Paris slips into its most magnetic mood each September when Paris Design Week takes over the city. From 4 to 13 September 2025, the French capital offers a ten-day glide between heritage, experimentation and discovery becoming a vast parcours, connecting museums, intimate ateliers, and pop-up salons with Maison&Objet anchoring it all. The rhythm is clear: mornings at the fair, afternoons drifting through the city’s quartiers, evenings folding into openings, gatherings, and late-night conversations over drinks.
Maison&Objet itself, running 4–8 September at Villepinte, is the compass point. The fair’s halls set the tone, with the “Talks” programme outlining where interiors, hospitality and retail are heading, while the Factory zones spotlight emerging designers still shaping their language. Back in Paris, visitors can follow an elegant route of nearly five hundred addresses, like a curated labyrinth, and a way to feel the pulse of both tradition and experimentation in one sweep. The motto is: less spectacle, more discovery!
The museums, too, extend the conversation. At the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, “Bamboo: From Motif to Object” runs through mid-September, turning a single material into a meditation on craft, pattern, and transformation. In the heart of the museum, “Paul Poiret : la mode est une fête” (Fashion Is a Celebration), unfolds as a lavish homage to the man who liberated the female silhouette and elevated fashion into spectacle. Spread across two floors and featuring roughly 550 works, including garments, accessories, decorative arts, photographs, and posters, it is the museum’s first full-scale monograph dedicated to the couturier. Fun fact: Poiret was a design devotee and a close friend of André Groult, with whom he conceived his super-luxurious yacht. Groult, a master of straw marquetry, was also the grandfather of today’s virtuoso, Lison de Caunes. A few metro stops away, the Centre Pompidou offers a scale shift: Wolfgang Tillmans’s carte blanche installation spreads across 6,000 square metres until 22 September. Photographs, sound, and spatial interventions bleed into one another, creating an immersive pause before the museum enters its renovation cycle. Speaking of museums that underwent heavy restoration, the Grand Palais is back to its former splendor (and will host some of the Centre Pompidou’s future exhibitions), its fantastic structure now graced with a gigantic “curtain” created by the Maisons d’Art de la Mode et de la Décoration from Le 19M, Chanel’s hub for savoir-faire. This spectacular Rideau de Lumière (“curtain of light”) is the most accomplished example of the genius and skill of ultra-talented specialty creators, including Studio MTX. Finally, when the city’s brouhaha becomes too much, one can seek refuge in Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s meditative installation: hundreds of ceramic bowls drifting and colliding across a basin of blue water, releasing magical sounds with every touch. Now on view at Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection.
There are also some favorite book haunts… When looking for an artist’s book, we never fail to stop by Librairie Yvon Lambert — if only to grab that last available copy of Diagrams, a project by amo/oma, inked with Rem Koolhaas’ words of wisdom and sponsored by Fondazione Prada. From there, we might spend some time at OFR, leafing through thousands of photobooks and the occasional underground fashion or design magazine. For those still mourning the book section at Colette, solace might be found at the Palais de Tokyo Library, where shelves and book tables are filled with the most confidential artists’ books and zines from every corner of the world. Hardcore bibliophiles should wander into the famed Parisian passages and head to Galerie Vivienne, to step into Jousseaume, a 200-year-old library that just might hold that rare first edition you’ve been dreaming of… On your way to Invisible Collection Rive Gauche, make a stop at our friends’ 7L. Karl Lagerfeld’s brainchild lives on in the spirit of its much-regretted founder — with its highly eclectic selection and bespoke book curation services. (FYI: The only 7L outpost outside Paris is housed at Invisible Collection New York, our gallery on the Upper East Side).
