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We appreciated the days when Hedi Slimane worked with promising unknown bands on runway soundtracks, but that doesn't diminish our enthusiasm for a good fashion week collaboration. Hedi Slimane and Liars made for a fine team at Saint Laurent's Women's Spring/Summer '13, Collection VIII show at Paris Fashion Week. Liars frontman Angus Andrew remixed the "Mr Your On Fire Mr" single as a 19-minute, punky-dance epic for Slimane's Saint Laurent show. It maintains intensity and heightens the experience, never settling in as background music. No easy feat. 

Images via Gant Rugger Instagram

The historically collegiate Gant Rugger is a flurry of activity this fall—they've even got a collab salsa going (you'll have to get your chips off the rack, though). The youthful Gant brand is also staking its claim in bricks and mortar. Following on the success of the Chicago opening this summer, Gant Rugger has opted for Paris for a new outpost. And we tend to think the Parisians are just as taken with the oh-so-American brand as the rest of us. While the goods might be American, the interiorlook is French—Gant Rugger says it has preserved the original architecture as much as possible. The space features custom floors, white-tiled walls, copper detailing, and vintage furnishing in a brasserie-inspired design at 116 Rue Vielle du Temple.

Visit Gant Rugger for more info.

Only a French menswear label, er "collective," could get away with the name Brooklyn We Go Hard, if it is possible to get away with at all. Now, BWGH, which calls itself a collective of "members" on its blog, has a new Paris shop at Les Docks, Cité de la Mode et du Design, a minimal and sleek pop-up inspired by Yves Klein that will be selling BWGH through September.

Visit BWGH online to see its latest collection.

 

 

 

Photo by: Stephanie Bisseuil | C215

Nearly 130 years old, Les Bains was originally a municipal bath house where folks like Marcel Proust like to take a steam. From the late 1970s, it transformed (via a design by a young Philippe Stark) into one of the key venues for new wave and rock acts and celebrity scenesters. Joy Division played Les Bains. But by May 2010, the structure of the space was deemed too dangerous for occupation. While its owner Jean-Pierre Marois jumps into the restoration—the plan is to make it private residences/hotel/club called La Societe Des Bains—he temporarily turned the space into a canvas for fifty urban artists (Futura, Mr. Brainwash, Jef Aerosol, Mosko et associés, L'Atlas and so many more) commissioned by gallerist Magda Danysz. While the building remains closed to the public, one can still browse an incredible ranges of works graving the walls of the building via the Les Bains website's artist-a-day blog. The contrasting approaches make for a buzzy contemporary survey with a Parisian perspective.

To find out more, visit LesBains-Paris.com

 

Photos by Stephane Bisseuil and Jerome Coton 


Jef Aerosol


Zeer

Sambre

Mosko et associes


Clone

Baudelocque


Space Invader
L'Atlas

Some of us like a contrast between urban grit and city chic, some well-worn infrastructure with our tony brownstones. We like seeing the logo of the local metropolitan transit authority on strange buildings tucked away between alleys and elevated trains. Then there are those of us more sensitive to preserving the "charm" of upscale city hoods or maintaining their historic aesthetic. It seems the transport authorities fall into the latter category in several instances, at least in the case of the fake townhouses exposed in New York, London, and Paris on messynessychic.com today, one of which is even cited in an Umberto Eco novel. All three were devised to hide air shafts for underground trains.

Know of any other fake townhouses? We'd like to hear from you.

It takes a certain panache to decorate a tiny urban pad. We live in New York City and store our shoes in the stove—we get it. And Parisian designer Philippine Lemaire gets it, too. Her convertible Itisy Table for Ligne Roset is nothing short of well-polished functionalism. Flexible segments cut out of three of four table tops join and rotate around each other to create a variety of configurations from a circular clustered dining table to a linear form suited to display. Available in American walnut or sawn oak, each top is stabilized by two solid oak legs that extend from a grey lacquer-coated stem at the joint. Those of us stateside will have to wait until June to get our mitts on the Itisy. By then, we hope to have cleared some extra space from our 500-square-foot glorified closet. 

There might not be a better place to talk to a filmmaker than in his/her favorite video rental store. Despite the increasing scarcity of such shops, Nowness managed to interview Michel Gondry in his favorite video store in Paris, La Butte Video Club. During a tour of the tiny shop Gondry opens up about his influences, his love of Wim Wenders films, and explains why he prefers visiting a physical store to "watching movies on the net."