PARIS
Part 3
Photos by Karlina Vitolina
Stéphanie & Sébastien Janssen
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muses: Stéphanie Busuttil Janssen and Sébastien Janssen. She lived ten years with César, the sculptor, and after his death made it her mission to keep the work alive — building a foundation that archives, restores, authenticates, lends, curates, collaborates. From Pompidou retrospectives to Tiffany table sculptures in bronze, she carries his compressions and expansions forward, ensuring the hand of César still radiates. At the foundation she edits catalogues raisonnés, guides restorations, manages loans, preserves archives — a keeper of both matter and memory.
He is Belgian, a gallerist in Brussels since 2008, working like the old masters of the métier: not just showing but editing, producing, publishing, defending the artists he believes in. His gallery lives inside a 19th-century hôtel particulier at the Sablon, untouched for 150 years, once a house of law publishing, now a neoclassical shell turned into a stage for the contemporary. Once trained in the conceptual, he has grown toward the hand: ceramics where fingerprints remain, sculptures where touch persists.
If you gave them three months and a limitless card, they would not fly far: they would charter a great boat, an elegant vessel with crew, and make a Grand Tour of the Mediterranean — Palermo, Rome, Greece, Spain. Palaces, antiquities, encounters, dinners on deck, shopping for the handmade, long days unfolding at the rhythm of the sea. The voyage itself as sculpture in time. Stéphanie and Sébastien: one devoted to memory, one to discovery, both guardians of the hand.
Mélanie Huynh
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Mélanie Huynh. She began in fashion, trained as a stylist and model maker, but quickly turned toward marketing and the larger stage of Vogue. She arrived first as an intern, assisting everyone at once — Emmanuelle Alt, Anastasia Barbieri, Marie-Hélène Sauvé — and soon became the right hand of Carine Roitfeld for more than four years. It was there she found her rhythm: French touch with a Vogue stamp, chic but a little offbeat.
Her roots are as hybrid as her métier: born in Paris, raised in Vincennes, daughter of a Chinese father who fled the Khmer Rouge as a teenager and built a life in France, and a French mother from Normandy. Together they bought, years later, a château in Bordeaux — a fairy-tale ruin restored during Covid — from which came Holy Dermi, Mélanie's own creation: a brand built inside-out, with nutricosmetics, supplements, beauty food, and skincare drawn from the land. There is the Rich Lift cream, the collagen chocolate made artisanally in France, the beauty tools for skin and time.
Ask her of the handmade and she answers with reverence: it is transmission, soul, the antidote to standardization. She loves ceramics, blown glass, objects that still carry the touch of their maker, and she worries that global sameness erases the human trace. For her, craftsmanship is not nostalgia but survival — proof that the hand and its hours still matter.
Sébastien Pluot
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Sébastien Pluot. Historian of art, curator, seeker of translation and its impossibilities. He has staged exhibitions where no cartels explain, where the visitor must negotiate directly with the work — where even eels once became the witnesses of art, raised in a tank, then released into rivers carrying fragments of human discourse. He is haunted by the Japanese guzunsei, the art of doing with chance, and by Zeno's old metaphor of the hand: open for apprehension, folding for understanding, closing for comprehension. He resists the last phase. He prefers the trembling openness, the unfinished touch.
At Villa Kujoyama he began tracing this "aesthetics of contingency," and since then the research has spread — exhibitions multiplying like echoes, collaborations between artists and artisans, forms that embrace accident, imperfection, impermanence. He says the hand does not control, it negotiates, with wood, with clay, with matter's own tamashii.
If you gave him three months and limitless means, he would build what already grows in his mind: an ecosystem for ecological transition — two hundred hectares near Paris, with workshops of ceramics, urushi, wood, and dye, with a farm in permaculture, with residencies for artists and thinkers. A place where families arrive with broken things and leave with them reborn — stitched, lacquered, repaired. A place where ecology is not duty but desire, not constraint but irresistible beauty.
Alice Grenier-Nebout
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Alice Grenier-Nebout. "I'm a painter," she starts off. "But sometimes I act in films. Sometimes I make music. At night I work as a DJ." Her life spreads out like a three-part artwork — painting, cinema, sound, each part bouncing off the others. She came into the world in Paris but grew up splitting time between France and Canada. She manages Atelier 46, an artist's spot tucked in a courtyard on Rue Sainte-Anne — a maze of rooms set up as studios for painters, designers, and stylists, a meeting point where different fields share the same pulse.
Her paintings pull you into a warm dream — sensual, literary, mysterious. Once she made a full series based on The Divine Comedy. Her canvases glow with fauvist colors: reds, ambers, deep pinks that radiate from within. "They talk about warmth and body and story," she notes. "About what a woman carries." At night she teams up with her friend Oriana and mixes tracks at Hôtel Amour and La Belle Époque, building a sound that shifts through funk, world music, and electric pulse.
Cinema runs through her family: her father was a cameraman, her mother Claire Nebout an actress who filled her childhood with light, costumes, and backstage whispers. Lately she took the role of Berthe Morisot in Cédric Klapisch's latest film, wandering the Exposition Universelle and defending Impressionism before it even had a name. "Painting is introspection," she says. "Acting is escape. Together they balance me."
Sophie Rioufol
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Sophie Rioufol. Pure Parisienne, raised across from Le Rubis where the Beaujolais nights spilled into memory, Sophie grew up between the 1er and the 6e, and now plays equally at home in the 10e. She is versatile, like the shoes she curates — chic, roots, and a little rock'n'roll. Ten years ago she took over 58M, the boutique her mother Marion opened on Rue Montmartre. It is a wardrobe in miniature: Worishofer sandals for heatwave days, Maison Ernest stilettos for Pigalle nights, Laurence Dacade boots for work, Tropéziennes for summer, Swedish clogs, clutches for soirées.
She believes the true luxury is the hand. A shoe, a plate, a cushion, a dress — if it is fait main, you can see the hours, the gesture, the value. That is where worth resides. 58M has become known for championing independent designers, often those she discovers herself, always privileging craftsmanship, singularity, and a sense of freedom.
If you gave her 24 hours in Paris, she would walk you along the quais, from the Louvre to the Pont des Arts, across to Saint-Germain, stopping at Flore, then break away into the 10e, where the street hums differently — less polished, more alive. And if you gave her three months and a limitless card, she would take her daughter, her man, and circle the world by sailboat — south, to the warm seas, to live slowly and freely, wind in hair, salt on skin.
Tamara Taichman
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Tamara Taichman. She begins her day hidden away at Hôtel des Grandes Écoles, a secret garden behind the walls of Cardinal Lemoine, where roses lean against pale stone and silence thickens like velvet. Then she drifts toward the Voltaire, where she still orders the hard-boiled eggs, €0.92 — a relic of another Paris, a time when the owners allowed penniless artists to dine there. In summer she might slip into the Musée de Minéralogie at the École des Mines, treasures of earth pressed into glass cabinets. Her Paris is rigolo, intimate, timeless.
The hand for her is memory. Wednesdays of childhood spent in clay workshops, fingers plunging into mud and glaze, adolescence at La Droguerie on Rue du Jour spending every coin on beads and thread. She had forgotten until her mother reminded her: this was always there. Today she still threads beads with artisans in Paris and Marseille — the first pieces always born in her hands.
She studied economics, but it was always fashion. From Elle magazine she learned the trade — more than thirty years as photo stylist and consultant, showing women that style is not logos but appropriation. And then her own creations: Re.sea Beachwear and jewelry under her own name, intimate and personal enough to bear it. "The only real luxury," she says, "is time: to have it, to take it, to live inside it."
José Lévy
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: José Lévy. If you have only 24 hours in Paris, José will not take you running. He will take you home. To his home. Because that's where it begins — stillness, stories, the unspectacular magic of being present. Not everything needs to be consumed. Some things need to be steeped in. Like tea. Or grief. Or beauty. He speaks like he draws, in loops, in layers. He believes in rhythm, not itinerary. In curiosity, not conquest.
You ask him about the hand, the handmade, and his answer comes with reverence. The hand, he says, is the first tool. The best one. The one you must educate, protect, repeat with. The artisans he works with, métiers d'art, they live through it. You cannot fake the hand. He started in fashion — "the first skin," he says, "that intimate membrane between the self and the world." For more than fifteen years he shaped silhouettes under his own label before shifting toward interiors, objects, and the dialogue between France and Japan.
He signed the French Pavilion for the World Expo in Osaka 2025, orchestrating its creation as artistic director. He speaks of kokeshis, the wooden dolls he has reinterpreted — not as souvenirs but as bearers of intimacy, the invisible threads between maker and receiver. He tells of Les Endiablés for Saint-Louis: crystal glasses that are never one thing, always many, ambiguous and alive — a wild success. That's José: curious, sincere, drawn to what escapes him. A designer, yes. But mostly: a revealer of silence, of texture, of time.
