The 18th Keqiao China Textile City Curtain and Fabric Exhibition has just concluded, and the most repeated signal is that the competitive logic of the soft furnishing industry has been thoroughly rewritten. The most intuitive change was not a new product but the exhibition hall format—traditional stalls piling up fabric have almost disappeared, replaced by immersive full-house realistic experience spaces. This means that downstream buyers and designers are now making decisions based on the overall spatial effect rather than the texture of a single fabric.
Industry Shift
The data direction is equally clear. During the fair, online cloud exhibition live streaming attracted far more viewers than offline visitors, and the pattern of selecting products online and ordering offline has become the standard operation for soft furnishing stores and source factories. For traditional merchants accustomed to waiting for customers, this is no longer a trend reminder but a survival threshold. As one of the world's largest textile trading hubs, Keqiao's fair signals often predict the terminal market direction for the second half of the year and beyond. This year's signals deserve careful attention.
The second signal is the significant divergence in style aesthetics. Dopamine bright colors, French vintage, and medieval texture styles remain popular, but the biggest dark horse is light neo-Chinese style. Unlike the heavy and complicated traditional Chinese design of previous years, the 2026 neo-Chinese style uses low-saturation base colors like light mist gray, milk coffee, and off-white, paired with simplified oriental lines and delicate embroidery, reducing heaviness and enhancing transparency. This style precisely fits modern large flat-floor apartments and improved residential homes, meaning the high-end home furnishing and custom soft furnishing sectors will face a new round of product iteration.
Industry Transmission
Upgrades on the fabric side are also accelerating. Chenille and high-precision fabrics remain mainstream, but yarns are finer, weights are increased, and drape is improved, directly adapting to the current popular large floor-to-ceiling window types. Meanwhile, natural eco-friendly fabrics like cotton-linen blends and Tencel textures are gaining popularity, with non-odor, high color fastness, and biodegradability becoming hard requirements rather than bonus points. For buyers, this means the selection logic must shift from pure price comparison to a comprehensive evaluation of materials, craftsmanship, and environmental certifications.
Structural changes in window treatments are also noteworthy. Thickened illusion sheers and textured sheers that transmit light without being see-through have become standard in households, elevating sheer curtains from supporting roles to protagonists of spatial atmosphere. High-shade, abrasion-resistant, permanently shaped functional ready-made curtains continue to sell well, while blinds, honeycomb shades, and custom-shaped window treatments are expanding. Integrated whole-home window treatment solutions are becoming a new profit direction for stores, driven by consumers' dual demand for overall coherence and functionality.
Original design reached a new high at this fair. Self-developed patterns, original texture crafts, and exclusive color schemes were clearly more favored by buyers, while the survival space for homogeneous copies has shrunk sharply. The industry is shifting from scale competition based on output and low prices to value competition based on design, quality, and innovation. For factories, this is both a challenge and an opportunity—OEM enterprises without R&D capabilities may accelerate their exit, while source manufacturers with design barriers will gain higher pricing power.
Keqiao's integrated exhibition-trade advantage is also expanding. Short-term exhibitions are extended into year-round source markets, allowing buyers to capture annual trends at the fair and then visit the Beilian physical market to connect with factory source orders, greatly shortening the supply-demand chain. With continued visits from overseas buyers, the pace of domestic fabric brands going global is accelerating, and the market map of the curtain industry is expanding from domestic-led to dual circulation.