The three coolest fashion exhibitions in Paris and an iconic artist who’s so hot he’s still smoking 🚬

Rick Owens, Demna, Wolfgang Tillmans, and David Hockney are all subjects of shows I saw last week in the French capital. Let's discuss.

Howdy, fashion fans! Welcome back to AND ANOTHER THING, thank you for being here.

After last week’s haute couture shows in Paris, I got home on Thursday night and hit the ground running.

On Friday, legendary beauty editor Linda Wells hosted an Air Mail cocktail at Topping Rose in Bridgehampton. Then I went for dinner at a friend’s house in East Hampton, where everyone wanted to argue about New York City’s mayoral race. Who’d have thunk we’d miss the days when Eric Adams was a punchline?

On Saturday, Cameron Diaz and Katherine Power hosted an event for Avaline, their clean wine line, with Stella McCartney, who’s a top secret Hamptons local in the summer. I also joined New York editor-in-chief David Haskell at a party for the mag’s inaugural Hamptons issue at a church-turned-art gallery in Sag Harbor. I had the divine pleasure of telling Alix Earle that, yes, the woman across the room was Candace Bushnell, the real-life Carrie Bradshaw, who wrote about sex after 60 in Sag in the issue.

Chanel hosted a dinner at Swifty’s, the new restaurant in East Hampton’s Hedges Lane hotel, to celebrate the brand’s styling suite there. (For the last two summers, Chanel had an “ephemeral location”—that’s how fancy French people say “pop-up shop”—on Newtown Lane, but Rolex took over the lease this summer.) It was my fantasy menu: soft summer peaches, steak, and s’mores. I drank three “very cold, very dirty vodka martinis with olives, no blue cheese” and met my new Pop music crush, Ashe, whose after-dinner performance charmed every single person in the room. She's in the selfie with me at the top of this newsletter.

Yesterday, I took our son Noah to his first-ever tennis lesson; he kept referring to the racket as “his bat,” which dashed my dreams of raising the next Wimbledon winner—spoiler alert?—Jannik Sinner. (But don’t worry, I’ll keep my eyes open for another avenue to be his dadager.) I left our daughter Grace with our houseguest, Mark Guiducci, Vanity Fair’s newly installed editorial director. On weekdays, he’s planning a fabulous next chapter of the illustrious Condé Nast title; on weekends, he’s a perfect Guncle:

While I’m physically back in New York, my mind keeps wandering back to all the fantastic things I saw when I was in Paris. Since Dior and Valentino didn’t have shows this season, the abbreviated fashion week schedule meant I had more time to explore the exhibitions in the French capital…

In today’s newsletter, I’m going to talk about four of them:

• Rick Owens at the Palais Galliera

• David Hockney at the Fondation Louis Vuitton

• Demna’s Balenciaga retrospective at the Kering headquarters

• and Wolfgang Tillmans’s photography survey at the Centre Pompidou

1. FIRST, I don’t own a single piece of Rick Owens clothing. I’m too vanilla, too uncool; the look is too intimidating. That said, his shows are consistently one of mine (and the rest of the fashion industry’s) most anticipated of the season. These happenings are equal parts avant-garde fashion and performance art, and the only thing more aesthetically fascinating are the people who come to them. He’s the pope of a sartorial religion, and his runways are pilgrimages for his people.

“Rick Owens: Temple of Love” is the first Paris retrospective of the king of brutalist glamour and architectural leather. (On view through January 4, 2026, at the Palais Galliera.) The exhibition spans 30 years, with over 100 runway pieces, sculptures, videos, and a recreation of Owens’s bedroom. He personally oversaw the exhibition’s layout and even designed the carpet pattern to match his signature aesthetic.

Rick has called his aesthetic “glunge”—a combination of glamorous and grunge. What I learned from his interview on Vogue’s The Run Through podcast is that he was initially afraid of doing fashion shows, which is ironic given that his shows have become famous for featuring dance troops, bubble and/or smoke machines, and other fabulous visual quirks.

While fashion exhibitions can feel like just a dress on a mannequin, Rick imbues something much bigger and grander and outrageously emotional. The word brutalist is often associated with his work, but when you spend more time with him and his clothes, you realize his strength is his vulnerability. Many of the vignettes are separated by hue, and each one has been meticulously curated with objects, influences, and references.

The show is a reminder of how Rick is a master of cut and drape, similar to Madame Grey and Charles James. The latter is an excellent reference for Rick, two geniuses who denied selling their businesses. (Rick is one of the few major brands not owned by LVMH or Kering.) But whereas James withered away in the Chelsea hotel—even though he was making divine dresses—Rick’s business has expanded, including into furniture. I hope Substack lets me publish the urinal fountain featured in the show:

What does Rick say about this fountain? “The world can be a very judgmental, condemning, and overly moralistic place. I feel a responsibility to counterbalance that with cheerful depravity.” Amen.

If you want more on Rick, check out my interview with him in Gagosian Quarterly from 2022.

2. SECOND, I made a pilgrimage to the Fondation Louis Vuitton to see “David Hockney: 25,” an incredible, full-spectrum dive into the world of one of Britain’s greatest living artists. (On view until August 31, 2025.) The exhibition spans 70 years of work: paintings, iPad drawings, Polaroids, stage designs, immersive video installations, and more.

The “25” in the show title refers to its focus on the artist’s last 25 years of work, from around 2000 to 2025. Famously, later in his career, he devoted himself to his iPad, which he has said is the best sketchbook he’s ever had. I always admired that Hockney didn’t deny advancements in technology; he ran toward them, even if it meant alienating the work that he became famous for half a century before. (But don’t worry, it opens with the greatest hits, so you’ll get your fill of pools and portraits.) He picked all the wall colors for this show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton and was still working on a canvas for it until two weeks before it opened. He wore canary yellow Crocs to the opening, by the way.

Fun fact: One of the paintings in the show is of Peter Schlessinger’s bare bottom, who was at the New York magazine cocktail party on Saturday night. Aren’t you proud that I recognized him, even though he was wearing trousers?

To me, Hockney is a national treasure with highlights and a bucket hat, a quirky, fabulous art figure who has been a beacon for many who followed him. It’s both horrifying and amusing that, at 88, he still smokes cigs. “I have had three doctors in the last 50 years. Each of them recommended I give up,” he told the Times in London two years ago. “But each of them has died; the last one only a year older than me.”

One of my favorite rooms in the show (which is enormous, more than 400 works!) is on the top floor, where we see many of the works he painted in dialogue with other painters, like van Gogh, Picasso, and Matisse. It reminded me of Bob Colacello’s book, Holy Terror, which argues that Andy Warhol's ability to simplify contemporary art into a one-dimensional commercial style that made him famous was due to a robust, thorough knowledge of art history. The same could be said about Hockney: you have to understand history to contribute to it.

3. THIRD, “Balenciaga by Demna” was the swan song to the designer’s 10-year tenure at the historic fashion house. (Sorry, if you wanted to see this exhibition, you’re too late. It closed on Wednesday, the same day as Demna’s final couture show.) Featuring 101 pieces, it’s a self-curated farewell to Demna’s unique blending of streetwear and couture, memes and meticulous tailoring, runway shocks and deep respect for Cristóbal’s legacy.

Demna (like Madonna and Cher, he dropped his surname in 2015) was born in Georgia (the country) and fled the Abkhazian war as a child, an experience that shaped his apocalyptic aesthetic. His focus on combining technical skill with streetwear culture has been the number one driver of conversations about what luxury means in the social media age.

I’ll never forget when I was the Head of Fashion & Beauty at YouTube, and the most watched video of 2021 was Demna’s The Simpsons video, which he created instead of a fashion show. (It currently has more than 26 million views!) Demna hosted a splashy screening of the film at Paris Fashion Week, and only when the audience was in our seats did we realize the red carpet was the runway, and the people he invited were wearing the new collection.

The exhibition opened with a copy of an email (above) from Balenciaga’s corporate headquarters, rejecting Demna’s application to intern in the menswear department back in 2007, just after graduating from the Antwerp Academy. (One of these days, I’m going to dig up my dismissal letter from a Vogue writing contest when I was in high school.)

From there, the show unfolded like a crucifix: at the top stood a 3D-printed mannequin of his muse, the artist Eliza Douglas, wearing the opening look from his debut womenswear show in March 2016. What followed were the greatest hits from the following 30 collections—the purse that looked like a Doritos bag, the prototype for the incredibly influential Triple S sneaker from winter 2017, the dresses with shoulders so big it looked like the ’80s on steroids, the beige bath towel skirt from spring 2024, and a parade of grand gowns that made me swoon just like the first time I saw them on the runway.

The audio experience was non-consensual; captions were written in first-person, then Demna’s voice was captured by an AI generator and read aloud in front of each garment. Spooky!

For me, the strongest part of the show was Demna’s historic references, a reminder that Cristóbal Balenciaga’s technical prowess made him the couturier of his day, the type whose clients went into mourning when he retired. Luckily for us, today is his first day at Gucci, so we’ll see more of Demna soon enough.

4. FOURTH, I walked to the Marais to see “Wolfgang Tillmans: Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us,” which took over the entire public library at the Pompidou, transforming 6,000 square meters into a living installation. (On view until September 22, 2025.) Photographs, videos, sound installations, and posters are layered in an immersive experience that feels like a time capsule of the present.

Tillmans was born and raised in Remscheid, Germany, went to school at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design in England, and started his career with intimate, diaristic shots of his friends going out in the early 1990s. He was the first photographer and non-British artist to win the Turner Prize in 2000. He is deeply involved in politics, having designed anti-Brexit posters and LGBTQ+ rights campaigns. Fun fact: He once DJed at Berghain in Berlin for eight hours straight and considers music an integral part of his creative practice.

On my way to the museum, I listened to the official podcast companion of the show, which made clear how inspired Tillmans is by going clubbing, visiting gay bars, and talking about hooking up with people. Maybe that’s why I felt like there was a distinctly cruisey vibe to the show. (I mean this as a compliment!) Unlike other photography shows, which can feel sterile, this one felt intimate; there were lots of people touching and smiling.

This is the last exhibition in the museum before it undergoes a five-year renovation; Tillmans insisted on leaving the raw, unfinished remnants of the previous layout, including the walls, shelves, and exits, which made it feel like an art show in a zombie apocalypse.

One thing to note: this is not a retrospective, according to the artist, who’s 56. “It’s rooted in the here and now,” he says. He’s still clubbing, still taking pictures, still making music, with David Zwirner actively selling his work.

Also, this is not a glamour show. Images aren’t retouched or digitally manipulated. A photo of Brad Pitt in a hotel room hangs above snapshots of highways and crop circles. Some images are framed; others are taped or pinned to the walls.

“The challenge with my work is that I believe in the here and now, but I’m also taking pictures of it. Without judgment,” Tillmans says on the Pompidou podcast. “I don’t love being there with a camera. The proliferation of photography in the last 30 years is disturbing because the more people embrace their camera, the less they engage with it.” As I was taking notes and photos, I hear him add, “To walk through a museum with a camera is the best way to not engage with the art.” Whoopsies!

Despite everything happening in the world, the show made me feel surprisingly good. As Tillmans says of a photo he took of a new moon (below): “If we’re all in this together, it can’t be that bad.”

THANK YOU FOR READING ALL THE WAY TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS NEWSLETTER 😍

Writing about these four shows reminded me how much I admire the people who succeed in this world. I’m not cool enough to wear Rick Owens. Demna’s collections are intimidatingly provocative. I’d be scared to be shot by Wolfgang Tillmans. If David Hockney offered me a cigarette, I’d smoke it, obviously. It’s a fine line between intimidation and inspiration, and one I ride all the time.

Have you seen any of these shows? If so, what’d ya think?

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Wishing you a glorious week, and I’ll be back with more soon.

Yours,

Derek C. Blasberg

PS: AND ANOTHER ANOTHER THING. Do we think Kris Jenner is texting one of her kids, or creating a Hockney-inspired masterpiece on her iPhone here?