PARIS, CAPITAL OF ART AND FASHION: MIU MIU AND HELEN MARTEN’S 30 BLIZZARDS AT ART BASEL
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.

