Cosima von Bonin’s Sculptural Menagerie Enchants the Petit Palais
The Berlin artist's whimsical plush creations, commissioned for Loewe's Fall Winter 2026 show, inhabit Paris as tactile sculpture meets high craft. A collection of bags and accessories channels von Bonin's distinctive aesthetic through leather, mohair and velvet.
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There is something profoundly moving about the encounter between fine art and fashion craft, that moment when sculpture and utility converge. At the Petit Palais, Cosima von Bonin’s sculptural universe unfolds as an exhibition of remarkable textural abundance, commissioned by Loewe’s creative directors Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez for the maison’s Fall Winter 2026 presentation.
Von Bonin’s menagerie exists in a realm of pure imagination rendered through material splendour. Leather octopuses curl with an almost sentient grace, their tentacles soft and impossibly elegant. Mohair whales suggest the gentle monumentality of ocean depths brought indoors, rendered in fibres that catch light like phosphorescence. Velvet St. Bernards stand as noble companions, their forms both playful and dignified, embodying a certain Germanic sensibility that speaks to the artist’s Berlin practice.
The sculptures, which form part of Art Basel Paris’s Public Program, represent more than decorative flourish. Von Bonin’s visual language operates in the territory between childhood reverie and conceptual rigour, between the handmade and the formally considered. Each form speaks of hands at work, of material understood and manipulated with remarkable sensitivity.
Craft Interpreted Through Fashion
Loewe’s Fall Winter 2026 collection draws inspiration from this distinctive aesthetic, translating von Bonin’s sculptural vocabulary into leather goods and accessories. The collaboration speaks to the maison’s fundamental understanding that luxury lives in the marriage of artistic vision and technical mastery. Bags and accessories carry forward the exhibition’s textural poetry, channelling the artist’s preoccupation with form, material and a certain tender eccentricity.
This is luxury as conversation rather than proclamation. The pieces emerge not from commercial demand but from genuine creative communion between artist and maison, a shared language of material exploration and visual intelligence. There is restraint in this approach, a refusal of the obvious, an insistence that beauty need not shout.
Von Bonin’s sculptures occupy the Petit Palais with an easy majesty, their soft forms contrasting beautifully with the classical architecture surrounding them. To encounter them is to understand something essential about contemporary luxury: it dwells in the space where art and craft dissolve into one another, where sculptural integrity meets the discipline of the handmade object.
The exhibition remains on view at the Petit Palais during Art Basel Paris, offering a rare glimpse into the sensibility shaping one of fashion’s most thoughtfully curated houses.
Imagery courtesy of Loewe (@loewe).
