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Wonderful Artists You’ll Discover This Summer 
At Playtime & Kid’s Hub, our events are centered around three key motivations: business, discovery, and inspiration. In addition to the hundreds of international kids’ fashion and lifestyle brands on display, the design of the event is created to inspire and awe visitors and exhibitors alike. Each season, our Artistic Director, Laetitia, teams up with the scenographer Amélie Lengrand to create their vision for the season. From wonderful artists to the incredible entryway, the restaurant to the color of the carpets, they carefully select every detail.
To help bring this vision to life, they invite a selection of artists to exhibit their artwork. Before discovering their work in person, let us introduce you to the three wonderful artists collaborating with us this summer!
Rachel Altabas is originally from Tarn in southwest France. In this region close to Spain, her awakening to color, painting, architecture, and ornamentation was nurtured. Memories of the wonderful artists Picasso, Miro, and Gaudi have left their mark on her. Drawing and painting have been her mediums of expression since childhood.
Curious and attentive to her environment, Rachel developed a passion for objects and textiles at an early age. This interest led her to pursue a career in applied arts at the age of 15. She first studied in Toulouse, and later in Paris at l’école Duperré. Within the fashion design, fashion, and environment departments, she developed a joint research project applied to clothing.
She flourished at several couture fashion houses, such as Maison Martin Margiela. In the silk department of Christian Dior Couture, she specialized in textile coloring and design.
Rachel continued as a freelance designer, and opened her own studio in 2015. At the same time, she developed a personal artistic style where the primitive is combined with the refined. The raw dialogues with the sophisticated created a visual language of mature naivety. Rachel’s work is characterized by a wide diversity of mediums that includes paper, paint, pencils, pastels, textiles, and ceramics.
Rachel’s artwork is a rich palette where manual work is favored. It develops through a dialectic between decorative and abstract forms. A movement that pushes her to explore ornament and color, it’s a fertile ground for a variety of graphic creations.
You can explore her work in the Elemental fashion trend space in Paris and New York this summer!
Born in Paris and of Sri Lankan origins, Léa Tissera is a visual artist based in the French capital. After a general baccalaureate, she took a preparatory year in applied arts before joining ESAA Duperré, where she is currently in her second year of DNMADE – Materials & Textile with a specialization in research and development focused on fabrics, surfaces, and color.
Drawing on her dual Franco-Sri Lankan identity, Léa’s artistic practice is distinguished by a wide variety of techniques and mediums. They include weaving, tapestry, crochet, braiding, engraved linoleum, copper, textured threads, paint, and gesso applied to thread, to name just a few. What drives her is the exploration of transforming materials and the way they enters into dialogue with their supports. Through her experiments, she questions the dualities that run through her identity and history, combining woven, crocheted, wrapped, knotted, or intertwined elements in installations that evoke both here and elsewhere.
Léa’s creative process is punctuated by repetitive gestures, accumulations, and superpositions. While she charts a direction, she also leaves room for intuition, surprise, and a form of chance. Léa draws on the connections between the materials, threads, and colors that are often bright or complementary to design sensitive spaces where the thread is freed, occupies space, and inspires a form of contemplation. Today, she is trying to weave her own narrative made of experiments, trials, adjustments, and, above all, nourished by a deliberate proliferation of materials.
Get your pass to discover her work as part of the Zest Fashion Trend Space in Paris and New York!
The studio Tressages Pas Sages is the fruit of a professional rebirth. Alexandra Ferdinande turned to a craft profession after having worked as an audiovisual project manager, director, and documentary film editor. Moving to the countryside of the Rhône-Alpes region instigated her meeting with wild basketry which she solidified through an exploration of land art, particularly the artistic work of Andy Goldsworthy.
Following CAP basketry courses with GRETA de Lyon, Alexandra studied with basketweavers in their workshops and obtained a Certificat d’Aptitude Professionnelle (CAP) in 2014. Since then, she has practiced basketweaving with passion, and envisions basketry as an art in its own right.
Alexandra is helping these timeless techniques last by passing them down through public workshops that enhance the values of noble, simple materials. She is proud to practice this art that has an almost neutral environmental impact. She starts from the roots of a savoir-faire that has been built over thousands of years to become the art of basketry, bringing it to today’s world and accompanying it towards tomorrow.
Alexandra’s work, photographed by Vincent NoclinToday, Alexandra presents her baskets on a national scale, at events dedicated to the arts as well as part of artistic exhibitions. She takes orders and makes unique pieces for architects and interiors designers, especially those who love ecological design and eco-responsible decoration.
VIP buyers and the press can discover this wonderful artist’s work in the lounge at Playtime Paris!
We can’t wait to explore the artwork from these wonderful artists at the summer shows! Whether helping to bring the sentiments of the fashion trend spaces to life or creating an inspiring space in the VIP & Press Lounge, their artwork will add an element of beauty and inspiration to the show.
Thank you to Laetitia and Amélie for choosing these wonderful artists to collaborate with this season! Buyers can get their pass here to explore their work and hundreds of kids’ fashion and lifestyle collections in Paris and New York.
And if you want more art in your day, check out this article on the artists from the winter shows!
