Paris Design Week 2026: What if the future of french design is coming from the Caribbean?
At Dach&Zephir, Guadeloupe is woven, carved and transformed into objects. For Paris Design Week 2026, the duo presents Souvenances, an exhibition marking ten years of creation at the crossroads of Creole memory, Caribbean craftsmanship and contemporary design. Another way of looking at what we call French design.
Guadeloupe is more than a postcard
Palm trees, bright colours, endless sunshine. The Caribbean postcard refuses to die.
Dach&Zephir would rather look elsewhere. The studio brings together Dimitri Zephir, born and raised in Guadeloupe, and Florian Dach, born in the Île-de-France region. They met at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and founded their studio in 2016.
Since 2015, their Élòj Kréyòl project has been digging into the creative and cultural history of the French Caribbean through its objects, materials and techniques.
Basketry, seeds, pieces of wood, terracotta: the duo collects traces of a culture whose roots also run deep into the history of colonial slavery.
The goal? To revalue these forms of knowledge and bring a contemporary Creole imagination to the surface.
With Machann Pannié, they turn their attention to basketry and, in particular, to the figure of the basket maker in Guadeloupe.
Not to turn Creole culture into decoration.
But to bring to the surface stories that French design has spent too long keeping at the margins.
« Our approach is to use history as a raw material for design — a starting point from which the project can take shape. »
Why does an object tell more than it shows?
At Dach&Zephir, an object rarely begins with a form. It begins with a story, a material, a gesture or a memory.
The duo creates lighting, furniture, seating, objects and sculptural pieces rooted in research conducted across the Caribbean territories.
There’s Manman Dlo, where terracotta, seeds, basketry and everyday objects tell the story of water in Martinique. Caribbean Beauties transforms seeds, wood and rocks from Guadeloupe and Martinique into objects inspired by traditions of botanical adornment. With Machann Pannié, basketry becomes the starting point for an exploration of the gestures and know-how of basket makers.
Their materials tell stories, too: bakoua, arouman, cachibou, Caribbean hardwoods, bamboo, coconut leaves, terracotta…
Behind every piece lies an investigation — archives, encounters, gestures and inherited know-how.
At Dach&Zephir, an object doesn’t illustrate history.
It becomes a new form of it.
Ten years of archives. And still so much to tell
For their tenth anniversary, Dach&Zephir aren’t simply bringing back old pieces.
With Souvenances, presented during Paris Design Week 2026 in the boardroom of Galeries Lafayette Champs-Élysées, the duo turns its attention to everything that has accompanied their projects without always making it into an exhibition: field images, archives, texts, materials and documents.
How do you tell the story of ten years of research without turning it into a retrospective?
Dach&Zephir transform their archives into object-displays, somewhere between an administrative file, a personal memory and a fashion showroom.
Images become objects. Objects become archives. Memories become material.
Souvenances doesn’t just tell the story of what the studio has created since 2015.
It also reveals what they chose to keep.
What if French design is more Creole than we think?
Why talk about “Creole design” as if it were a category of its own?
For the past ten years, Dach&Zephir have been making objects from Caribbean histories, materials and know-how. Objects that don’t ask to be seen as cultural curiosities, but as design in their own right.
Their work has now entered the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the CNAP and FRAC Pays de la Loire. Their first solo exhibition, simé grenn, was presented at the Cité du design in 2024. In 2025, the City of Paris awarded them its Grand Prix de la Création in the Design and Engagement category.
The recognition is there. What remains interesting is what it says about the landscape around it.
For a long time, the history of French design has been told through its schools, designers, manufacturers and major houses. The overseas territories and their know-how appear far less often as creative forces than as reservoirs of folklore, materials or inspiration.
« This marginalisation can be partly explained by geographical distance, he notes, but also by a colonial past shaped by a dominant imaginary and the pressure to assimilate. »
Dach&Zephir shift that boundary.
They’re not trying to make Guadeloupe “fit” into French design. They’re showing that it has always been part of it.
And perhaps this is where their work feels most contemporary: no longer asking for a place in the narrative, but helping to rewrite it.
Things to see in Paris
Souvenances — dach&zephir Paris Design Week 2026
10–20 September 2026
Galeries Lafayette Champs-Élysées
60 avenue des Champs-Élysées, 75008 Paris
Daily, 10am–9pm
Free admission
At Dach&Zephir, Guadeloupe is woven, carved and transformed into objects. For Paris Design Week 2026, the duo presents Souvenances, an exhibition marking ten years of creation at the crossroads of Creole memory, Caribbean craftsmanship and contemporary design. Another way of looking at what we call French design.