Objects & Icons On Display – A Week in Paris
Celebrating life in Paris, Paris Makers, and the strange, new, true and beautiful – forever!
Hi, and welcome to Paris, Puces. 🇫🇷
If you’d like to stay in the loop, consider subscribing. I share a weekly edit where art, fashion, design and the Puces de Saint-Ouen flea market collide.
🏋🏽♀️ Paris based fashion photographer Camille Vivier gets a first retrospective, opening today at the MEP. Best known for her surreal images that blur the boundaries between fashion and art, Vivier has spent more than two decades exploring the body, femininity and sculpture through photography. Among the highlights is her “Sophie” series, centred on a female bodybuilder whose powerful, carefully constructed physique challenges traditional ideas of beauty and identity.
🍨 Folderol, the cult natural wine and ice cream bar from Le Rigmarole founders Jessica Yang and Robert Compagnon, has just opened a second address in the 11th arrondissement, at 40 rue Faidherbe, around the corner from Clamato. Since launching in 2020, the place has become one of Paris’s most influential food spots, drawing queues for its small-batch ice creams, low-intervention wines and the unexpected but perfect pairing of the two.
🫸🏽 Surrealist Giacometti: Objects like Sculptures at the Fondation Giacometti revisits the artist’s surrealist period (1929–1935), when sculpture and functional objects were still fluid categories. Alongside key works from his time with André Breton, the exhibition brings together lamps, vases and sculptural “objects” made for designer Jean-Michel Frank, showing how Giacometti’s surrealism extended into everyday form before he turned decisively towards the human figure.
👠 Following Prada Group’s €1.25bn takeover of Versace last year, a large-scale, privately organized Gianni Versace retrospective lands at the Musée Maillol for the summer. Put together by independent curators working from a major private collection, the show gathers more than 400 looks and objects, from baroque runway excess to 90s supermodel-era iconography, tracing the house’s maximalist visual language at full volume.
📸 Daido Moriyama, now 86 years old, returns to Paris with Love Letters to Photography at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. Rather than a conventional retrospective, the exhibition follows the Japanese photographer’s lifelong fascination with the medium itself, starting with his seminal 1972 book Farewell Photography, which helped rewrite the rules of contemporary photography.
In the video below, the director of the Fondation HCB and exhibition curator Clément Chéroux talks us through the show (with English subtitles).
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 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!