Chanel’s hatmaker Maison Michel opens a 90th-anniversary show in Paris.
Maison Michel is marking its 90th anniversary with “Metamorphoses — The Hats of Maison Michel,” an exhibition opening September 23 at La Galerie du 19M, Chanel’s craftsmanship hub in northern Paris. The show, running through December 13, traces the hatmaker’s process from raw linden wood to finished designs, spotlighting the tools and techniques behind styles worn by Hollywood stars and beyond. Curated by artistic director Priscilla Royer alongside Palais Galliera director Emilie Hammen, the exhibition features thousands of archival wooden hat blocks, a totem sculpture by Hyères prize winner Amaury Darras, and a decommissioned 19th-century straw-sewing machine. A dedicated runway section includes a recent design created for Chanel creative director Matthieu Blazy’s cruise 2027 show in Biarritz. The exhibition also traces hats’ shift from social convention to self-expression, alongside weekly filmmaking workshops led by director Michel Gondry’s participatory studio, L’Usine de Films Amateurs.
The Islamic Arts Biennale appoints four curators for its third edition.
The Diriyah Biennale Foundation has named the four curators leading the third edition of the Islamic Arts Biennale, opening November 1, 2027. The team includes Nada Raza, director of the Alserkal Arts Foundation; William Robinson, former head of Christie’s Islamic Art department; Alain Fouad George, I.M. Pei Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Oxford and founding director of the Lusail Institute in Doha; and Idries Trevathan, former chief curator of the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture in Dhahran. Each curator will organize a distinct exhibition, bringing an individual lens to the biennale’s exploration of Islamic art and culture as a living, evolving field.
The World Around names 25 finalists for its Young Climate Prize.
The World Around, the global design and architecture organization founded by curator Beatrice Galilee, has named 25 finalists for the third cycle of its Young Climate Prize. Launched in 2022, the mentorship program supports climate-focused designers, scientists, and organizers ages 13 to 25. This year’s cohort, drawn from 16 countries, will compete in a three-month academy of mentorship, lectures, and workshops before a jury selects three winners in 2027. Mentors include designer Bruce Mau, MoMA curator Paola Antonelli, landscape architect Walter Hood, and architects Tatiana Bilbao, Al Borde, and Xu Tiantian, among others.
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts receives a $60 million gift, the largest in its history.
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has received a $60 million anonymous donation, the largest gift in its history, timed to the library’s 60th anniversary. The funds will support a five-year effort to digitize, preserve, and catalog the library’s 15-million-item archive, prioritizing fragile materials such as wax cylinders, cellulose acetate negatives, and unpublished prompt books. The donor, who is not from New York, made the gift after visiting the collection in June and speaking with executive director Roberta Pereira about expanding global access to the archive.
The National Gallery’s Renoir exhibition sets a new ticket sales record.
The National Gallery’s Renoir exhibition has become the museum’s best-selling show ever, with ticket sales topping 22,000, surpassing 2024’s “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers,” which sold 15,654 tickets in the same six-week window. Titled “Renoir and Love,” the show opens on October 3 following a run at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where it ranked among the most visited exhibitions in that museum’s 40-year history. Featuring 45 works by the French Impressionist, it marks the most comprehensive Renoir show in England in two decades. The exhibition is organized in partnership with the Musée d’Orsay and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The show follows another record-breaking, French-partnered exhibition in London this year: the Bayeux Tapestry, on view at the British Museum through July 2027, which set a single-day ticket sales record after arriving in England for the first time in a millennium.
Attractive Distractions:
An immense ancient mosaic resurfaces at Rome’s Baths of Trajan.
A new Art Gallery of Western Australia exhibition spotlights nine MENA artists and their diasporas.
Aperture, the celebrated exhibition space devoted to fine-art photography, opens its first permanent home in New York.
Porsche’s 550 Spyder returns as a scaled-down electric replica.
