Dear Shaded Viewers,
Art week is ending. The tents are coming down, the VIPs are heading to the airport, and Paris is going back to being itself. That is the right moment for the quietest show of the season, which opens on 11 November.
The Musée des Arts Décoratifs is paying tribute to Yohan Serfaty, the Geneva-trained leather specialist who founded Y.Project and died in 2013. There will be no spectacle. The hang is small and deliberate, spread over three rooms of the medieval and early Renaissance galleries. Serfaty’s coats, silver pendants and reptile skins sit next to Florentine gold-ground panels and a sculpted frieze from a Spanish castle. The question running through the whole show is whether a garment is an adornment, a relic or a talisman.
His story explains the pairing. In 2008, after surgery left a scar on his throat, Serfaty cut a gash into his own label and called the winter collection Y-scar, a pun on “scar” and “scare”. After that, every collection read like a chapter of a personal liturgy: Carnation, Tord-Peur, Ad Vitam, Catharsis. Parasomnia was shown on hospital beds. As he grew thinner, the clothes narrowed with him. The leathers kept their flaws and wounds on purpose, and the seams and cutouts started to read like lines of verse. His palette was dark and brown, the colours of a time when colour was rare. Hooded cottes, houppelandes, bonnets and even leather poulaines all come from that world, somewhere between cloak-and-dagger and cathedral.
The museum has made the dialogue with the old objects very literal. In the first room, Serfaty’s silver and leather jewellery, shaped after human anatomy, sits among altarpieces and sculptures of the Old and New Testaments. One example is a tiny silver hand on a bracelet, hung from a black cord. In the second room, under the sculpted frieze of the Labours of Hercules, a recumbent Serfaty silhouette in skin and knit lies between two torso-mounted jackets in alligator and leather, one by Serfaty and one by Martin Margiela. In the last room, a period bedchamber from the late fifteenth century is occupied by looks from EgonLab and Marine Serre, alongside a reptile outfit by Serfaty. Their accessories are laid out on the antique furniture: Vicente Rey’s feather shoes, Ruslan Baginskiy’s fur hat, a Maeden bag and a high-heeled glove by Benoît Méléard.
The show also has a quieter purpose. It exists because of Serfaty’s sister, Nathalie, who donated four menswear silhouettes to the museum in 2024. In 2025, the sale of the Y.Project archives let her fund the ANDAM, the fashion prize founded in 1989, through an endowment in her brother’s name. That is why the laureates appear here as part of a living conversation rather than a footnote. For anyone who collects and cares about leather, it is a welcome idea that a designer’s legacy can feed the next generation.
Glenn Martens ran the house as Y/Project until 2024, and Serfaty’s own work is rarely seen in this setting. The show is small, and you can see it in under an hour. On a Thursday evening it stays open until 9 p.m., which makes a good alternative to the usual openings and dinners.
Hommage à Yohan Serfaty, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 107 rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris, 11 November 2026 to 21 March 2027. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Thursday until 9 p.m.
