Fair Warning to auction Naomi Campbell’s McQueen archive and Saint Laurent’s “Mondrian” dress.
Before it hits Fair Warning’s virtual auction block on September 17, “The Impossible Couture Collection” will walk the runway Friday during New York Fashion Week at a Gilded Age carriage house on the Upper East Side. The sale, curated by Peter Brant Jr. in collaboration with Fair Warning founder Loïc Gouzer, features 23 rare fashion-history lots, including the opening look from Alexander McQueen’s final show, “Plato’s Atlantis,” sourced from Naomi Campbell’s personal archive, and a 1965 Yves Saint Laurent “Mondrian” dress. Several John Galliano pieces round out the collection, arriving amid renewed interest in the designer following his exit from the Met’s planned retrospective in his honor. Other standout lots include a gold Elsa Schiaparelli insect collar and a papier-mâché Martin Margiela gilet. The McQueen and Saint Laurent pieces are expected to fetch roughly $1 million and $500,000, respectively. Gouzer, fresh off brokering an $18 million Banksy sale earlier this summer, argues vintage couture remains undervalued relative to fine art and predicts a “massive reappraisal” is underway.
Bulgari’s “Kaleidos” exhibition lands in Shanghai with 300-plus jewels.
Bulgari has brought its traveling exhibition “Kaleidos: Colors, Cultures and Crafts” to Shanghai’s Power Station of Art, staging a dialogue between Italian and Chinese culture through more than 300 jewelry pieces. Running through October 31 and open to the public, the show pairs archival designs from the Bulgari Heritage Collection and pieces on loan from private collectors with new commissions by Chinese artists Liang Manqi and Zhang Ding, who reinterpret the brand’s chromatic focus through immersive installations. The exhibition unfolds across three chapters: The Science of Colors, Color Symbolism, and The Power of Light, juxtaposing Western color theory from figures like Goethe and Chevreul with Eastern frameworks such as the Chinese five-elements system, or Wu Xing. In Shanghai, Liang Manqi contributes a geometric installation that extends painting beyond the canvas, while Zhang Ding presents a golden light installation illuminating gemstone-surfaced glass heads.
Blue Box Café by Daniel Boulud opens its first California location.
Tiffany & Co. and chef Daniel Boulud have announced the opening of Blue Box Café by Daniel Boulud at South Coast Plaza, a new dining destination connected to Tiffany’s striking new store at the Southern California shopping center. The menu will include beloved offerings such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Tea at Tiffany’s, alongside seasonal, all-day dishes crafted by Boulud and his culinary team. The Signature Breakfast at Tiffany’s will showcase California ingredients, including organic flour from Petaluma County, apricots from the San Joaquin Valley, eggs from San Diego, fruit from Corona del Mar, and dairy from Sonoma, alongside dishes like Spaghettini au Caviar and Soufflé Glacé aux Framboises. Dinex Group CEO Sebastien Silvestri called it the company’s first California restaurant with Tiffany & Co., expressing confidence that the café’s light, elegant approach will resonate in Southern California.
Renoir paintings worth $10.5 million were stolen in a pre-dawn museum heist.
Thieves broke into the Musée Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer, on the French Riviera, early Monday morning, making off with four paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir before dropping two in the museum’s garden during their escape. The Guardian reports the stolen works, taken from the painter’s former home, are valued at an estimated €9 million ($10.5 million). Cagnes-sur-Mer mayor Bryan Masson said the thieves appeared professional, using what looked like an electric saw to cut the bolts securing the paintings’ frames to the wall. Surveillance footage captured the pair fleeing and abandoning at least one painting, and Masson noted police arrived within five minutes of the 5:48 a.m. alarm. The heist adds to a string of increasingly bold museum crimes across Europe, including October 2025’s $102 million crown jewel theft from the Louvre, a dynamite break-in at the Netherlands’ Drents Museum, and last month’s daylight theft of a 200-carat diamond necklace from Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts.
Beyoncé donates $2 million to the Studio Museum in Harlem for her birthday.
Beyoncé marked her 45th birthday on September 4 with a $2 million donation to the Studio Museum in Harlem. In a statement, the singer credited the museum with introducing her to some of her favorite emerging Black artists, calling it a place where “diverse storytellers” reflect shared humanity through art. Founded in 1968, the Studio Museum was established to expand the canon to include Black artists and create space for them to work and exhibit in Harlem. Early solo exhibitions featured Hale Woodruff and Beauford Delaney, and the museum relocated to its current West 125th Street site in the early 1980s under then-director Mary Schmidt Campbell. Thelma Golden has served as director and chief curator since 2005.
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