#louis-icart

#louis-icart

Hector Guimard's distinctive designs are well known - even if his name isn't. His signature work, the Paris Métro entrances, are classic examples of Art Nouveau, characterized by their elegant flowing lines, floral ornamentation, geometric forms, and mythical symbolism, taking inspiration from nature.

The texture of the material and the handcrafted quality were aspects that particularly interested them. The challenge was to translate my style from stone to paper.

Schiaparelli's timeless designs spun glamor out of the avant-garde, showcasing a unique blend of high fashion and artistic expression that continues to inspire.

Naked mermaids and prancing horses, silk carrots and unshelled peanuts, gilded elephant trunks, drums and masks are just a few of the buttons. The V&A's lavish spring show is a weird and wonderful tumble down the rabbit hole that is Schiaparelli, fashion's house of surrealism.

There's Portugal, Brittany, Vendée, Egypt, and Damascus. He also has a place in Los Angeles. And there's Vermelho Melides, the boutique hotel in Portugal, that he designed and opened in 2023, and its new beachside mate, scheduled to be ready this summer.

At the official launch last November, the current culture minister Rachida Dati described the imperative behind the programme as not just celebrating an uncommon visionary but the "burning relevance" of his legacy: "a commitment to continuing to nurture this demanding idea of what culture is".

Cubism and Reality is his return to the works by Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris that define early Cubism. The book has many strands but turns around a highly informed reconstruction of the processes by which their interactions with reality resulted in physical works of art, what Green terms "material things to be looked at". The revolutionary works discussed remain visually difficult; as he acknowledges, they are "most often only slowly penetrated by looking, imagining, reflecting and looking again".

Regardless of the address, the revered fashion designer always, unabashedly, combined old with new, shedding fresh light on various historical design movements and their most important pioneers. Most of these homes have been the subject of expansive magazine print features and the fodder of tabloid headlines but little focus has ever really been placed on his workspaces.

Styling by Axelle using fashion by Nazarene Amictus, Victoria Amerson Design GmbH, Mossi, and Vintage pieces. The assistant stylist is Evan. The series explores the idea of haste and unintentional disorder in Paris, the moment when you rush downstairs, almost forgetting your trousers, because every minute counts. This sense of urgency, this I don't have time, becomes an aesthetic language. In Paris, style isn't calculated, and yet, nothing is ever left to chance.

There's something about trendspotting in France that just hits differently. Maybe it's the Haussmannian architecture, which provides such a charming backdrop that you almost don't even notice you're literally running from showroom to showroom. Or maybe it's the fact that some of the brands on display truly are new - and in some cases, not even available stateside yet. Whatever the reason, I look forward to Maison&Objet and Paris Déco Off, two furniture- and textile-forward events in Paris, each January.

The longer we wait, the more difficult it will become to remedy the damage. Since 2019, state funding had all but dried up, forcing the foundation to auction works to raise funds to continue the restoration of both the iconic building and its many site-specific works.

In the 1880s Seurat was the leader of the avant-garde group of painters who used pointillist dots of pure colour to create their pictures. The eye blends Seurat's colours harmoniously, giving his paintings a luminosity and vigour.

The question of how fashion is archived - what enters the museum; what is deemed worthy of preservation; whose clothes are considered culturally significant enough to outlast the bodies that wore them - has long sat uneasily at the centre of fashion history itself. Institutions have tended to answer it, or ignore it, in much the same way: couture gowns under glass, luxury garments mounted on conservation-grade mannequins in blockbuster exhibitions - an implicit hierarchy of the designed over the worn, the authored over the anonymous.

Running from March 17 to July 19, 2026, Renoir and Love will be one of the top special exhibitions of the year in Paris. Celebrating how affection, connection and human relationships shaped Renoir's work during a defining period of his career. Bringing many key works together for the first time in decades, the exhibition offers a fresh perspective on how Renoir approached love not as an abstract ideal, but as something lived and experienced within the changing social life of late-19th-century Paris.

Georges Seurat was a French post-Impressionist best known for a technique later dubbed pointillism: painting not with expressive brushstrokes, but by patiently placing thousands of tiny dots onto the surface. Rather than mixing colours on a palette, Seurat relied on the viewer's eye to do the work. The dots optically blend at a distance, creating the colour and light he intended.

The foundation's collection is exceptionally large, encompassing more than 10,000 items-including thousands of drawings, over 400 sculptures, 100 paintings, a whole collection of decorative objets d'art, prints, everything that was in the studio, all the archives. Most of the collection has never been exhibited.