There are still people asking what collectible design actually is. This isn’t a provocation, but perhaps the most interesting insight to emerge from Collectible Brussels, the fair dedicated to 21st-century limited-edition design. Now in its ninth edition and hosted beneath the modernist vaults of Espace Vanderborght—a historic 1935 department store—Collectible has established itself as one of the most significant events for closely observing a sector that is expanding, yet still difficult to define.

Unlike many other fairs devoted to collecting—from Design Miami to PAD and Nomad, and soon the Salone Raritas at Salone del Mobile.Milano—the focus here remains almost exclusively on the ultra-contemporary, setting aside any dialogue with historical design. This choice strengthens its connection with more experimental galleries and transforms the fair into a privileged platform for identifying emerging languages and still-unsettled visions.

Taking the pulse of such an elusive field reveals a sector that is nonetheless vibrant and in good health. Liv Vaisberg, founder of Collectible together with Clélie Debehault, confirms this assessment, sharing with Domus her perspective on an ecosystem that is undeniably expanding, even if it remains difficult to read and not yet accessible to all tastes and appetites—will it ever be?

“The sector is growing,” she says, “but it remains a niche: its relatively small scale is precisely what makes it so appealing, because its nature is inherently attractive to its audience. At the same time, I don’t think it is fully understood yet, and for this reason explaining what collectible design is becomes an ongoing task. We still have to do it again and again and again. After all, people still ask me: what exactly is collectible design?”

Walking through the different sections of the fair—Main, New Garde, Bespoke, Architect-Designer, and finally Curated, entrusted this year to the young curator Marine Mimouni—it becomes easy to see how the diversity on display can still be disorienting. In this vast kaleidoscope, this protean cabinet de curiosités, visions overlap, disciplinary boundaries collapse, while techniques and materials may lose their established status, redefined through new perspectives or sheer irreverence.

So what are we looking at? Furniture, artworks, conceptual explorations, high craftsmanship, or objects made deliberately striking to assert a new protagonism within domestic space? Exhibitors’ answers inevitably vary.

The Barcelona-based gallery Vasto dissolves hierarchies by placing contemporary art alongside hyper-material furniture pieces. Shifting latitude, Poland’s Object Gallery turns each object into a maximalist statement—an approach that reflects the vitality of emerging markets and the great freedom with which they engage with very small-scale production. The collective Regarding Relations, composed of 17 women designers, interrogates gender counter-narratives, reinterpreting the connotations of the boudoir to free it from its most stereotypical layers, also through the exclusive use of sheet steel, which radically renews the typology. Another collective, Full Circle, brings together a group of designer friends exhibiting through spontaneous affinities, experimenting with accessible materials and bold, out-of-scale forms. At the Milan-based gallery Oxilia, Ludovico Grantaliano’s lamps are reconfigurable artisanal systems, designed and crafted by hand in every detail, combining high-tech languages with natural elements such as shells.

Within this diversity of forms and approaches, other areas of design practice seem distant—first and foremost industrial design, even though some of the designers featured at Collectible can boast collaborations with companies devoted to mass production. It is instead a space for experimentation with great freedom, as perfectly demonstrated by the sixty young designers in the Curated section, invited to explore the theme of memory by transforming a desire to play and subvert rules into tangible forms. One example is the sofa from the Invert collection, born from the collaboration between Alan Prekop and Sebastian Komaček, where it is not the rubber structure that welcomes the body, but a niche formed by bent metal profiles.

“As a fair, we represent a platform,” Liv Vaisberg continues. “We connect people, along with journalists, curators, and all kinds of professionals. Our calendar never coincides with design weeks or other industry events because we truly want to focus on collectible design and the dialogue it can generate. That is our deliberate stance.”

Yet it is precisely in this stance that the paradox of the sector emerges: the more it grows, the more it resists stable definition. Perhaps collectible design is not fully understood because it does not want to be, at least not entirely. And it is precisely within this ambiguity—between object and research, between function and narrative—that it continues to find its strength.