Espada, which will be displayed May 13 to 17 in a show apartment at 12 Warren Street, in Tribeca, designed by the furniture retailer the Future Perfect.
Orange? You’ll think you’re in Miami with all the juice-colored fabrics and accessories, including a wall clock by Abi Alice for Alessi with the palette of a Creamsicle. (The Dotty clock will be at HOMI, the Italian lifestyles fair, which runs concurrently with the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Hell’s Kitchen, May 14 to 17.) Wild geometries? For its first wallpaper collection, shown at the ICFF, Heath Ceramics has concocted intoxicating compositions of angles and curves.
NYCxDesign is in its fourth year. The mix of exhibitions, workshops, lectures and parties once known as New York Design Week has doubled in length, expanded in scope and won the support of the New York City Economic Development Corporation. The festival has been given its own street banners, ads on taxi television screens and shuttle buses among key sites.
Having grown to more than 500 events at 200 locations, it may one day rival the Milan Furniture Fair, the mother of all design jamborees, in guaranteeing that every single person within a 30-mile radius of the city is aware that cool stuff is happening, even those who don’t know their Jacquard from their Jack Bauer.
Design week has traditionally been a global melting pot. At the ICFF, Austrians, Spaniards, Norwegians and even Tibetans will be selling their goods.
But an international spirit is growing even stronger, thanks in part to a couple of Frenchwomen, Odile Hainaut and Claire Pijoulat. They started their own trade show, WantedDesign, five years ago in Chelsea and followed up in 2014 with an outpost in Industry City, the elephantine former factory complex in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
Exoticism is a hallmark of WantedDesign: Go to its Manhattan branch at the Terminal Stores building May 13 if you want to see fresh design ideas from Poland, Argentina, the Netherlands and Tunisia.
There, you’ll also find a baby-smooth tomato-red sofa called Mellow, a collaboration between Bernhardt, the American furniture producer, and Océane Delain, a young French designer. Ms. Delain sourced the seamless, stretchy fabric from the medical industry, dyeing the first samples in her bathtub to make the colors more appealing.
In Brooklyn (May 7 to 17) WantedDesign will exhibit innovative works in glass by students and faculty of ECAL/University of Art and Design in Lausanne, Switzerland.
NYCxDesign has a regional element, too, with clusters of neighborhood businesses and cultural institutions synchronizing events.
Organized by Jean Lin, a design curator, and David Weeks, a designer, the second annual TriBeCa Design District aims to be one such magnet. Participating showrooms will sponsor a neighborhood walk on May 12, and several will host activities through May 17.
Colony, for instance, a Canal Street cooperative of American designers founded by Ms. Lin, will present a beer tasting, dim sum sampling and a live nude drawing session.
At South Street Seaport, from May 5 to 17, the Downtown Design Festival will offer creative workshops for families and exhibit Parsons School of Design projects that aim to foster social change. There will also be lectures by noted designers and urbanists, and a market by WantedDesign offering furniture, artwork and accessories. The party is May 9.
Some design week institutions hop around. BKLYN Designs (May 6 to 8), a furniture fair, moved last year to Greenpoint from Dumbo, Brooklyn, while Collective Design, mostly a show of gallery pieces that straddle art and utility, is having its fourth edition at its third Manhattan location: the 60,000-square-foot Skylight Clarkson Square in West SoHo.
(While Milan may seem to have a bottomless supply of vacant palazzi for its design week, New York is stingy with large event spaces. Supporters of a robust NYCxDesign are hoping that the new West Side real estate developments will provide some badly needed sites.)
Collective Design, with its experimental reach, celebrates the aesthetic and conceptual juice squeezed from materials and processes.
Fernando Mastrangelo, a Brooklyn-based sculptor who uses BB pellets, corn kernels and cupcake sprinkles in some of his works, is introducing chunky furniture of cast sand that is inspired by glaciers.
David Nosanchuk, a New York interdisciplinary designer, will be represented in part by Louie, a 3D-printed lamp manufactured by the Italian company .exnovo that is based on scanned elements of Louis Sullivan’s 1899 Bayard-Condict Building in NoHo. (In an odd way, it’s an example of the Victoriana that really is beginning to slip into contemporary product design.)
You’ll find innovation all over town. Stop by the Flatiron district shop of Sandy Chilewich from May 13 to 19 to see a material so new that it’s still looking for an application. Ms. Chilewich, who revolutionized table settings with her artistic vinyl place mats, has developed a weave with glowing strips of jelly-colored acrylic inserted into the white textile’s open pockets.
Loving the effect, but not quite sure what to do with it, she contacted Matilda McQuaid, deputy curatorial director at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, for advice. Ms. McQuaid wasn’t sure, either, but quickly ushered the textile, called Edges, into the museum’s permanent collection.
The traditional theme of New York’s design week has been home furnishings. By extending the borders to include organizations like the Frieze New York art fair on Randalls Island (May 5 to 8), where you will find dog-patterned Maharam Serpentine Galleries wallpaper designed by Alex Katz, and the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, where Tom Sachs is interpreting the Japanese tea ceremony (through July 24), NYCxDesign is putting on needed weight.
The city hopes outsiders will have an incentive to visit and residents will find relevance and maybe even career paths. As Steven Learner, the founder of Collective Design, said in describing the impact of a citywide smorgasbord, “More is more.”
New York has always been a “phenomenal hub” for creativity, Mr. Learner said. “I just think the design moment is happening right now. It’s sort of like a puppy that doesn’t belong to you. You come back two months later and say, ‘My, that thing has really grown.’”