PARIS
Photos by Karlina Vitolina
At Kilometre Paris, each piece seeks to tell a story of travel through Couture & Embroidery. With our 'Caravans', we invite you to join us on our worldly travels and experience unique events in which fashion meets storytelling.
Through our stops around the world, we shine lights on each of our 'muses': those exceptional individuals who inspire us with their passions and their individuality. These encounters offer the opportunity to immerse yourself in a universe where each garment, crafted with care & detail, represents a journey, an enriching experience which we hope to share.
Under the direction of Alexandra Senes and with the eyes of talented photographer Karlina Vitolina, we've documented these exchanges, offering an intimate & authentic way of celebrating our creations. This eighth edition of Caravan takes place in Paris, with 12 inspiring muses, each enriching our adventure. Join us on an unforgettable journey of fashion and creativity.
Clémence & Didier Krzentowski
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Clémence & Didier Krzentowski. They do not need to leave Paris to dream — though Clémence admits she loves long voyages, Italy stretched like a ribbon, or one day Egypt under the sun, places where time is finally slow. Didier, him, he stays. Paris is his continent, his map complete, his obsession still unfinished. Together they once toured every garden of the city during the silence of Covid, secret enclosures, lawns and gravel paths, discoveries within a city they thought they knew.
They speak of the hand with reverence. The artisans they have seen — plumassiers, luthiers, makers of impossible objects — communicate in a language that does not need words. They have watched French designers and Japanese craftsmen exchange only drawings, paper, leather, gestures, until the object itself became a sentence. Like music, they say: a duet you can hear but not translate.
Their gallery, kreo, is a laboratory. A place where designers, released from the constraints of industry, can invent. A bureau whose legs are cast from stones mixed with concrete. A chapel in Brittany refitted by Ronan Bouroullec, its glass poured and trembling with light at the edge of the winds. Notre-Dame restored by Guillaume Bardet — an altar in bronze, a chair for the archbishop, candlesticks forged in steel. From the infinitesimal to the monumental, their projects bend design toward poetry, toward liturgy.
Aure Atika
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Aure Atika. She would lead you through Paris as through a collage. Morning at the Luxembourg, its lawns trimmed by the gardeners of the Senate, a park as perfect as a stage. Then the 10th arrondissement, restaurants of Kurds and Turks, because Paris is not only marble but spice, smoke, mix. At sunset she pulls you to the Cheval Blanc terrace, to see the city burn in gold.
Her métier is the hand, she says. Acting as an artisan's work, learned by repetition, by practice, by error. Recently she hired a friend's father to teach her how to drill, saw, hang, repair. Fear turned into pleasure: the joy of making something yourself, of no longer being afraid of tools. A conviction grows: craftsmanship is treasure. The Japanese call their masters "living gods." She thinks we should too.
She retreats often to the Médoc, where the Atlantic hammers the shore. She has taken up surfing — awkward, imperfect, but joyful. One hour in the water and the mind is clean. Salt as meditation, waves as purification. Her origins are multiple: French, Parisian, Moroccan, Hungarian, Sephardic Jewish. She resists labels, preferring cuisine, music, dance to define culture rather than categories.
Amandine Lepoutre
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Amandine Lepoutre. She begins by following water. Always water. The Seine as compass, a café terrace on Île Saint-Louis where the waiters are gloriously rude — the kind of rudeness that frees her to be silent. Coffee bitter, chocolate ice cream from the Glacier de Notre-Dame, 80% cacao like a sacrament, and then the slow walk downstream, Louvre, bridges, galleries, the unexpected detour that keeps her mind still.
The hand, for her, is connection. She takes yours instinctively, touches shoulders, leans forward with a palm open. To make with one's hands is to offer oneself, to pass emotion into matter. To hold a hand is already to say: you are not invisible. And so, when she speaks of craft, it is not only objects — it is tenderness, the possibility of reconnection in an age that fractures.
Her real project is not escape but gathering. For years she has created festivals, conferences, exhibitions — always moments of encounter. Today, this impulse has become Art for Action, a foundation that summons artists, writers, performers to speak of peace and human rights through emotion rather than argument. Anish Kapoor, JR, Lorraine de Sagazan — each work a gesture, each gesture a bridge. Because Amandine believes change begins not in debate but in feeling. And feeling begins with art.
Chloé Bartoletti
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Chloé Bartoletti. She begins not in a palace but in a banh mi shop — Miss Banh Mi, rue Mandar. An egg sandwich wrapped in paper, carried like treasure to the tip of Île Saint-Louis, eaten with the river at her feet, the sun dropping into gold. She loves Paris most when she is on the Seine, when beer bottles clink with English tourists, when the city insists on mixing strangers, laughter, water, evening.
What fascinates her is the hand, though she says she is not manual herself — she is hypnotised by those who are: artisans who work leather and silk, who hammer gold into buckles. This is why Hermès obsesses her: not the brand, but the artisans hidden in the ateliers, their mastery visible in every seam. She believes the best is always handmade.
Chloé is the founder of Marlowe, her agency for photographers, directors, set designers — fifteen talents who work image and film, specialising in still life, luxury, perfume and beauty. When she leaves Paris, she disappears to the Finistère, the bay of Audierne, her house of stone, a century old, standing at the edge of the world. No motorway, no beach club, only kilometres of sand, wind, sea — the village of her grandfather, a return she never planned, a lineage rediscovered.
Thomas du Pré de Saint Maur
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Thomas du Pré de Saint Maur. He calls himself simply: a Frenchman. Proudly so. Someone who, with the means he has, tries to create as much beauty as possible — in images, in films, in the products he shapes at Chanel, and in the ways he surrounds himself with people he loves. At Chanel, his title is precise: he directs creation for all fragrance and beauty. Seventeen years now. A love story still alive, still absolute.
Ask him about the hand, and he answers with certainty: there is no brain without the hand. The hand guides the mind. Its physicality, its movement, its work — that is what develops thought. Even as a teacher at Sciences Po, he makes his students write by hand, on paper, without devices. They resist at first, then flourish. He recalls a phrase: "Glissez, mortels, n'appuyez pas." Infinite delicacy. The courtesy owed to the world. Never force things. Never resist the flow of beauty. Just move with it.
Because Greece is where another part of his story unfolds. For twenty-five years he has gone, without speaking the language — so he decided to dance it instead. He learned Greek dances, not the invented syrtaki of Zorba, but the vernacular dances of Patmos, of Athens, of villages where music erases age, wealth, difference. Where everyone takes hands and moves together. For him, that is civilization itself. He studied with masters who traced the migratory flows of peoples through their dances — the dance of Patmos, Ωκεανός — l'Océanos, is his: slow, bodies pressed together, ocean-born.
Emma Sawko
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Emma Sawko. She starts the day the way others finish it — with a jolt, a jabbing rhythm: one hour of boxing if the body asks to be shaken, one hour of yoga if it begs to be stretched. Hunger for what then? For freedom, perhaps, for calibration, for something raw and just slightly painful to remind her she is alive and alert. Then, Montreuil — to the lab, the kitchen, among the clatter of spoons and voices and recipes not yet born.
There's Wild & The Moon, her fierce garden of plants and pulses and pressed juices that behave like poetry, born in 2016, now sprawling across Paris, Dubai, Amsterdam. Each space more refuge than restaurant, more gesture than chain. She speaks of handmade food not like a trend but like a faith — the fermentation of time, the rebellion against speed, the texture of something slow. For her, the handmade is sacred, because it remembers. It remembers women. It remembers threads. It remembers stories told not in words but in weave, in spoonfuls, in silence.
And she's still building. Quietly, urgently. A clothing line now, Voyage 102 — clothes that move, that breathe, that don't shout but linger. Emma isn't a brand. She's a method. A murmur. A momentum. She builds not just spaces or menus or garments but atmospheres, where the pace is slower, the taste sharper, the light softer. Where something ancestral stirs, and then stays.
