Inside the creative musical world of Matéo Garcia, in-demand shaper of sound

Prince’s ‘17 days’ is cascading through a stark white tent in central Paris. Guests at the Celine S/S 2026 show sit like churchgoers on long benches with crossed legs and serious expressions. As 70 looks by new creative director Michael Rider zoom in and out of our perspective, we’re taken on a hopscotch through music history – from 1980s pop to gospel-soul classic ‘Like a Ship…(Without a Sail)’ by Pastor TL Barrett and the Youth for Christ Choir.

Looming at each end of the catwalk are substantial wood and metal speakers, adding some retro warmth to what could otherwise feel like a void-like space.

'Music is incredibly important to Michael Rider. For this show, he had gathered photos from recording studios in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as from theatres and early talking cinemas of the 1930s and 1940s, where speakers were a prominent feature,' Matéo Garcia, the designer behind the speakers, tells me later. 'Since these are references I myself have had for a long time, it felt like the perfect collaboration.'

Matéo Garcia: a life in music and creativity

Growing up in a family of creatives (his grandfather was a contemporary of Joan Miró in Spain, his father an ex-punk and abstract painter in Paris, and his mother a contact improvisational dancer) Garcia’s home was a place of paintbrushes, music, and movement. Techno, jungle, reggae and hip hop were blasted from the speakers at all hours of the day, and his father more or less banned pop and other forms of commercial music.

‘They were free-thinkers, always questioning the status quo, and it affected me. I always destroyed my toys because I was frustrated with the limits of the design and wanted to put them back together in ways that made more sense to me,' he says.

During his teens, he ventured out at night to graffiti around Paris, and in his early twenties, while studying drawing and then industrial design at ENSCI-Les Ateliers, he began designing speakers and founded the collective Manifart. With lots of energy to shake off and bored with what they saw as a stale Parisian nightlife, they wanted to shake things up.

'The nightlife industry had smoothed out most clubs in Paris: you’d find the same kinds of bars, the same drinks, overpriced cloakrooms, and bad techno,' he notes. ‘Museums and official exhibition spaces didn’t excite us either. There was no real freedom or experimentation. We wanted to subvert expectations and have art and nightlife meet in unexpected ways.'

The collective found abandoned buildings and squats all over the city, knocked down walls and made new, creative entrances, invited artists, architects and designers to exhibit their work, and sprinkled experimental music and techno onto the evening. Trying to solve the problem of police shutting down the parties by cutting the music, Garcia created speakers embedded in concrete walls or welded steel cages and fixed them to the floor.

'We were really part of a movement of collectives around 2010, with people always pushing the boundaries, all having different approaches, but inspiring each other,' he recalls. 'I think it has led to Paris being very different today. There’s far more variety.'

After graduation, he did a long stint as what he describes with a shrug as a 'traditional designer', while continuing to keep a sound system in his workshop and experiment with speakers from time to time. Slowly, but steadily, word started spreading, and he got booked to provide sound systems for events or create custom speakers for clients and brands.

'There’s been an interesting change when it comes to speakers,' he says. 'When we grew up, they were becoming smaller and smaller, less and less visible. They were hidden in the walls and the ceilings, came mostly in black and white, and were very sleek.'

More recently, though, he’s observed a big shift: 'For a long time, there wasn’t a specific place in the home dedicated to speakers, but now I think that’s changing. The bigger speakers are coming back. And since sound itself is invisible, there’s something nice about having a visible aspect to sound.'

Sound and design collaboration with Celine

His studio only had three weeks to sketch and produce the speakers for the Celine show. Not wanting to create exact replicas of the speakers in Rider’s reference photos, they came up with an array of totally original designs.

'We sought to blend strong, very early historical references with more contemporary technologies,' he explains. 'Radical, functional forms, yet with a certain softness and delicacy. I like that combination. It’s also interesting to me that the word for speaker is the same as the word for pregnant in French. There’s an entire world inside it (a sense of containment) with many elements coming together to create something.'

The visible speakers provided the main source of sound, with smaller speakers adorning the lights and the floor. 'We wanted to figure out how everyone attending the show could experience the same fantastic sound, no matter where they were seated. Afterwards, I’ve heard from several people that it was the best sound they’ve ever experienced at an event, which was incredible feedback, of course.'

Now it’s all systems go on the numerous projects they had to press pause on for Michael Rider and Celine. Since the fashion show, they’ve provided the sound system for a listening session with James Blake arranged by the collective Mino at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, on the occasion of the release of Blake’s Trying Times album.

'It was an honour, especially since he is known to be very precise about his mastering,' says Garcia. 'Our goal is to develop systems that remain as faithful as possible to the artist’s original work. The listening experience was very emotional.'

Later in 2026, Garcia and his team will continue to expand their range of high-end speakers, produced in extremely limited series, while also working on a more intimate and discreet dedicated listening space in Paris. With a calendar constantly filled from edge to edge, Garcia hopes to carve out time to keep exploring. 'We always want to push ourselves and be innovative, but I also need time for sculptural experimentation and research. That’s a goal going forward.'

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