From hemp houses to sustainable fashion, DesignMarch 2026 connects disciplines, materials, and people
Despite it being May on the calendar, DesignMarch is back, once again ignoring its own name and sprawling across Reykjavík and even beyond May 6 to 10. Now in its 18th edition, the festival has grown to be one of the biggest in Iceland — or, in fact, the biggest, as Festival Director Helga Ólafsdóttir clarifies. “More people come to DesignMarch than Iceland Airwaves,” she says. Across the five-day schedule, over 100 free exhibitions, side events, displays, performances, experimental dinners, and even test-drive naps take over the city, spanning everything from architecture to fashion, product to digital design, ceramics to furniture. The single-day international conference DesignTalks kicks off the festival, this year featuring names such as Stefan Sagmeister among its headliners.
How do you navigate the festival programme and stay ahead of the curve on what to see and do? We spoke to selected designers to bring you a few festival highlights.
Fashion takeover at the Nordic House
Year after year, fashion is a big topic at DesignMarch, raising questions such as whether fashion could truly be sustainable, and how material waste could be reduced. This year, in addition to the annual showcase of Iceland University of the Arts graduates, the fashion programme makes a home at the Nordic House, with a multiday fashion and textile takeover. The overarching theme of this year’s festival is connections, and one case in point is Suskin, a fashion brand created by two best friends, Karítas Spano and Thelma Rut Gunnarsdóttir.
Suskin is built around a single product: the Everbag, a durable handbag designed by Karítas and Thelma, and produced in Italy using deadstock leather they personally source. The use of deadstock leather means they can offer a wider range of colours, but with only a limited supply of each.
“The bag just came to be by an accident,” Thelma explains. “We both do clothes, and our research often includes working from our own bodies, the body figure, and the movement of the body. So a bag is very unexpected for both of us.”
“We thrift a lot, we take clothes and make our own clothes, but it was very hard for us to find a bag that would suit our everyday lifestyle,” says Karítas. So they made their own.
Since a bag is something you use every day, it was important to create a product that is timeless and durable, designed to work every season, every day, for anyone, regardless of gender or age. Plus, “It needs to amplify all the aspects of the outfit,” Karítas adds.
In addition to their pop-up, Suskin is also bringing a special performance to DesignMarch, combining Karítas and Thelma’s respective passions for dance and music. “We were very inspired by all the shows Alexander McQueen did when he was alive. It was never like a normal fashion show,” Karítas explains. “I feel like fashion lost a sense of the theatrical that he invented. So we really wanted to do something with that — do a fashion show, but with a theatrical sense.”
Another fashion designer coming to the Nordic House is London transplant Theo Ike, who moved to Iceland about a year ago, “to get a fresh perspective on my craft,” as he puts it.
Theo will be showcasing new garments from his clothing label, most pieces made by hand from primarily deadstock or reworked secondhand materials, reflecting a brand built around “the natural world, geography, organic processes and kind of observing them within textiles and clothes.”
He also presents an Extinction Event, within which he’ll be doing guided tours through his own version of history, told through garments. “From hundreds of millions of years ago all the way through to the future,” Theo explains, quickly noting that it’s not exactly a fashion event, and everyone curious or sceptical is welcome.
“The whole premise of the title is that we’re so wrapped up in minute issues now that we forget that everything that’s led to this point has been a result of extinctions and evolution. Now, we’re in a position where we can miraculously live on this planet — we’ve got enough water, we’ve got the temperatures just right. What might happen in the future? How will that affect us having to pay our taxes? Will we be paying taxes in 200 years even? Or will some superiorly evolved species come and make us extinct? It’s all very speculative,” Theo says. “The garments tell the story, chapter by chapter.”
On the closing day of DesignMarch, Theo is also hosting a family-friendly interactive workshop, Build A Dinosaur, where participants will get a chance to design their own dinosaurs and weird creatures and print them onto the clothes of their choice. “I just really wanted to do something that’s not serious,” he explains. “I find that the fashion industry can be very, very serious a lot of the time, and quite unfunny.”
A field trip to Grímsnes
Last year, architecture was one of the hottest topics at DesignMarch — quite literally. Arnhildur Pálmadóttir presented her speculative project Lavaforming, rooted in harnessing molten lava as an alternative to concrete, a project that went on to represent Iceland at the Venice Architecture Biennale. That thread of exploring innovative materials continues in 2026. Expect lectures and film screenings from Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, who famously likens good architecture to good sushi — the key is choosing the best material, from the best place, and in season — alongside open studios, a look ahead to Reykjavík in 2050, and multiple architecture walks. One of the most unusual events requires going on a road trip. Architects Anna Karlsdóttir and Jan Dobrowolski, founders of lúdika arkitektar, invite visitors to Grímsnes, a popular summerhouse area about an hour south of Reykjavík, to see the first hemp house built in Iceland. “A hemp house is a building made from hemp-based materials, most commonly hempcrete or hempwool,” the architects explain. “What makes it special is that it’s made from natural, non-toxic materials and therefore it doesn’t leave harmful waste behind at the end of its life,” they add.
When the duo moved back to Iceland from London during Covid, it was the same year it became legal to import and grow industrial hemp. The project began as an experiment to measure how hempcrete performs in Icelandic conditions, but grew into broader research. They noticed that, despite widespread talk of sustainability, the building industry had not really changed — if anything, more materials were being imported than before. “As we went deeper, we kept running into gaps in basic knowledge: what building materials are even available locally? How much is currently being imported? How much arable land exists in Iceland? Why do we build almost exclusively with concrete and imported materials?” Anna and Jan explain.
Building regulations limited the hemp house to 15 square metres, but instead of looking at it as a constraint, Anna and Jan took inspiration from a Japanese teahouse tradition, “small, humble, deeply connected to the land.” Hemp itself is not a structural material, so while it cannot hold the building up, it makes excellent walls and insulation. Other local materials are incorporated throughout: Icelandic poplar for the timber structure, larch for the cladding, gravel and red scoria for the foundation and walking paths, and seaweed paper for the window screens. Visitors are invited for a guided tour, with prior registration required, limited to three people at a time, an experience that, in Anna and Jan’s words, offers “something quite personal and unhurried.”
Continuing the theme of sustainability and green(er) materials, one of the most awaited DesignMarch events will be the first public presentation of the inaugural product by Flöff. Co-founded by Ólöf Jóhannsdóttir, Sæunn Kjartansdóttir, Sigríður Tryggvadóttir and Margrét Katrín Guttormsdóttir, the company is working to build Iceland’s first specialised textile recycling centre — with their debut product, sound-absorbing acoustic panels made from textile waste, making the case for what that facility could produce.
“Sound-absorbing panels felt like a natural place to start because textiles in general already have acoustic qualities. There is growing demand for better sound environments in workplaces, public space, and homes,” Ólöf explains. “We wanted our first product to be something practical and scalable.”
Displayed within the Flöff up your wall exhibition, the panels are made with textiles collected from Íslenska Gámafélagið alongside offcuts and surplus wool from Varma and Ístex. The materials are sorted by colour and type, shredded into fibres, and processed into felt using specialised machinery, then shaped into panels without any chemical binders or finishes. “We are developing the panels with circularity in mind, so that the material can ideally be reprocessed, reused, or repurposed again rather than ending up as waste,” Ólöf adds.
With only five to ten percent of textiles currently recycled in Iceland, Flöff’s product represents “a step toward creating a local circular system for textile waste in Iceland,” the founders say. Though it may be years before the textile centre comes to life, the team is keeping busy in the meantime — alongside the acoustic panels, their uniform upcycling project for N1 will also be on display during DesignMarch.
A third perspective
Designer and musician Logi Pedro has spent years researching how culture is embedded in daily patterns and communicated through objects. At DesignMarch, Logi opens his first solo exhibition titled Heimur, building a complete domestic environment at Ásmundarsalur.
“I have an African mother and an Icelandic father, and their ideas of what the home should look like were totally different. I was constantly in this back and forth of what my material or aesthetic heritage was,” Logi explains, adding, “Most people grow up and they don’t even think about why their environment looks like what it looks like.”
In total, the exhibition features over 20 objects, from tableware, textiles and lighting to large furniture, all sharing a very similar DNA — “very Nordic but at the same time, something totally different.” Logi insists he wasn’t trying to make a hybrid of African and Icelandic culture, stressing, “It’s its own thing. It’s like a third view, a third perspective put into a physical form.”
To bring the vision to life, he collaborates with a variety of local creatives: Fjöll, an Icelandic-Dutch carpentry studio; glassblower Anders Vange from Reykjavík Glass; and Studio Viktor Breki on ceramics, among others. One highlight is Logi’s remix of the famous Stool 60 designed by Alvar Aalto, which he considers “the pinnacle of Scandinavian design,” found in libraries, schools, and homes across the Nordics. “I took that chair, and I kind of wanted to put it through my filter — looking at the materials, the shapes in it. I wanted it to be referential but also allow it to be a bit different, to not get hidden in the Nordic landscape,” Logi shares.
“A big thing in the exhibition has been the political discourse in Iceland around immigration and assimilation,” he adds. “This idea that culture is something like blood property, something that you have to protect from outside influence, something that you’re born with. While to me it’s very clear, and I try to make that argument an exhibition, that culture is something that is an active dialogue.”
The shape of grief
Perhaps the most unexpected project at this year’s DesignMarch, Archive of Them is an installation exploring the materiality of grief by artist Thijs Fisser and designer Valgerður Birna Jónsdóttir. Rooted in Thijs’s grandfather’s grief following the death of his wife, the work brings together Thijs’s background in spatial installations and Vala’s expertise in wool.
“We were both interested in how something like grief, which is very internal and abstract, can actually exist in a physical way,” the collaborators explain.
In an attempt “to hold onto something that is already disappearing,” the duo will display fragments of Thijs’s grandfather’s film tapes, projected onto Icelandic wool, a process that softens and blurs the image. “For us, that made sense with the idea of memory. It’s not sharp, it’s not fixed, it becomes more about atmosphere and feeling.” They also work with the five stages of grief, displaying five chairs, distinguished only by colour, each representing a different stage.
The installation continues with a ticketed experimental dinner at Skreið, where each course is connected to a stage of grief and paired with scent. “Grief is often something that stays very private, or happens behind closed doors,” Thijs and Vala explain. “We were interested in what happens if you bring it into a shared space, in a very open way.”
This is just a fraction of what DesignMarch 2026 brings to town. Now it’s your turn — scroll through the programme, watch interviews with designers on the festival’s Instagram, or, as Helga suggests, simply walk downtown. Start at Hafnartorg or Laugavegur and be surprised how much is packed into a few blocks. “Come and see what an amazing design scene we have here in Iceland.”
DesignMarch 2026 runs from May 6-10. See the full programme: designmarch.is
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