Frankfurt in February is not a flirtation. It presents itself plainly as a steel sky, brisk air and all trains running on time. By the time I step into the vast organism that is Messe Frankfurt, the mood is already set: efficient and built for throughput. Ambiente has a reputation and its veterans treat it like a competitive sport. You hydrate (with espresso). You wear sensible shoes you pretend are stylish. You study the floor plan the way tourists study subway maps in unfamiliar cities.

Twelve halls. Thousands of exhibitors. Entire ecosystems of dining, gifting, interiors, lifestyle stacked under one industrial sky. The unspoken understanding is that you will leave having walked miles and have seen more objects than your memory can reasonably store.

This year, as I stepped into Ambiente, I sensed a different current moving through the architecture. The rhythm felt recalibrated, which refreshed me. People were not just surveying; they seemed to be studying. They were testing weight in their hands and I noticed, through the sea of faces, they were circling back.

Ambiente’s official trend framework – Brave, Light, Solid, reads less like a stylistic taxonomy and more like a cultural diagnosis. Brave explored saturated expression and material experimentation. Light traced translucency, reduction, and spatial openness. Solid, the most grounded of the three, articulated a desire for environments built to endure- “lasting yet versatile living worlds,” as the curators described them. Across all three, the language returned repeatedly to tactility, hybridity, emotional resonance. It felt impossible to ignore how often the conversation drifted toward the body: how something registers, how it ages, how it participates in daily life.

Germany’s influence on that discourse was palpable. Sustainability here is not marketing garnish; it is infrastructure. Circular systems, long-term durability, responsible sourcing-these are baseline expectations. At Ambiente this year, ecological responsibility surfaced less as virtue signaling and more as design intelligence. Exhibitors spoke about lifecycle, about repairability, about material honesty. The emphasis leaned away from novelty and fell forward into continuity.

It was within this atmosphere that encountered the work of Minjung Kim.

Her presentation did not rely on theatrical staging. The textiles occupied their space with structural clarity. From a distance they appeared composed; up close they revealed complexity- subtle tension within the weave, surfaces that carried the imprint of process. Visitors leaned in instinctively. I watched a buyer lift the edge of a piece and let it fall back into place, assessing how it held its own weight.

When I asked Kim about her approach, she spoke first about sensation and memory. Every project begins, she told me, with questions about interaction. How will this meet a person? What will it register under pressure? Her research starts with the hand..sampling, manipulating, testing, before moving toward industrial realization. The collaboration with factories does not dilute the intimacy of her work; it allows her ideas to exist at architectural scale.

Her biography threads through the material. After leaving Korea for Europe, she spent years living in furnished apartments, always prepared to relocate. Surrounded by objects chosen for their disposability, she felt a growing estrangement from her own environment. The only elements she altered were textiles- duvet covers and blankets draped across sofas, fabric layered over inherited furniture. They became instruments of authorship in temporary rooms. Rather than replacing what existed, she transformed it. From that experience grew a sustained investigation into how material can create belonging without permanence.

Standing within the Solid trend world, I recognized the alignment immediately. Kim gravitates toward it not because it is fashionable but because it reflects a line of inquiry she has pursued for years: durability without rigidity. Trends, she said, are reference points, not directives. When a work is structurally resolved, it may later coincide with a forecast, but her process begins with long-term research into sensation and structure, not seasonal cycles. Alignment with the zeitgeist is a byproduct of inquiry; tension arises only when artistic direction gravitates in the direction of the market.

Her textiles make that philosophy tangible. They carry structural presence while remaining responsive to pressure and use. “Materials hold memory,” she told me. “Form and surface change depending on how they are used.” In that exchange, attachment forms. Sustainability, in her view, begins there.

Her perspective reframes a debate that runs strongly through German design culture. While many exhibitors foreground recycled content or low-impact production, Kim focuses on attachment as an ecological strategy. Objects that carry narrative are less likely to be discarded. She is wary of projects that rely solely on the optics of sustainability…materials that satisfy moral criteria yet feel visually or spatially impoverished. Longevity, she suggests, must be aesthetic as well as ethical. A statement I thought was so human and yet so obvious it still sounded profound. 

As I moved through the halls, that idea echoed repeatedly. Tableware designed to be inherited. Lighting conceived as modular systems rather than seasonal statements. Upholstery engineered for disassembly and repair. The fair’s conversations circled around endurance not as heaviness, but as relevance over time. Even the physical behavior of visitors reflected this shift. Buyers revisited stands. Editors reconsidered objects they had passed earlier. Evaluation replaced impulse. Deliberate de ja vu. 

Later in the afternoon, I returned to Kim’s booth. A different group had gathered, yet the choreography remained consistent. There were adjustments of vantage points. They tested the edge of the textile between their fingers. The interaction was almost architectural; the body responded to structure, and structure responded to touch.

Ambiente has always functioned as a barometer for global taste. This year, walking alongside the industry, I felt it registering something deeper than palette or proportion. The conversation had turned toward inhabitation. Design was being discussed in terms of how it would live, age, and accumulate meaning.

Leaving the Messe as dusk settled over Frankfurt, my step count rivaled previous editions. What stayed with me, however, was not the number of halls covered but the density of encounter. The memory of tension in fabric. The recognition that sustainability, here, was not a slogan but a system – material, emotional, architectural. And threaded through it all was Minjung Kim’s quiet insistence that objects earn their place not through novelty, but through relationship.

This year, Ambiente felt like a recalibration of attention. Walking those halls, I sensed a design culture reasserting the value of presence- of surfaces that register use and of environments that hold us over time. The future may be accelerated by code, but it will still be shaped by the hand.

To explore more of Minjung Kim’s work, visit minjungkim.com.For further information on Ambiente and its 2026 trend framework, visit ambiente.messefrankfurt.com.

Credits:

Written by Christina Wright | @cbiwright

Photograhy courtesy of Minjung Kim | @minjung.lea.kim