kenzo returns home

Winning a local car show is nice, but taking home a trophy that declares your vehicle superior to every other top-tier winner on the planet is a different league entirely. The Peninsula Paris became the centre of the automotive universe this week as it crowned a 1938 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B with ‘The Peninsula Classics Best of the Best Award.’ This is the sort of accolade that settles arguments before they even start, marking the car as the undisputed monarch of the classic circuit.

Qualifying for this award is harder than getting a table at a new hotspot on opening night. To even be invited, a car must have already won ‘Best of Show’ at a major international Concours d’Elegance during the previous year. This specific Alfa Romeo punched its ticket by dominating at ‘The Amelia 2025’ before arriving in Paris for the gala on 26 January. The event drew a crowd as high-profile as the machinery, including Nicole Kidman, who watched as the Italian thoroughbred took the top honour.

Sir Michael Kadoorie launched this initiative in 2015 alongside co-founders William E. ‘Chip’ Connor, Bruce Meyer and Christian Philippsen because they shared a desire to celebrate the best of what defines the automotive world. They wanted to create a global benchmark that brings the elite of the international concours scene together in one place. It serves as a way to honour the highest art of restoration while ensuring these mechanical cultural assets are preserved for future generations to appreciate.

Most collectors would settle for any 8C, but this chassis comes with a backstory that sounds like it was written for cinema. It was originally owned by Giuseppe ‘Nino’ Farina, the man who etched his name in history as the first official Formula 1 World Champion in 1950. While many of its siblings wore Touring coachwork, Farina kept it in the family by commissioning Stabilimenti Farina to sculpt the body. The result is the only 8C 2900B in existence with this specific design, making it a singular piece of motoring history.

Deborah Keller accepted the prize for the Keller Collection and noted that the car “embodies the golden era of Italian automotive design and outstanding craftsmanship.” The vehicle was in a partially restored state when acquired but underwent a complete transformation finished in 1995. Since then, it has been busy collecting silverware at Pebble Beach and even winning the ‘Parade of Elegance’ after completing the Rally Monte Carlo. “Every time I see it, I am reminded why such magnificent automobiles deserve to be preserved and celebrated,” Keller said.

Taking the title required fending off six other nominees that represent the absolute peak of collecting. The Alfa had to outshine heavyweights like a 1936 Mercedes-Benz 500K Spezial Roadster and a 1954 Ferrari 375 MM. The jury panel responsible for this difficult decision included industry titans such as Gordon Murray and Jay Leno. Co-founder of the awards, Christian Philippsen, described the winner as “the pinnacle of pre-war high-performance engineering,” and it is hard to argue with that assessment.

Anyone hoping to see this masterpiece in the metal can head to Rétromobile from 28 January to 1 February. Find out more here.

photography. courtesy of Agence Pancake, Peninsula Paris
words. Gennaro Costanzo

The Peninsula is turning its hotels into something like a travelling gallery this spring. For Hong Kong Arts Month in March 2026, the group will stage the latest edition of ‘Art in Resonance,’ the commissioning programme that asks artists to make work specifically for hotel spaces (from façades to lobbies) and this year it does so in close creative conversation with the Victoria & Albert Museum.

The programme invites work to be imagined with the building in mind. The result is site-specific art that plays with how guests and the public move through a place: a façade that reads from the street, a ceramic field in the lobby, a carpet that lives underfoot. 

Three commissions lead the Hong Kong presentation. Angel Hui has been asked to transform the hotel’s exterior with a piece intended for everyone on the street to see. Hui, who was recently chosen to represent Hong Kong at the 61st Venice Biennale, brings a contemporary attention to questions of identity and belonging; placing her work on the façade makes the hotel part of the city’s public life.

Inside, Albert Yonathan Setyawan – an Indonesian artist based in Tokyo – will install a contemplative ceramic work in The Lobby. Curated by Dr Louis Copplestone, the V&A’s Curator for South-East Asia, Setyawan’s piece draws on ritual, repetition and sacred space, offering a moment of calm in one of the building’s busiest rooms. Dr Copplestone’s scholarship and long experience with Asian visual culture help shape the commission’s dialogue between material and meaning.

On the first-floor landing by The Verandah, architect-artist Dr William Lim teams up with Tai Ping, the luxury carpet house, on a woven piece that explores materiality and memory. It’s Tai Ping’s second year participating in ‘Art in Resonance’ and the project continues the hotel’s interest in collaborations that blend craft, design and public art.

The programme also keeps its earlier projects in circulation. Lin Fanglu’s ‘She’s Bestowed Love,’ shown at The Peninsula Hong Kong in 2025, is currently on display at the V&A South Kensington as part of ‘Dimensions: Contemporary Chinese Studio Crafts’ through September 2026. A portion of that work is also scheduled to appear at The Peninsula London in February.

“We are proud to continue our partnership with the V&A,” says Benjamin Vuchot, Chief Executive Officer of The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels. “This collaboration represents our shared vision to present world-class, immersive and intentional art experiences that transcend borders and resonate with audiences around the world.”

Discover more here.

photography. courtesy of Angel Hui, Jake Chen, Terry Tam
words. Gennaro Costanzo

“The human gesture carries memory. It is imperfect, singular and embodied. In a world dominated by repetition and automation, gesture becomes a space of resistance.”

Pauline Guerrier says this plainly, without romanticising it, and it neatly sums up why her work feels so at home inside ‘Beyond Our Horizons,’ the exhibition opening at la Galerie du 19M from 29 January to 26 April 2026. Presented by Chanel’s métiers d’art hub between Paris and Aubervilliers, the show arrives in France after a successful run in Tokyo and centres on a dialogue that is slow, physical and deeply human: Japanese and French craftsmanship in conversation.

But if you want to understand the soul of Le19M’s latest blockbuster exhibition, you don’t start in the pristine, Rudy Ricciotti-designed gallery itself. You start down the road, in a former perfume factory filled with concrete dust and drying paint.

This is POUSH, the sprawling artists’ incubator in Aubervilliers and the current workspace of Guerrier. The French artist, a Beaux-Arts de Paris alumnus who cut her teeth under the legendary Giuseppe Penone, is the perfect guide for this journey. Her practice is built on what she calls the “anthropology of the gesture,” trekking from Italian glassblowers to weavers in Benin to rescue ancestral techniques from oblivion.

Those two rhythms came together at Le19M, Chanel’s purpose-built home for its eleven Maisons d’art, including Desrues, Lemarié, Lesage, Montex and Maison Michel. Together with nearly thirty French and Japanese artisans, they have turned the gallery into a space of wonder and exchange. Curated by a collective of five creatives – including Momoko Ando and Aska Yamashita – the show has expanded for its Paris debut, with ten new designers joining to push the limits of how heritage and innovation can feed off each other.

“This exhibition embodies the dialogue between the French artisans of the Maisons d’art of le19M and their Japanese counterparts. It illustrates how heritage and innovation can coexist and feed off each other,” says Bruno Pavlovsky, President of le19M.

When Guerrier first entered the workshops, the connection was immediate. “At POUSH, my practice is raw – I don’t go looking for precision right away,” Guerrier tells us. “But then that energy gets filtered through the hands of the artisans. It’s not a conflict; they need each other.”

Her contribution to ‘Beyond Our Horizons’ is distilled into the Tako Tsubo series, which encapsulates the exhibition’s wider ambitions. The starting point was a small but deeply personal object: a mother-of-pearl music box found years ago at the Saint-Ouen flea market. That discovery pushed Guerrier towards Japanese techniques such as marquetry and lacquer, and philosophies including kintsugi and wabi-sabi. 

“What is sacred is this return to the object itself, to its capacity for repair, and to the idea that a fracture can be considered a strength rather than a flaw.” For Guerrier, the music box remains a tangible meeting point between French craft history and Japanese thought.

To translate these ideas materially, she worked with Maison Desrues, the historic house known for crafting Chanel’s buttons and costume jewellery. Guerrier delved into their archives, selecting precious and semi-precious beads to explore the art of repair. The reference to kintsugi is clear, but never too literal.

“The beading acts like a reparative skin,” she explains. She isn’t hiding the cracks; on the contrary, she’s making them visible and precious. It’s a direct translation of the wabi-sabi worldview (finding beauty in imperfection) executed with the hyper-precision of French luxury.

The exhibition space itself refuses to be a typical white cube. Designed by architect Tsuyoshi Tane, the scenography treats the gallery as a living home – or an “artist’s house.” Lantern-like structures guide visitors through worktable environments and interior gardens, making the experience relatively more intimate.

This emphasis on inhabiting the space reflects a reverence for the long game. Guerrier speaks with genuine admiration for Japan’s ‘Living National Treasures’ – masters recognised for their lifelong dedication to a specific skill. It is a system that values the repository of knowledge within a human body over the final product. Even without direct collaboration for this specific series, that spirit saturates her work. In an age obsessed with the instant, her practice, and indeed the entire exhibition, acts as a cultural brake.

“I would like visitors to leave with a heightened awareness of gesture and the time it requires. That they perceive, beyond the forms, the sum of hands, skills and attention necessary for these works to exist,” says Guerrier.

“If something is to remain, it would be the idea that this exhibition is a living material. That behind each piece lies a story of shared gestures and transmission, which continues to live beyond the exhibition itself.”

‘Beyond Our Horizons: From Tokyo to Paris’ runs from 29 January to 26 April 2026 at la Galerie du 19M.

Discover more here.

photography. courtesy of Clarisse-Ain
words. Gennaro Costanzo