Philippe Starck is one of the defining designers of the late twentieth century, a figure whose work helped shape the visual language of the 1980s and beyond. Today, that period has become part of the Puces de Saint-Ouen itself, where dealers such as Remix Gallery specialize in design from the 1980s onwards, an increasingly important part of the market, alongside the antiques on which the Puces built its reputation. Yet Starck’s attachment to the Puces has little to do with collecting.

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🪨 Final week to catch ‘Guest House’, the Paris takeover by Milan-based art-world internet phenomenon The Pink Lemonade at Item Idem. Founded by Italian artist Francesco Vullo, the project began as an Instagram art page before morphing into a kind of virtual museum gift shop for the online art crowd. Bringing its digital universe into physical space for the first time in France, the exhibition mixes all sorts of collectible oddities by artists including Corrina Goutos, Julia Obermaier and Andrew Orloski, alongside pieces by our Parisian friends We Do Not Work Alone and of course, the inspired host Item Idem.

🌚 After Los Angeles, New York, Shanghai and London, the sprawling exhibition Beyond the Streets arrives at La Villette’s Grande Halle tomorrow, tracing how graffiti moved from subway cars to museums while reshaping cities, language, music and global visual culture along the way. The Paris edition places special focus on the city’s own graffiti history, with for example FUTURA 2000 and André, while a gift shop conceived with our very own Sarah Andelman offers special editions and collabs throughout the run.

🎮 From 8-bit bleeps to full symphonic scores, a new exhibition Video Games & Music at the Philharmonie de Paris explores how video game music evolved into one of the defining soundtracks of contemporary life. Designed like an open-world game, the exhibition invites visitors to move freely through immersive installations, playable consoles, cult soundtracks, instruments, archives and around twenty games tracing the history of the genre, from Pong onwards.
(For French-speakers, you can watch this intro by the exhibition commissioners.)

🎈 Already all over Instagram despite not officially opening until 6 June, JR’s La Caverne du Pont Neuf reimagines Paris’s oldest bridge as a cave that pays tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s magnificent 1985 project The Pont Neuf Wrapped (which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2025). Free and open to all 24/7, the inflatable work transforms the bridge into a free public art work, visible from multiple vantage points. Two spaces selling merch are already open: at La Samaritaine’s Loulou, and Merci / Le Vieux Campeur.

🏆And finally, on Saturday, it’s the Champions League final! Arsenal face Paris Saint-Germain at the Puskás Aréna in Budapest, with PSG arrive as reigning champions, chasing back-to-back titles after a dramatic semi-final win over Bayern Munich, while Arsenal return to Europe’s biggest stage for the first time in 20 years. Paris is set to erupt, with fans across the city preparing for a huge night.

See you there!

Kate

[ BOOK RELEASE ] The Ofr. Paris Cookbook, a collab between Mkrs. and my friends at 0fr., celebrates the joy, ritual and radical hospitality of the Parisian table.

Welcome to Paris, Puces. on Substack. Expect the best of : LIFE IN PARIS 🇫🇷 each week, plus expert intel and tips from the world’s most epic FLEA MARKET✨ Art, Fashion, Design !

On Mondays: Life in Paris postcards - a curated mix of sights, bites and delights, celebrating Paris Makers, and the strange, new, true, and beautiful, forever!

On Fridays: Flea market intel - in-depth guides, behind-the-scenes stories and practical tips (this content is now paywalled, but Life in Paris remains free).

👉🏽 After years exploring the Puces de Saint-Ouen and researching for my book ‘The Paris Flea Market’, I now share that insider knowledge through bespoke buying and research tours – for collectors, decorators, architects, or anyone who wants to explore the markets with a deeper eye. Hit me up!

Share

This interview is excerpted from The Paris Flea Market (Prestel, 2024), described the New York Times as “a celebration of the culture, history and oddball treasures of the market”.

A second-hand dealer whose stand occupies a prime position at the entrance to the Marché Vernaison, Damien Vannienwenhove continues a family history at the Puces, taking over a space first run by his father, himself a dealer.

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🗿 “Open this issue at random and imbue the image or word you encounter with an unknown power”, invites the Profane team. Launching Thu, issue n°22 has something slightly divine and prophetic about it – a desire to distance itself from harsh reality and invent a world where believing, wanting to believe and consciously dreaming become creative acts. One of Paris’s most singular indie mags, Profane is a biannual publication dedicated not to the art world proper, but to the figure of the amateur: obsessive collectors, outsiders, self-taught or weekend artists working far from official circuits. (6-8pm, Librairie Sans Titre, 143 av. Parmentier, 75010)

⚕️ Inside the little-known MAHHSA museum of Sainte-Anne hospital, a major psychiatric and neuroscience hospital in the 14th, an exhibition presents 145 drawings and paintings created between 1858 and 2020 by artist-patients, psychiatric patients turned artists, and artists engaging with psychiatry. Works by recognized figures such as Aloïse Corbaz, Unica Zürn and Maurice Blin sit alongside anonymous creations, regrouped through themes of refuge, imaginary worlds, symbolism and adventure – offering a fresh reading of the museum’s collection of outsider art.

🍽️ The historic Le Grand Véfour on the Palais-Royal enters a new chapter with chef Bruno Doucet now in the kitchens, following the departure of Guy Martin after 34 years, and the sale of the institution to the Paris Society group. A pivotal figure in Parisian bistronomy, Doucet built his reputation outside Michelin circuits at La Régalade, before also taking over Le Comptoir du Relais from his friend Yves Camdeborde. At the Grand Véfour, his ambition is to turn the 240-year-old institution into what he calls a “luxury brasserie”. The opening menu stays close to his bistro DNA while nodding to the grandeur of the setting – pâté en croûte, foie gras with smoked eel, poached skate with confit potatoes and caviar beurre blanc, and pigeon with petits pois à la française.

👖 Atelier Tuffery brings its French denim heritage – made in the Cévennes since 1892 – to Paris with a new Marais boutique (39 rue des Blancs-Manteaux, 75004). Across four generations, the family house has helped turn workwear into a wardrobe staple, still producing its jeans in Florac with a focus on durability and longevity. More atelier than flagship, the space offers tailoring, alterations and repair services, extending the life of every piece it sells.

🎭 And finally, inscriptions open Thu at 2.30pm for a rare public sale at the Opéra National de Paris, where more than 5,000 stage costumes and accessories from iconic opera and ballet productions will be made available to the public, with prices ranging from €2 to €800. From Les Indes galantes to Eugène Onéguine, Coppélia to Siddharta, pieces from landmark stagings by Robert Carsen, Thomas Jolly, Angelin Preljocaj and others will be available across three days (29–31 May) at the Opéra Bastille.

Thanks for reading :)

Kate

[ BOOK RELEASE ] The Ofr. Paris Cookbook, a collab between Mkrs. and my friends at 0fr., celebrates the joy, ritual and radical hospitality of the Parisian table. We’ve invited 25 special guests – our friends, collaborators and heroes – to share a recipe, and reflect in a thoughtful Q&A on their relationship to food, cooking and life around the table. The book reveals the city in surprising ways – open, diverse, globally connected, and alive with possibility!

👉🏽 In stock at 0fr., other good bookshops in France, and on French Amazon

Welcome to Paris, Puces. on Substack. Expect the best of : LIFE IN PARIS 🇫🇷 each week, plus expert intel and tips from the world’s most epic FLEA MARKET✨ Art, Fashion, Design !

On Mondays: Life in Paris postcards - a curated mix of sights, bites and delights, celebrating Paris Makers, and the strange, new, true, and beautiful, forever!

On Fridays: Flea market intel - in-depth guides, behind-the-scenes stories and practical tips (this content is now paywalled, but Life in Paris remains free).

👉🏽 After years exploring the Puces de Saint-Ouen and researching for my book ‘The Paris Flea Market’, I now share that insider knowledge through bespoke buying and research tours – for collectors, decorators, architects, or anyone who wants to explore the markets with a deeper eye. Hit me up!

Charles Mas makes the business of the second-hand dealer something closer to a laboratory for turning junk into poetry. His two stands at the Marché Vernaison are part inventory, part installation, part philosophical prank.

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🎂 Founded in Belleville in 1936 and still entirely family-owned, French tennis shoe brand Spring Court is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year! Festivities include a capsule of its iconic G2 model (the same model worn by John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their wedding in Gibraltar btw), and to launch the capsule – available in 4 bright monochromes – Spring Court has unveiled this joyful campaign starring retired dancers Jo Ann Endicott, Elisabeth Clarke and Lutz Förster of Tanztheater Wuppertal, longtime collaborators of Pina Bausch. It feels fitting for a brand whose greatest luxury, according to the three Grimmeisen sisters now running the company, remains “independence”.
PS Florence, Laura & Théodora Grimmeisen of Spring Court are featured in Makers Paris 2 (Ofr. Editions).

🍷 Coffee shop by day, wine bar by night, La Cordonnerie is an understated new place set up by seasoned chef duo Jonathan Schweizer (Café Les Deux Gares, Le Goncourt) and Nora Hauber, out in the Gambetta neighbourhood. The simple, flavour-driven menu riffs on smørrebrød from Hauber’s German heritage – pickles with dill butter, obatzda with smoked paprika, rillettes, anchovies with beetroot and horseradish, sauerkraut and crème crue, and taleggio with endive and pear – paired with a curated list of “very natural” wines. Fun.

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⚽ Our friends the Paris Makers Macon & Lesquoy have transformed their workshop a few steps from Place des Vosges into an atelier-boutique open to the public. Both shop and creative studio, the space offers a curated selection of rare embroidered pieces, including one-off samples and fashion items customized in-house, alongside the new collab with Paris Saint-Germain, arriving just in time for the Champions League final between PSG and Arsenal at the end of the month! 3 rue Saint-Gilles.

✨ Now on view at the Grand Palais, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Temple (1906–1915) marks the first major monographic exhibition in France dedicated to the pioneering abstract artist, whose work radically reshapes the chronology of modern art. Trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, she developed in parallel a conventional figurative practice and a secret, spiritually driven abstract body of work informed by theosophy and spiritualism. Long predating Kandinsky and Malevich, her bold geometric compositions – first revealed to the public in 1986 – reassert her place at the origins of abstraction.

📸 And finally, our friends Eddie and Virginie of Fotoautomat – who save and operate some of the last black-and-white analogue photo booths in the world – have unveiled a first digital + colour booth, marking a new chapter for their project. Open at 4 rue Androuet, just around the corner from their original Montmartre location – opp. the cult grocery in Amélie Poulain – the luxe new booth introduces warm-toned, high-end prints on thick fine-art paper, housed in a custom-built solid oak storefront. And of course, our favourite booth, their first, remains proudly in place at the Palais de Tokyo. Open daily 8am-11pm.

Thanks for reading :)

Kate

[ BOOK RELEASE ] The Ofr. Paris Cookbook, a collab between Mkrs. and my friends at 0fr., celebrates the joy, ritual and radical hospitality of the Parisian table. We’ve invited 25 special guests – our friends, collaborators and heroes – to share a recipe, and reflect in a thoughtful Q&A on their relationship to food, cooking and life around the table. The book reveals the city in surprising ways – open, diverse, globally connected, and alive with possibility!

👉🏽 In stock at 0fr., other good bookshops in France, and on French Amazon

Welcome to Paris, Puces. on Substack. Expect the best of : LIFE IN PARIS 🇫🇷 each week, plus expert intel and tips from the world’s most epic FLEA MARKET✨ Art, Fashion, Design !

On Mondays: Life in Paris postcards - a curated mix of sights, bites and delights, celebrating Paris Makers, and the strange, new, true, and beautiful, forever!

On Fridays: Flea market intel - in-depth guides, behind-the-scenes stories and practical tips (this content is now paywalled, but Life in Paris remains free).

👉🏽 After years exploring the Puces de Saint-Ouen and researching for my book ‘The Paris Flea Market’, I now share that insider knowledge through bespoke buying and research tours – for collectors, decorators, architects, or anyone who wants to explore the markets with a deeper eye. Hit me up!

Anaïs Romand is a multi-award-winning costume designer who has created costumes for 49 films and counting, and the Puces is one of her essential working tools. Far from being a simple source of inspiration, the Puces function for her as a working archive – a place of research and sourcing, especially for the historical films that make up a large part of her work. I literally bumped into Anaïs at the Puces, on the Falbalas stand, while researching this book. That chance encounter led to a conversation, and eventually to her opening the doors of her atelier and generously sharing her working world.

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This interview is excerpted from my book The Paris Flea Market (Prestel, 2024), described the New York Times as “a celebration of the culture, history and oddball treasures of the market”.

With a gallery in the Carré Rive Gauche and a presence at leading design fairs such as the PAD, Aurélien Serre belongs to a generation of dealers who move fluidly between the Puces and the wider international design scene. At the Marché Serpette, his stand – in fact three adjoining stands – unfolds like a sequence of interiors, each carefully composed, where rare pieces from the 1960s and 70s converse across material, form and scale. Trained in architecture and shaped by early experiences in the collectible design world, Serre combines both rigor and instinct, bringing together rare design icons and anonymous pieces of equal character and style. His practice is defined as much by sourcing as by restoration: each object passes through the hands of skilled craftsmen, with upholstery playing a central, almost intuitive role in the final result. The choice of fabric, colour and texture becomes a decisive moment – one that can shift the perception of a piece entirely. At the Puces, where standards continue to rise, his work reflects a broader evolution toward more curated, gallery-like presentations. Beyond the individual object, it is the dialogue between pieces – and the atmosphere they create together – that lies at the heart of his approach.

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🎪 Celebrating the centenary of the artist’s arrival in France, and 50 years since his death, a sweeping retrospective now on view at the Fondation Louis Vuitton brings together nearly 300 works tracing Alexander Calder’s lifelong exploration of movement as a kind of “fourth dimension” of sculpture. The exceptional survey returns to Calder’s deep ties with France, where he arrived in 1926 and quickly became part of the Paris avant-garde in Montparnasse. It was here that he created his now-legendary Cirque Calder – on loan from the Whitney – a miniature circus that feels like the origin point of his entire universe. Don’t miss!

💌 New on the Palais-Royal, a luxury stationery boutique from Paris maker Ramdane Touhami. Papier Royal aims to revive the lost art of printed correspondence, channeling the spirit of 17th-century French scribe Charles Mavelot. Papier Royal offers bespoke monograms, business cards and stationery produced on historic machines – embossing, stamping and letterpress presses – sourced from the historic printing workshops Touhami has acquired over the years in France and beyond. The company’s slogan, Materiam Superat Opus, taken from Ovid’s poem Metamorphoses, translates as “the work surpasses the material” and reflects Touhami’s dedication to craft and the handmade.

🎸 The party continues for the legendary Bus Palladium, which has just reopened as a hybrid 5-star hotel, club and restaurant, with owner Christian Casmèze partnering with the Chapitre Six group. A temple of Parisian rock in the 1960s–80s – Mick Jagger celebrated his birthday there in 1966 – the venue has been completely reimagined by our friends Studio KO, who has layered brutalist form over the ghost of the original club, blurring its rock DNA with contemporary luxury. The restaurant is overseen by chef Valentin Raffali, who signs a short seasonal menu centred on exceptional French produce, running from breakfast through to late-night service at the bar.

🐻 Coinciding with her major survey currently on view at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, 91-year-old British artist Rose Wylie celebrates her first solo show in Paris, Henri, Egypt… Bette, Bear at David Zwirner. The exhibition of new and recent canvases, multi-panel works and works on paper reflects her long fascination with Henri Rousseau – reworking his dreamlike imagery through her own collage-like language of pop culture, memory and art history. At the centre is Homage to Henri, Bette and Bear, where Rousseau’s painting Unpleasant Surprise is reframed in Wylie’s signature mix of wit, distortion and visual storytelling. The cherry on the cake? The original painting is on view at the Musée de l’Orangerie, part of its current Rousseau exhibition.

🎬 And finally, the 2026 Cannes Film Festival programme is now fully set, with final additions completing a line-up that already signals an interesting year under jury president Park Chan-wook. James Gray’s Paper Tiger, starring Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, joins Competition, while Pedro Almodóvar returns with Bitter Christmas and Ira Sachs presents the musical fantasy The Man I Love. Queer slasher film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun and produced by Mubi, will open Un Certain Regard, while the more crowd-pleasing French film La Vénus Électrique from Pierre Salvadori opens the festival, hors compétition. And like each year, Paris stays in step with the Croisette with Le Louxor screening the opening film in sync with Cannes, on 12 May, preceded by a live red carpet broadcast.

Thanks for reading :)

Kate

[ BOOK RELEASE ] The Ofr. Paris Cookbook, a collab between Mkrs. and my friends at 0fr., celebrates the joy, ritual and radical hospitality of the Parisian table. We’ve invited 25 special guests – our friends, collaborators and heroes – to share a recipe, and reflect in a thoughtful Q&A on their relationship to food, cooking and life around the table. The book reveals the city in surprising ways – open, diverse, globally connected, and alive with possibility!

👉🏽 In stock at 0fr., other good bookshops in France, and on French Amazon

Welcome to Paris, Puces. on Substack. Expect the best of : LIFE IN PARIS 🇫🇷 each week, plus expert intel and tips from the world’s most epic FLEA MARKET✨ Art, Fashion, Design !

On Mondays: Life in Paris postcards - a curated mix of sights, bites and delights, celebrating Paris Makers, and the strange, new, true, and beautiful, forever!

On Fridays: Flea market intel - in-depth guides, behind-the-scenes stories and practical tips (this content will eventually be paywalled, but Life in Paris will remain free).

👉🏽 After years exploring the Puces de Saint-Ouen and researching for my book ‘The Paris Flea Market’, I now share that insider knowledge through bespoke buying and research tours – for collectors, decorators, architects, or anyone who wants to explore the markets with a deeper eye. Hit me up!

Share

Jacques Garcia is one of France’s most celebrated interior designers, known for his opulent, historically layered style and for shaping some of the world’s most lavish hotels, restaurants and private residences. From the game-changing Hôtel Costes in Paris to landmark projects in New York, Marrakech and beyond, he has built a global reputation for theatrical, deeply referential interiors where comfort, drama and historical imagination collide. That same sensibility extends to Château du Champ de Bataille in Normandy, the vast Baroque estate he restored and continues to inhabit as a kind of living laboratory of decorative history – a private world where centuries of style are not preserved but actively re-staged. He is also working on the revival of Le Palace, the legendary nightclub that defined late-1970s and early-1980s Paris as its answer to Studio 54, where nightlife became performance art, inaugurated by Grace Jones’s iconic rendition of La Vie en Rose. Across these different worlds runs a single constant: a way of reading culture through accumulation, atmosphere and fragments. It is this same instinct that finds its most natural expression at the Puces de Saint-Ouen, a place Garcia returns to not as a nostalgic refuge, but as a living archive of forms, where eras overlap freely and where his own visual language feels most at home.

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This interview is excerpted from my book The Paris Flea Market (Prestel, 2024), described the New York Times as “a celebration of the culture, history and oddball treasures of the market”.

A duo in life and work, Valérie Bouvier and Antoine Nouvet have been at the helm of Remix Gallery at the Marché Paul-Bert since 2015, among the first dealers at the Puces to champion 1980s design and contribute to its wider reappraisal. Their stand reflects a shared sensibility shaped by that decade’s visual culture – bold, inventive and irreverent – alongside a deep knowledge of its key figures, in France and beyond, from Philippe Starck and Andrée Putman to Alessandro Mendini. Regularly reconfigured, their display evolves with each visit, guided as much by instinct as by research, and rooted in a practice of chiner they describe, above all, as a game. Their story mirrors a broader shift at the Puces, where twentieth-century design has come to the fore, in line with evolving tastes, gradually overtaking period furniture and decorative arts, once the lifeblood of the market. Their activity extends beyond the Puces, with Remix regularly curating themed exhibitions in central Paris and participating in major design fairs such as the PAD.

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🖤 Fresh from the Tate in London, the Musée d’Art Moderne presents a retrospective of the heroic Lee Miller, tracing her journey from sought-after 1920s model in NYC to pioneering photographer. A central figure in the Parisian avant-garde, she collaborated with her lover Man Ray and appeared for example in Jean Cocteau’s surrealist opus Le Sang d’un poète (1930), while apprenticing at French Vogue, and opening her own photo studio. Spanning her full career – taking in fashion shoots, society portraits, surrealist experimentation and war reportage – the exhibition demonstrates her fearless, experimental vision. Opens Fri!

🍜 The ultimate residency at Mokoloco is currently underway before the tiny 11th arrondissement counter undergoes an exciting – and still secret – transformation. Owners Moko Hirayama and Omar Koreitem of Mokonuts will unveil a new concept there in May. Don’t miss your last chance to experience Mokoloco in its current form, where Korean chef Minsoo Kim (ex-Septime) is serving a seasonal sharing menu that blends the bold flavors of Korea with the elegance of French cuisine, until 25 April.

🍸 Out tomorrow! Cravan: Cocktails and More: Recipes from Paris (Rizzoli) a new book by Franck Audoux, Paris Maker and founder of Cravan, Paris’s most inspired bar americain. An abecedary of cocktail culture, the book features recipes for drinks and bar food alongside conversations, reflections and offbeat images, tracing the cultural influences that nourish Cravan – starting with its namesake, the surrealist Arthur Cravan, poet, boxer and provocateur.

🐖 Yves Camdeborde’s much-loved, standing-room-only wine bar/ small plates concept L’Avant-Comptoir expands to the Right Bank, now in the hands of his nephew Julien Camdeborde: Avant-Comptoir du Grouin (8 rue de Belzunce), in Thierry Breton’s former haunt near Gare du Nord, and Avant-Comptoir des Halles (49 rue Montmartre). A new generation, but the formula remains the same – raucous, convivial and unapologetically delicious – celebrating the French terroir with lots of bold nose-to-tail dishes and quality wines from independent growers. Open daily from noon to 11 pm.

🌿 Next weekend, a new festival Le Printemps des Manufactures, organized by the Mobilier National, celebrates France’s living craft heritage nationwide. Seven historic workshops – from Aubusson and Beauvais tapestries to Alençon lace – open their doors for demos, hands-on ateliers and encounters with artisans. Just outside Paris, the exceptional Manufacture nationale de Sèvres welcomes visitors to explore the secrets of porcelain-making, meet designers in residence and see centuries-old techniques reimagined today. (Sat 11 April, free entry)

Thanks for reading :)

Kate

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Welcome to Paris, Puces. on Substack. Expect the best of : LIFE IN PARIS 🇫🇷 each week, plus expert intel and tips from the world’s most epic FLEA MARKET✨ Art, Fashion, Design !

On Mondays: Life in Paris postcards - a curated mix of sights, bites and delights, celebrating Paris Makers, and the strange, new, true, and beautiful, forever!

On Fridays: Flea market intel - in-depth guides, behind-the-scenes stories and practical tips (this content will eventually be paywalled, but Life in Paris will remain free).

A design dealer with an artist’s eye, François-Xavier Courrèges approaches his stand at the Marché Paul-Bert as both curator and scenographer, composing a series of evolving “mini exhibitions” in which objects are brought into deliberate dialogue. Since opening in 2022, he has developed a distinctive language shaped by an early passion for design and a background in contemporary art. His selection, spanning the 1980s to the 2000s, moves fluidly between eras and disciplines: the expressive forms of Gaetano Pesce set against the rigour of Maarten Van Severen, alongside lighting by Gino Sarfatti or André Cazenave and occasional artist ephemera. He presents only a handful of pieces at a time — rare, sometimes unusual, often sculptural works — seeking to establish correspondences between them and to create coherent, immersive worlds.

This interview is excerpted from The Paris Flea Market (Prestel, 2024), a book that draws back the curtain on this rare place through encounters with a handful of the dealers at its heart.

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🔶 Now open at the Grand Palais, Matisse, 1941–1954 brings together over 300 works from the artist’s final years, a period of extraordinary reinvention. In his 70s and 80s, Matisse developed his now-iconic cut-outs, transforming painted paper into a bold new language of pure colour and form, without ever abandoning painting, which here reaches new levels of intensity. Conceived as an immersion into his studio, the exhibition unfolds room by room, showcasing the thrilling energy and inventiveness of his late work. Don’t miss!

🎬 The great Michel Gondry revives his cult 2002 clip for Kylie Minogue’s hit Come Into My World for the latest Chanel 25 handbag campaign. Originally filmed in a realistic looking corner of Boulogne-Billancourt, the clip saw Kylie strolling the streets, doubling and quadrupling in a hypnotic and fun choreography – now with Margot Robbie in the starring role, though with a cameo from Kylie herself, the ersatz streetscape lacks authentic Paris grit, don’t you think?

🐅 Fresh from its season at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets is now on view at the Musée de l’Orangerie. The self-taught artist, collected by Picasso and other avant-garde figures, only gained full recognition long after his death. This exhibition brings together around 50 of his dreamlike, symbolic and deeply strange paintings, showing a world both real and enchanted, primal and poetic – a celebration of the human imagination.

🎒New at the Puces, one of the founders of indie label Études Studio Jose Lamali has left the brand to open this vintage clothes stand Lamali inside Marché Dauphine (Stand 203). Part conceptual project, part nostalgia trip, these are garments as Art Brut: vintage Eastpak backpacks or denim jackets customized with band names or other teen obsessions, and channeling Lamali’s own adolescence as a skater in the late 90s. The stand is staged like a suburban house, containing all the boredom and restless energy of youth.

✏️ For Paris Drawing Week, Galerie Dina Vierny presents If You’ll Believe in Me, I’ll Believe in You, an exhibition of works on paper by the rising Catalan painter Marcel·la Barceló. Installed in Vierny’s private apartment behind the Musée Maillol, the show inhabits an intimate space once home to the trailblazing gallerist, resistance fighter, and last muse to Aristide Maillol, perfectly suited to Barceló’s otherworldly works. Founded in 1947, Galerie Dina Vierny’s original Perret-designed space on Rue Jacob remains intact, and today is run by her energetic grandsons Pierre and Alexandre Lorquin, who are opening the gallery to contemporary artists. (Visits by appointment only until 4 April.)

Thanks for reading :)

Kate

Share

Welcome to Paris, Puces. on Substack. Expect the best of : LIFE IN PARIS 🇫🇷 each week, plus expert intel and tips from the world’s most epic FLEA MARKET✨ Art, Fashion, Design !

On Mondays: Life in Paris postcards - a curated mix of sights, bites and delights, celebrating Paris Makers, and the strange, new, true, and beautiful, forever!

On Fridays: Flea market intel - in-depth guides, behind-the-scenes stories and practical tips (this content will eventually be paywalled, but Life in Paris will remain free).

Our very own Renaissance man, Ramdane Touhami, started out at the Puces de Saint-Ouen back in 1992, coming up every weekend from his native Montauban to sell his own collection of T-shirts at the Marché Malik, naturally drawn to the hustle and energy of the market and resonating with its contradictions – straddling as it does rich and poor, old and new, real and fake, French heritage and cosmopolitan melting pot. From those humble beginnings, Ramdane has built an extraordinary career, with one of his most recent achievements being the sale of Officine Universelle Buly, which he created with his wife Victoire de Taillac, to LVMH. Today, via his creative agency Art Recherche Industrie, “branding is elevated to the level of total art” for clients including Gucci, Zara and Christofle. Touhami has inspired a young generation of entrepreneurs to prioritize craft over efficiency, authenticity over trends and cultural specificity over global uniformity. Restless, ambitious, endlessly curious, he moves effortlessly across fashion, design, publishing and retail, always combining craft, politics and beauty. When he’s in Paris, you can be sure he’ll be back at the Puces, hunting for whatever feeds his current obsession.

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🥢 A new chapter for chef Adeline Grattard, who closed her Michelin-starred Yam’Tcha on Rue Saint-Honoré at the end of last year to open the more relaxed Yam’Tcha Bistrot (in her former Café Lai’Tcha space on Rue du Jour) – open since last week! The French-Chinese fusion menu ranges from steamed bao and dumplings to gourmet snacks like prawn toast (€16) or beef consommé with foie gras (€24), and on to more indulgent mains including sweetbreads with Shaoxing sauce (€48) or Bouillabaisse Yam’Tcha (€42), and with her iconic dessert of sorrel soup with orgeat sorbet. (Call to book: 01 40 26 05 05) Also note, the Yam’Tcha boutique remains open at 4 rue Sauval for fine Chinese teas and Cantonese snacks to eat in or take away.

📸 Magnum inaugurates its new Paris Gallery and Bookshop this week at 2 Impasse Delaunay. Opening Sat, the inaugural exhibition, Martin Parr: In Plain View, pays tribute to the longtime Magnum member (1952–2025), and chimes with the major survey currently on view at the Jeu de Paume. “His humour, his clarity and his vision shaped many discussions across the agency and within the wider photographic world” says Magnum co-president Lorenzo Meloni. Visitors can also preview and collect Parr’s contribution to the latest Magnum Square Print Sale, taking place this week. While on Thu, the gallery hosts a launch and signing with photographer Harry Gruyaert and film director Cédric Klapisch, celebrating Gruyaert’s latest photobook, New York.

🏢 Inaugurated at the Rencontres d’Arles last year, the @PRINT.xp project – a collaboration between chef Alexis Bijaoui, Cracki Records and Bureau Classico – lands in Paris, taking over the multi-storey former Ménilmontant telephone exchange until 7 June. It’s a playful, improvised mix of music and food, with some art and design thrown in for good measure, across six floors. The 5th-floor restaurant and terrace, led by Alexis Bijaoui with guest chefs like Antoine Villard (Dandelion) and Ella Aflalo, serves inventive seasonal menus, including a Sunday roast!; Marthe Brejon is making her sourdough pizza on the 3^rd floor in the Print’zzeria; the 4th-floor Break Room club pulses with DJ sets and party energy; plus there’s a café and bookshop, and workshops, exhibitions and installations are scattered throughout the building. Free entry!

🛍️ The Barcelona-born experimental fashion label Paloma Wool returns to Paris with a new pop-up at 51 Rue de Turenne, open through the end of the year. Part of a global tour, the space lets visitors try on pieces from the Autumn/Winter 2026 collection – anchored by the guiding narrative: “A woman with a lingering girlhood traveling the world alone, carrying a small fantastical mischievous element inside her bag” – and explore the project, which revolves around the spaces and ideas that form around the act of dressing.

🚲 And finally, Paris has a new mayor! Emmanuel Grégoire (Socialist Party) was elected last night in the second round of the municipal elections, securing a decisive victory for the united Left with over 50% of the vote. He succeeds Anne Hidalgo, who handed over the keys to the city after two terms – welcoming him at City Hall as he arrived by Vélib. With the Hôtel de Ville settled for now, attention is already shifting to the next political horizon: all eyes are on the 2027 presidential race.

Thanks for reading

Kate :)

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Welcome to Paris, Puces. on Substack. Expect the best of : LIFE IN PARIS 🇫🇷 each week, plus expert intel and tips from the world’s most epic FLEA MARKET✨ Art, Fashion, Design !

On Mondays: Life in Paris postcards - a curated mix of sights, bites and delights, celebrating Paris Makers, and the strange, new, true, and beautiful, forever!

On Fridays: Flea market intel - in-depth guides, behind-the-scenes stories and practical tips (this content will eventually be paywalled, but Life in Paris will remain free).

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Maxime de Laurentis – son and grandson of antique dealers – has held a stand at the Marché Paul-Bert since 2000, specializing in avant-garde and minimalist fashion from the 1980s through the 2000s. A former Margiela assistant stylist, he approaches each piece with the eye of a storyteller rather than a collector, privileging character over pedigree, and he never sells the same piece twice – ensuring that every visit to his stand is a wholly unique discovery. During fashion week, his stand becomes a rendezvous for collectors and designers, including his friend Hamish Bowles. Through rituals such as sweeping, arranging and burning sage and palo santo, Maxime attends to each garment’s spiritual resonance, cleansing it of its past and preparing it to embrace a new story with its next owner.

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▶ After touring Europe, Nan Goldin’s retrospective devoted to her videos and slideshows This Will Not End Well arrives in Paris, opening Wed at the Grand Palais. Now 72, the legendary American artist admits she always wanted to be a filmmaker. My slideshows are films made up of stills – immersive sequences of photographs, sound and music drawn from more than 50 years documenting life among friends, lovers and family. Installed inside a series of pavilion-like structures designed by architect Hala Wardé, the exhibition unfolds as a kind of village of intimate cinemas, presenting six of Goldin’s major works. They include The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, her magnum opus, and The Other Side, a moving tribute to the trans community she photographed from the early 1970s onward. The journey culminates across the Seine at the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière with the return of Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, Goldin’s searing installation on family trauma and the legacy of suicide, first created for the space in 2004.

🍷 Fleur Godart, longtime champion of natural wine and her father’s free-range chickens, has transformed her earlier project Vins et Volailles into Fine Fleur, a buzzing café, canteen, grocery and wine bar in Saint-Ouen, just a short stroll from the Puces. The space reflects the vision of an inspiring personality – storyteller, advocate for sustainable farming, and champion of creativity and community in Paris – and sees you through the day: morning coffee, a relaxed lunch on the sunny terrace, an afternoon snack, or a glass of wine for the apéro.

🎀 Designer Johanna de Clisson launches George Ruban Libre this week, a new mono-product brand making a single, XXL wool ribbon – 2.5 meters long and handmade in France – that can be tied as a bow, cravat or ascot. Unisex, timeless, and endlessly transformable, it turns a single gesture into an instant signature.

👗 La mode du 18e siècle. Un héritage fantasmé has just opened at the Palais Galliera, exploring women’s fashion during the Age of Enlightenment and its lasting influence on contemporary style. Over 70 garments, accessories and works of art are on display, including Marie Antoinette’s fragile corset, alongside iconic pieces by Chanel, Dior, Louis Vuitton, Vivienne Westwood and Dries van Noten – showing how 18th-century silhouettes continue to inspire haute couture, kitsch and camp alike.

🌸 And finally, the cherry trees at the Jardin des Plantes are in bloom, heralding the arrival of spring next week. A handful of spectacular Prunus – from the iconic white Shirotae along the main Perspective to the deep pink Kanzan, delicate Alba Plena, and early-flowering Oregon plum – transform the garden with their spectacular blossom and perfume, reminding us, in the spirit of the Japanese tradition of hanami, to pause and savour life’s fleeting beauty.
PS There’s other cherry trees in Paris to admire: in the Tuileries, Trocadéro, Parc de Bagatelle, Père-Lachaise, parc Martin-Luther-King, Square René-Viviani, Jardin Tino-Rossi, and the Parc des Sceaux.

Thanks for reading :)

Kate

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Welcome to Paris, Puces. on Substack. Expect the best of : LIFE IN PARIS 🇫🇷 each week, plus expert intel and tips from the world’s most epic FLEA MARKET✨ Art, Fashion, Design !

On Mondays: Life in Paris postcards - a curated mix of sights, bites and delights, celebrating Paris Makers, and the strange, new, true, and beautiful, forever!

On Fridays: Flea market intel - in-depth guides, behind-the-scenes stories and practical tips (this content will eventually be paywalled, but Life in Paris will remain free).

Originally from London, Max — who has to have one of the best names at the Puces! — is one of the few foreigners to have established himself at the Marché Paul-Bert. An instinctive ensemblier with an eye for pieces that make an immediate statement, he mixes periods and styles with confidence, privileging character over pedigree. The four suits of a deck of cards tattooed on his right hand hint at the gambler’s instinct behind the trade: knowing when to trust your eye and play your luck. In parallel with his stand, he has developed a streamlined digital sales system, previewing new collections to his mailing list every two weeks before releasing them on his website — extending the rhythm of the market into the online world.

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💻 Savvy local influencer Ly.as generated serious buzz last fashion week with his ‘watch parties’ at La Caserne. He’s back this season with an expanded program, streaming select Paris Fashion Week shows live at the 2,000-seat Théâtre du Châtelet. Tonight, the season closes with a live screening of the Chanel Autumn–Winter show (6.30-9.30pm, show at 7.30 pm). Free entry – just turn up, and brace for the queue. Secret show and after-event included.

👠 Footwear designer Nina Christen, known for her work at Loewe, Bottega Veneta and Dior, just opened a first flagship for her own-name label on the coveted Rue de la Paix, spitting distance from Place Vendôme. In contrast to the environment’s rarified luxury, the space, designed with artist Azadeh Shladovsky, is stripped back to raw concrete in a radical layout that foregrounds Christen’s handmade shoes (1250€ for a pair of stretch pony mules), while leaving room for future fashion and accessories collections.

🪑 Currently on view at Mitterrand St-Honoré gallery, Centro Fly: Ettore Sottsass & Andy Warhol reactivates the spirit of Mobili Fly, a 1966 Milan exhibition in which Sottsass presented a series of radical furniture for Poltronova – geometric cabinets, wheeled tables and anthropomorphic “robot” storage units that treated furniture less as utility than as characters in space. Here they’re set alongside a handful of Andy Warhol portraits, including a pouting Rikky von Opel, and a magnificent red Liz – revisiting a mid-60s moment when Pop art and domestic objects began to operate as icons.

🧑🏿‍🎨 And in another look to the past, the Marian Goodman gallery introduces Paris to the work of Barkley L. Hendricks (1944–2017) in a first, posthumous, solo show in Europe. Best known for his vivid oil portraits of stylish Black Americans, the exhibition spans a lifetime of explorations, from intimate photographs and landscapes to his playful, geometry-driven basketball paintings, revealing an artist who never stopped experimenting and never followed trends.

🌸 And finally, just in time for spring, our friends at the potager-restaurant Le Doyenné, just south of Paris, are now open for dinner on Mondays. Their garden is the heart of the kitchen, and seasonal micro-harvests shape the menu, complemented by the finest French game, poultry, dairy and seafood, and paired with natural wines that share the same commitment to care and integrity. Bookings are now open for March, April and May.

Thanks for reading

Kate

Welcome to Paris, Puces. on Substack. Expect the best of : LIFE IN PARIS 🇫🇷 each week, plus expert intel and tips from the world’s most epic FLEA MARKET✨ Art, Fashion, Design !

On Mondays: Life in Paris postcards - a curated mix of sights, bites and delights, celebrating Paris Makers, and the strange, new, true, and beautiful, forever!

On Fridays: Flea market intel - in-depth guides, behind-the-scenes stories and practical tips (this content will eventually be paywalled, but Life in Paris will remain free).

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