Art Basel Paris Deepens Ties With Luxury to Appeal to New Collectors

PARIS — Defying a sluggish art market, Art Basel Paris lit up the French capital with a record six-day run, anchoring a vibrant week of public exhibitions, private previews and social events — many staged in partnership with top luxury brands.

The 2025 edition gathered 206 galleries at the Grand Palais, while its public program unfolded at nine venues across town. Underscoring the fair’s growing synergies with fashion, filmmaker Loïc Prigent curated its re-hanging initiative Oh La La!, while editor Edward Enninful hosted a day of talks.

French President Emmanuel Macron and First Lady Brigitte Macron were among the 73,000 visitors who flocked to the fair between Oct. 21 and 26, organizers said.

The event got off to a strong start with the addition of an extra half-day on Tuesday titled “Avant-Premiere,” during which participating galleries were asked to invite their six best clients for a more intimate preview.  

Vincenzo de Bellis, chief artistic officer and global director of Art Basel Fairs, said the fair introduced the new format after drawing large crowds at its First Choice VIP Opening day last year.

“We wanted to create a moment, both for our clients, meaning the galleries, and for the clients of our clients, where they could have a slower pace, a moment to chat, a moment to really connect,” he told WWD. “It worked very well. It generated what we wanted to generate, meaning more meaningful conversations and market opportunities.”

Many galleries synced their exhibits to major exhibitions at Paris museums.

It was a winning strategy for Hauser & Wirth, which sold Gerhard Richter’s 1987 “Abstract Painting” for $23 million, in tandem with his retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. The David Zwirner gallery, which is staging a solo exhibition by the artist in Paris, found a buyer for another of Richter’s works at $3.5 million.

Meanwhile, Sprüth Magers sold three works by George Condo, the subject of a solo exhibition at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, for a combined $4.8 million.

Young and female collectors are emerging as the market’s driving forces, according to the annual Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting. In 2024, women outspent their male peers by 46 percent on average, driven by Millennial and Gen Z collectors, according to the study of 3,100 high-net-worth individuals in 10 markets.

This younger cohort collects not just art, but a wide variety of high-end design and collectible items, including luxury handbags, jewelry, watches, sneakers, classic cars and spirits, according to the report authored by Clare McAndrew, founder of research and consulting firm Arts Economics.

“Contemporary art is much more interdisciplinary today than what it used to be, and that interdisciplinarity goes across fashion, design, moving image and music, and that is something that we should nurture more and more,” said de Bellis.

That is one reason why Art Basel is forging ties with luxury brands like Miu Miu, the official partner of its public program, and Louis Vuitton and Audemars Piguet, associate partners of the Paris fair. Vuitton made a splash with a stand and Artycapucines handbag collection designed by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami.

A scaled-back version of the Art Basel Shop, with a reflective facade designed by Harry Nuriev, featured collaborations with artists including Thomas Bayrle, Camille Henrot and Nuriev himself, and brands such as Guerlain and Labubu.

“Paris, besides being an epic art world center and having history of art in its buildings, is also the capital of fashion, the capital of design, so the connection between these worlds is essential for us,” de Bellis explained.

“A lot of artists are collaborating with those brands,” he noted. “Naturally, this becomes much more a natural fit for us too.”

Art Basel also unveiled a five-year partnership with members-only app Dorsia, offering exclusive access and experiences, including an Art Basel Afters nightlife program launching in Miami Beach in December. De Bellis said the partnership was designed to enhance the fair experience and nurture new potential buyers.

“The more people we involve, the more potential buyers we have, the more we drive the art world into the future,” he reasoned.

With Clément Delépine moving on to head Lafayette Anticipations, the art foundation of Galeries Lafayette, the fair promoted Karim Crippa from head of communications to director of Art Basel Paris.

This follows the nomination earlier this month of former Christie’s executive Carly Murphy as Art Basel’s new global head of collector and institutional relations, another signal of the growing diversity and sophistication of the fair’s potential audience.

Among the whirl of parties across town were Chanel’s dinner with Alphabet magazine celebrating its special supplement dedicated to the newly restored villa La Pausa, and India Mahdavi’s week-long pop-up with trendy culinary collective We Are Ona.

Orient Express operator Accor hosted a dinner at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs to celebrate the exhibition “1925–2025: One Hundred Years of Art Deco,” while the newly inaugurated Fondation Cartier across the street from the Louvre drew crowds on its opening weekend.

Meanwhile, Moynat held a signing with Labubu’s creator, the illustrator Kasing Lung. The event saw luxury tycoon Bernard Arnault receive a sketch from the illustrator — and a blind box containing one of the Labubu plushies.

Here, WWD reviews some of the week’s key events:

Jacquemus’ ‘Mythes’

Simon Porte Jacquemus teamed with antiques specialist Galerie Chenel and Galerie Dina Vierny, founded by the muse of French sculptor and painter Aristide Maillol, for his first curatorial project centered around a dialogue between the antique, the sculpted and the everyday.

In the Galerie des Bernardins, a former Cistercian college set in the 5th arrondissement, the French designer imagined eye-catching tableaux. Maillol’s La Baigneuse Drapée, also known as La Seine, and a draped Roman marble statue from the second century rubbed shoulders with a sunshine yellow trenchcoat from the designer’s spring 2026 collection.

In another scene, the French sculptor’s reclining figure of La Jeune Fille Allongée became a sculptural beachgoer with the addition of a pristine cotton parasol. Elsewhere, a glass of orange juice propped on the side of an easel seemed to hint at an artist who just nipped out for a break.

Joopiter’s ‘Inked: Tattoos by Contemporary Artists’ and ‘The Contemporary Take: A Look with Jay Chou’

Pharrell William’s platform Joopiter launched two projects with a splashy party at Dover Street Market Paris.

Curated by Sharon Coplan, “Inked: Tattoos by Contemporary Artists” brought together 16 artists who each created original tattoo designs as conceptual works of art. Participants included fashion designers Gabriela Hearst and Thom Browne, milliner Stephen Jones, architect Peter Marino and curator Sarah Andelman, along with artists Jeffrey Gibson, Marilyn Minter and the late Lawrence Weiner.

Each tattoo design comes with a signed certificate, and proceeds from each sale benefited causes chosen by the artists, such as the CFDA. Collectors who purchased a piece gained the right to have the tattoo inscribed on their body, making the artwork participatory and transforming the skin into a living canvas.

Joopiter also launched “The Contemporary Take: A Look With Jay Chou,” a new contemporary art sale curated by the Taiwanese singer-songwriter known as the “King of Mandopop.” Following this spring’s collaboration with Martha Stewart, the auction highlights intergenerational and cross-cultural works, with a special focus on artists from the Asian diaspora, including Hajime Sorayama and Lung Kasing, creator of the infamous Labubu.

K-Way’s ‘In Y/Our Life’

French outerwear brand K-Way celebrated its 60th anniversary with the final run of its traveling exhibition, “In Y/Our Life,” at the historic Atelier Richelieu. The exhibit, which visited Milan and London earlier this year, explored six decades of design with a 7,500-square-foot multisensory installation combining fashion and contemporary art.

Curated by writer and cultural strategist Gianluigi Ricuperati, it featured works by Patricia Urquiola, Olimpia Zagnoli, Asad Raza and Nadine Fecht partnering with brands such as Chupa Chups, Moleskine, Bic pens and Polaroid. Highlights included a participatory mural using Bic pens and Scotch tape on Moleskine shelves; a reimagined the K-Way “Le Vrai” jacket infused with LEDs by Japanese label Anrealage’s founder Kunihiko Morinaga, and a tribute to Arthur Rimbaud’s “Voyelles” poem on the venue’s staircase.

It also featured a section curated by Sarah Andelman and a coffee spot called Café K-Way, codesigned with Parisian roaster Momus.

Miu Miu’s ’30 Blizzards’

As part of its ongoing partnership with Art Basel Paris, Miu Miu presented a program featuring a new work by artist Helen Marten, held at the Palais d’Iéna where the brand traditionally stages its Paris Fashion Week shows.

Known for her multifaceted practice that spans sculpture, painting, video and writing, Marten expanded her work into performance for the first time. Storage boxes emblazoned with words such as “Asphalt,” “Wind,” “The Guest” and “The Dentist” were carried along an elevated factory-style track while a troupe of 30 performers — some in a uniform of gray, and others in items from Miu Miu’s colorful collections — moved the boxes, broke out into song and dance, and recited monologues that questioned the audience.

Titled “30 Blizzards” and conceived with theater and opera director Fabio Cherstich and composer Beatrice Dillon, the work also featured five sculptural platforms depicting different stages of life. Marten was given carte blanche to select from Miu Miu’s collections as she created “characters” that acted out the work in two-hour cycles. She also invited London-based writer and filmmaker Juliet Jacques to moderate a day of talks with female authors and poets.

Salomon’s ‘Sensorial Terrains’

For its first year as an official partner of Art Basel Paris, French shoe brand Salomon outfitted the fair’s 250 hosts in its shoes, reflecting its move to position itself as a “mountain sports lifestyle” label, including activewear with a more urban spin. This partnership was designed to reach an urban audience that is culturally engaged in art, music and design, but still escapes to the park for a morning run.

To that end the brand hosted an experiential exhibit inside the Grand Palais that brought running to life by creating shifting floor environments from sand to concrete and forest soil to urban gravel, with matching soundscapes. It also hosted community runs throughout the festival from the Grand Palais to its flagship on the Champs-Élysées.

The partnership strengthened the brand’s presence in Paris following the success of its Olympics and fashion week programs, with another large-scale event planned during the men’s collections next January.

Cai Lei’s ‘Invisible Spaces’ at Icicle Cultural Space

For its inaugural participation in the official Art Basel program, Icicle staged the first exhibition in France of Beijing-based artist Cai Lei, best known for his practice at the crossroads between painting and sculpture.

In the Shanghai- and Paris-based brand’s cultural space on Avenue George V, Lei unveiled a new series of pictorial and sculptural works, centered around “Left in the Dust,” a spiral staircase with missing steps that captures the tension at the heart of his practice.

Magma Vol. 3, supported by Bottega Veneta

For its third volume, annual art publication Magma continues its “cartography of the contemporary world” with “Archive of the Future,” in which it questions whether art forms can anticipate the world in the face of higher-than-ever uncertainties. The 388-page issue, supported by Bottega Veneta, features more than 100 previously unpublished works and texts by prominent figures of contemporary art.

Among them are seven Polaroids by Lithuanian filmmaker and poet Jonas Mekas, taken during a 1971 Fluxus dinner where Yoko Ono and John Lennon improvised drawings, readings and performances; a visual correspondence between Jill Mulleady and Mike Kelley, and two mirror paintings by Italy’s Michelangelo Pistoletto.

The publication’s launch is accompanied by a monthlong exhibition in Paris, running until Nov. 19 at the Forma gallery on Rue de Turenne.