From archival fashion & photography to wild duck … A Week in Paris
Celebrating life in Paris, Paris Makers, and the strange, new, true and beautiful – forever !
🦆 With the hunting season in France coming to a close at the end of the month, it’s your last chance for a while to taste the signature dish at Le Canard Sauvage, the bright, modern table quietly devoted to game and other robust flavours from young Brit chef Jack Bosco Baker (ex La Vierge) that’s got Paris buzzing. If you’re lucky you might even find some shot left in the wild duck! Elsewhere on the bold seasonal menu, perhaps carpaccio of scallops, bergamot and agretti, or veal tartare, colatura, horseradish and radicchio. The cocktails and aperitifs are top-notch too. 14 Boulevard de Strasbourg, 75010 Paris
📚 The Galerie du Jour presents As Far As You Can See, the first French retrospective devoted to the publications of the Dutch artist, designer and curator Erik Kessels, in collaboration with his Paris-based publisher RVB Books. Spanning nearly 30 years, the exhibition brings together around a 100 works in which Kessels revives found amateur photographs to uncover their narrative, anthropological and emotional charge, questioning how images circulate, repeat and endure. A selection of books by Kessels featured in the exhibition, including Incomplete Encyclopedia of Touch and MAN, recently published by RVB Books, are available to buy onsite, at the Librairie du Jour. And watch Erik Kessels discussing some of his favourite books here:
🖼️ Semiose gallery – which, btw, took over Agnès b’s former rue Quincampoix Galerie du Jour in 2020 – has just opened a second space next door at 42. A sign of the gallery’s growing momentum, the expansion comes shortly after their artist Xie Lei won the 2025 Prix Marcel Duchamp. The new project space launches with Françoise Pétrovitch’s Très exactement, a collaboration with writer Marie Darrieussecq, where ink washes and prose mingle across isolated landscapes, birds and absent figures, as Semiose continues to champion underground cultures, and forms and ideas born on the political, social and geographical fringes. 42 rue Quincampoix, 75001 Paris
👗 Cult vintage fashion showroom INSITU has moved to a ground-floor space in the courtyard at 13 rue Chapon, behind Parcelles restaurant, and is now open to the public. Olivier Châtenet, alongside protégé Angèle, presents a seasonal edit of vintage designer pieces mainly from the 70s–90s, ranging from Gianfranco Ferré to Giorgio Armani, Versace, Issey Miyake, Alaïa and of course Yves Saint Laurent. Châtenet’s authority is hard to overstate: a former designer, creative director and obsessive collector, he assembled a 4,000-piece YSL collection (1966–1985), acquired by the fashion house itself in 2020. A rare chance to access serious fashion history, quietly and up close.
📸 And finally, on the centenary of her birth, and following the 2022 retrospective at the Musée du Luxembourg, Vivian Maier returns to Paris with a new exhibition at Les Douches la Galerie, which has championed her work for more than a decade. Underscoring Maier’s enduring attention to urban rhythms, ordinary gestures and marginal figures, the show Rue Vivian Maier invites a sensitive, formal reading of her streetscapes, fleeting faces, architectural fragments and subtle plays of light, demonstrating the coherence and modernity of a body of work now recognized as central to 20th‑century photography.
Thanks for reading :)
Kate x
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).