Meet the Wallpaper* Design Award winners

The role of the creative director, at least in the form we know it now – the multi-hyphenate aesthete that dictates everything from imagery to experience – is a relatively recent invention. As culture and media have become more fragmented, these cross-disciplinary figures have risen up to meet the moment — the macro-thinkers able to make sense of all that dispersion and wrangle a brand or an artist into a single, cohesive vision.

No one has been more successful at it than Montreal-born designer Willo Perron. He’s come up with the concepts for talked-about live shows such as Beyoncé’s Western-themed Cowboy Carter tour and Rihanna’s floating-stage performance at the 2023 Super Bowl. He’s designed slick retail stores and pop-ups for Kim Kardashian’s Skims line, as well as Cartier and H&M, and he created the marble-and-midcentury-furniture-filled HQ for Jay-Z’s Roc Nation record label. He’s also designed Chanel runway sets, and furniture, including for Knoll – ‘The musicians I worked for began asking me to help them with their homes,’ he says. ‘The “Pillo” sofas we did for Knoll came out of one of those projects.’

Where does a designer who has seemingly done everything, yet remains restless for new problems, go from here? Laura May Todd speaks with Perron to find out.

Ever since the V&A East Storehouse opened in May 2025, it has become the centre of our cultural lives. A museum like no other, it was conceived by architects DS+R to house some of the V&A’s vast collection, and has been designed as a series of ‘floating’ floors; each level features a central viewing gallery alongside many more, less accessible but still visible, shelving areas. The rigid formality of more traditional museums was abandoned in favour of a visually overwhelming staging (and we mean this in the best possible sense).

The best part? Aside from taking a usual look around, anyone can choose up to five objects they’d like to view up close, request them through the V&A website, and see them in the flesh at a private appointment that can last up to four hours. To celebrate the museum’s Wallpaper* Design Award 2026 win, here’s a gallery of 80 highlights – from early Japanese tech to punk socks – as picked by our team.

Idyllically located on the Finnish island of Kaunissaari, four hours by car and ferry from Helsinki, Puusauna, which means wood or tree sauna in English, is a traditional log cabin with intricate dovetail joints, here given a contemporary twist thanks to a handmade zinc roof, large windows, sophisticated wood detailing and treatments, and the use of actual trees – or, at least, whole tree trunks, minimally treated and replete with branches and knobbly bits. Such trunks inhabit both indoor and outdoor spaces, occasionally for aesthetic reasons, but mostly as part of the building’s ingenious structure.

‘In traditional log buildings, the horizontal frame settles as the wood shrinks over time,’ says architect and wood aficionado Jaakko Torvinen, who designed the sauna for a private client. ‘Here, I separated the roof structure from the log frame so that the roof rests on the upright tree trunks, which won’t shrink, and becomes a sort of canopy.’ Giovanna Dunmall explores an especially hot Wallpaper* Design Award winner.

Jonathan Anderson’s first collections for Dior have arrived in a Wunderkammer of a pop-up at London’s Selfridges. The windows are stacked high with grey Dior boxes; inside, these open to reveal Lady Dior handbags, or Anderson’s riff on the Book Tote. Cabinets and drawers offer up a menagerie of animal-shaped charms, while ready-to-wear spans men’s and womenswear, pieces encapsulating a mood of freshness and contemporary romance.