PARIS, CAPITAL OF ART AND FASHION: MIU MIU AND HELEN MARTEN’S 30 BLIZZARDS AT ART BASEL
By María Sancho-Arroyo, art market specialist
October 27, 2025
In a city where art and fashion have long shared the same stage, one of the most talked-about encounters during Art Basel Paris week was 30 Blizzards, a performative project by British artist Helen Marten, presented by Miu Miu at the Palais d’Iéna. The preview gathered an international mix of collectors, curators, and fashion figures, confirming how naturally these worlds now intersect.
Miu Miu, the offbeat and intellectually charged sister brand of Prada, has become a key cultural player in its own right. True to Miuccia Prada’s ongoing dialogue between fashion and contemporary thought, the brand’s collaboration with Marten extends its creative vision beyond garments to explore ideas of femininity, language, and experience. As the official partner of Art Basel Paris’s Public Program, Miu Miu once again reaffirms that the boundary between fashion and art has never been more porous—or more stimulating.
Conceived as both exhibition and performance, 30 Blizzards unfolds through sculpture, video, music, and live action. Five sculptural platforms and five video works trace the passage of life from childhood to old age, mirrored by the rhythm of a single day, from dawn to dusk. Thirty performers, each representing a distinct emotional climate, inhabit the space through movement, sound, and poetic narration. Viewers who attended noted how moving it was to see the work emphasize the lasting mark that childhood leaves throughout life—a theme that resonates universally and invites each spectator to recognize something of themselves within it. The result is a living tableau where body, language, and material fuse into a lyrical meditation on human existence.
Created in collaboration with theatre and opera director Fabio Cherstich and composer Beatrice Dillon, the piece transforms the neoclassical grandeur of the Palais d’Iéna into a stage of sensory resonance. Industrial tracks, looping containers, and shifting bodies evoke the constant interplay of order and chaos, structure and feeling, a metaphor, perhaps, for the way art and fashion continually reimagine each other.
Winner of the Turner Prize and the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture, Marten has long blurred the borders between disciplines. With 30 Blizzards, she brings her conceptual precision and visual poetry to a new scale, one that matches Miu Miu’s own flair for experimentation and narrative depth.
At a moment when fashion houses increasingly take on an active role in the cultural sphere, Miu Miu’s partnership with Art Basel Paris highlights a broader movement: creativity today thrives in collaboration. And in Paris, the world’s undisputed capital of style, art and fashion are not merely adjacent; they are in dialogue, inspiring each other’s next bold step.
*Cover image: courtesy of Miu Miu.
May interest you
BEYOND THE BLUE CHIPS: ERIC ALFARO AND THE RISE OF EMOTIONALLY RESONANT ART
By Violeta Lozada
As the global art market recalibrates, a quiet but powerful shift is rising. Collectors are increasingly moving away from multimillion-dollar blue-chip purchases and towards living artists whose work offers emotional resonance, personal connection, and affordability. Cuban painter Eric Alfaro is a standout in this new wave, an artist whose work combines painterly sophistication with accessible pricing and deeply human themes.
ARTBO 2025: CARTOGRAPHIES OF MARKET, IDENTITY, AND NATURE
By Candelaria Penido
ARTBO, Bogotá’s international art fair held from September 25 to 28, once again reaffirmed its position as one of Latin America’s most relevant platforms. It brought together 46 galleries and more than 180 artists across the five floors of Ágora Convention Center. With a program intertwining market and thought, this year’s edition emphasized diversity in formats, trajectories, and geographies, offering a multifaceted map of contemporary regional production.
FAIR EXPANSION AND BRANDING: FROM LOCAL EVENTS TO GLOBAL POWERHOUSES
By Maria Sancho-Arroyo
Over the past two decades, the global art fair landscape has undergone a radical transformation. What was once a relatively contained circuit of regional events has exploded into a complex network of branded cultural destinations. Since 2000, the number of art fairs has skyrocketed - from fewer than 60 to over 300 worldwide -reshaping how art is marketed, sold, and consumed.
MÓNICA KUPFER: “IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO EXHIBIT ART, WE NEED TO WRITE ITS HISTORY”
By María Galarza
For over four decades, Mónica Kupfer has been researching, writing, and curating exhibitions that seek to tell a story of Panamanian and Central American Art that is still under construction. She played a key role in the first edition of Pinta Panamá Art Week, where she coordinated FORO—a regional discussion platform that brought together artists, curators, collectors, and institutions.
ART BASEL IN BASEL 2025: A CAUTIOUS MARKET WITH A FOCUS ON VALUE AND QUALITY
By María Sancho-Arroyo, Art Market Specialist
This year’s edition of Art Basel in Basel echoed a similar dynamic to New York Art Week in May: the post-pandemic frenzy is over, and the market is clearly in the hands of buyers. While major sales did take place—particularly in the blue-chip segment—the overall pace was measured, expectations were modest, yet the atmosphere remained upbeat. The market is going through a period of adjustment, though interest in collecting remains strong.
IN UNCERTAIN TIMES, COLLECTORS TURN BACK TO THE CLASSICS
By María Sancho-Arroyo
Signs of caution in a market seeking stability.
THROUGH DESIGN AND IMAGINATION, ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE
ArtScience Museum in Singapore presents an exhibition that invites society to co-create the future from hope and creativity.
TARIFFS AT THE BORDER: WHEN ART MEETS TRADE POLICY
By María Sancho-Arroyo
How new U.S. trade policies are reshaping the movement of art and design, blurring the line between cultural object and commercial good.
HISTORIC RECORD — $54 MILLION: FRIDA KAHLO ACHIEVES THE HIGHEST PRICE EVER FOR A FEMALE ARTIST AND FOR LATIN AMERICAN MODERN ART
By María Sancho-Arroyo, art market specialist
Frida Kahlo has entered a new chapter of global recognition. The sale of El sueño (La cama) for $54.66 million at Sotheby’s marks the highest price ever achieved by a woman artist at auction and the strongest result for any modern Latin American artist.
THE NEW SPACE OF THE CARTIER FOUNDATION AND 40 YEARS OF ITS COLLECTION
By Patricia Avena Navarro
The Cartier Foundation settles into Place du Palais-Royal in Paris to write a new chapter in its history at the heart of the capital, inaugurating its new space by exhibiting the “must-haves” of forty years of collecting.
