Saint Laurent's Anthony Vaccarello curates four rare Charlotte Perriand reissues

With a brazen jewel heist at the Louvre and an array of impressive pyrotechnics closing the Pompidou, 2025’s Paris Art Week (embracing both Art Basel Paris and Design Miami Paris as well as events around the city) has had an electric start. The city is abuzz. The drama is haut.

Time to head over to the Bastille, perhaps, where Galerie Patrick Seguin's ‘Saint Laurent – Charlotte Perriand’ (24 October – 22 November 2025) offers a serene counterpoint. A calming breath of clean lines and fresh air amidst the chaos, here, four rare furniture designs are being reissued under the curatorial direction of Anthony Vaccarello.

Four lesser-known Charlotte Perriand designs

The exhibition opens to coincide with Art Week, but it operates at an entirely different frequency. Vaccarello, Saint Laurent’s creative director since 2016, has selected four of Perriand’s lesser-seen works – the ‘Rio de Janeiro’ bookcase (1962), the ‘Indochine Guest Armchair’ (1943), the ‘Table Mille-Feuilles’ (1963) and the monumental sofa designed for Japan’s ambassador in Paris (1967) – to be produced in limited editions. Each has been recreated from archive drawings, original models or one-off pieces, using the same species of wood, metal and cane that defined Perriand’s original vision.

The results are remarkable for their restraint. The ‘Table Mille-Feuilles’, formed from ten stacked layers of contrasting rosewood and cherry, is both sculpture and surface, lightness and density. The ‘Indochine Armchair’, conceived during Perriand’s time in Vietnam, marries industrial tubular steel with the warmth of local artisanship, an early expression of global modernism that is continually current and effortless.

And the ‘Japanese Ambassador’s Sofa’, a sweeping five-seat banquette that appears to float on its curved rosewood base, is technically furniture, but with bone structure to die for and catwalk-model poise. The Japanese Embassy in Paris helped to identify important details of the banquette to help bring it back to life in this edition.

For Vaccarello, this is about precision as much as it is about reinterpretation. His direction at Saint Laurent has often blurred the lines between fashion, art and architecture, and this project is a natural continuation of that approach. As is so often true these days, the most interesting work is that which sits between disciplines. By re-manufacturing Perriand’s furniture with the same care given to haute couture, the collaboration elevates these functional objects into studies of proportion, craft and materiality.

The dialogue also makes historical sense. Yves Saint Laurent himself collected Perriand’s work and admired her purity of line. Theirs was an aesthetic kinship, a shared understanding and an attitude. Pierre Bergé too, backed major international retrospectives of Perriand’s work.

In today’s Paris, with major institutions at a juncture and so much of the art and design world so performative, ‘Saint Laurent – Charlotte Perriand’ is comforting in its subtle celebration of endurance. Galerie Patrick Seguin, long known for its scholarly presentations of Jean Prouvé, Pierre Jeanneret and Perriand herself, provides an ideal setting in its Jean Nouvel-designed space.

In a week when the city’s creative energy tilts toward the new, ‘Saint Laurent – Charlotte Perriand’ offers a lesson in lasting modernity and a reminder that true innovation doesn’t always have to mean invention, newness or encore du drame…

‘Saint Laurent – Charlotte Perriand’ is on view until 22 November 2025
5 Rue des Taillandiers, 75011 Paris