In partnership with Longchamp

There is something about arriving in Paris in September that makes you want to walk everywhere.

Perhaps it is the light. Or the collective unwillingness of Parisians to acknowledge that summer might be coming to a close soon. Tables continue to spill onto pavements; bicycles weave between cars; doors to galleries and boutiques remain propped open to the street. Paris feels particularly alive when you have nowhere you urgently need to be.

My home for a few days is Le Grand Mazarin, tucked into rue de la Verrerie in Le Marais – the kind of hotel that makes an argument for maximalism when you've spent too long convincing yourself you prefer restraint. Pattern, colour, tapestry, lacquered furniture; rooms that feel more like the imagined Parisian apartment of an eccentric relative than somewhere you've checked into for a few days.

Outside, Le Marais is buzzing. Locals buying bread, tourists consulting maps, dogs disappearing beneath café tables, galleries opening their doors for the day. It is a neighbourhood built around proximity – of old and new, commerce and culture, residents and visitors – and there is something fitting about Longchamp choosing this particular pocket of Paris for its inaugural Art Festival.

For its first edition, the Maison has conceived something considerably more expansive than an exhibition. The Longchamp Art Festival is a three-day cultural program, free and open to the public, bringing together nearly 30 artists and creators from around the world. Painting, sculpture, photography and design sit alongside music, dance, singing and digital art; performances give way to workshops, guided tours and conversations. The ambition is less to simply encounter art than to spend time inside it.

The festival began with an invitation-only opening that brought together artists and figures from across culture, fashion and film. Among them were artists Xavier Veilhan, Elias Crespin and Yuko Nishikawa, alongside JR and Blanca Li, while Juliette Binoche, Zoey Deutch and Longchamp ambassador Kim Sejeong were among the guests. Performances from pianist Koki Nakano, singer Célia Kameni and dancer Marion Barbeau carried the evening into a DJ set by Dorion Mixe – an opening gesture that established the festival as a living cultural program rather than a conventional gallery presentation.

The festival itself is only a few minutes' walk from the hotel, at 5 rue Saint-Merri. At the centre of this sprawling program is an idea intrinsic to Longchamp: movement. Not simply as something physical, but as a way of thinking about creativity – the movement of bodies, materials and ideas, and the exchange that happens between them.

“Movement is really at the heart of the brand,” Jean Cassegrain, Longchamp CEO tells me. “Our logo with the horse and rider… expresses movement, speed, energy, strength.”

Longchamp, he explains, has always been a House for people in motion – “people who travel a lot, who move a lot around our cities” – and one that itself tries to remain “agile and fast and always on the move.”

For Sophie Delafontaine, Longchamp's Artistic Director and the creative force behind the festival, art has long been another way for the Maison to move: beyond familiar processes, materials and even the limits of its own savoir-faire.

“Art is, of course, a great source of inspiration,” she tells me, tracing Longchamp's relationship with artists through its collection, stores and collaborations. But the exchange goes further than aesthetics. For Sophie Delafontaine, working with artists has repeatedly challenged the Maison to develop new ways of making.

“When I work on collaborations with artists, it's like a white canvas for them,” she says. “I try to let them go where they want.”

Without the technical constraints that might ordinarily accompany product design, artists have pushed Longchamp into unfamiliar territory. “Sometimes we had to develop new kinds of machines. We had to develop new materials that we had never explored before,” Sophie Delafontaine explains. “It's very rich for us and for the company when we are able to work this way.”

The festival takes that idea beyond the literal, bringing together artists from different disciplines, generations and corners of the world. And so, appropriately, our own experience of it begins elsewhere.

Our first stop is the studio of Swiss artist Caroline Denervaud.

I'm immediately taken by the space – and perhaps even more so by everything surrounding the work. Books and references are tucked along windowsills and into tiny crevices around the studio, and I find myself obsessively scanning their spines, looking for clues to the images and ideas she surrounds herself with.

Caroline Denervaud's practice brings together painting, movement and performance, and we talk through the way her body and gesture inform the work. It's a brief glimpse inside her world, but one that will make seeing her again the following morning all the more special.

From there, we're back in the car and heading north to Aubervilliers. Our next stop is POUSH, a sprawling 12,000-square-metre creative hub home to around 250 artists from more than 40 countries. We're guided through the enormous site before heading upstairs into a beautiful gallery space for lunch with a group of artists in residence.

It's an entirely different scale to Caroline Denervaud's studio: work and conversation everywhere, with artists across disciplines gathered under one roof. Over lunch, we hear about their practices and experiences working in Paris before making our way back towards Le Marais.

The freedom afforded to artists here is central to Sophie Delafontaine's thinking – not simply in the work Longchamp commissions, but in the way she approached the festival itself.

Rather than collapsing art into a singular aesthetic, Sophie Delafontaine wanted its different forms to coexist. Working alongside French curator and producer Olivier Bassuet, she began with Longchamp's own collection and the artists the Maison was already following, before opening the conversation outward.

The process began in January, giving Sophie Delafontaine and Olivier Bassuet roughly nine months to build a program capable of moving between object and performance, the familiar and the unknown. Some participating artists had an existing relationship with Longchamp; others entered its orbit through the festival. The point, Sophie Delafontaine explains, was never simply to assemble names, but to consider how different practices might respond to one another within the same space.

That philosophy extended to performance. Some works were conceived specifically in response to the gallery; others brought existing practices into a new context. The result is deliberately plural: established artists sharing space with emerging voices, and static works existing alongside performances that change the experience of the gallery throughout the day.

By late afternoon, we're back in Le Marais for opening night, and the first thing I notice within the gallery is the light.

It pours through naturally, catching surfaces and shifting as people move through the space. Artists mingle with guests; conversations form around paintings, sculptures and installations before migrating elsewhere. I find myself watching how people interact with the work almost as much as the work itself.

Nothing feels particularly static – which, of course, is the point. For Sophie Delafontaine, the festival is a natural extension of Longchamp's longstanding relationship with contemporary art, but also an opportunity to take that commitment somewhere new.

“This festival is a way also to push a little bit further this engagement,” she tells me. “I think this really authentic and sincere engagement on creativity has the best expression here.”

“It's the first time that we do a project that is solely dedicated to art and artists,” Jean Cassegrain says. “Here it's 100 per cent artistic. There is no commercial element whatsoever.”

What the Maison has created instead is closer to a temporary cultural ecosystem. Admission is free, with the gallery's program continually evolving through choreographic performances, concerts and DJ sets, alongside guided tours, workshops and talks. A workshop conceived by Damien Poulain was designed specifically for younger visitors, while panel discussions created another point of entry into contemporary artistic practice.

The openness is deliberate. This is not simply an art-world audience being invited into a branded space, but an attempt to remove some of the barriers that can make contemporary art feel inaccessible in the first place.

“The idea is that people feel very welcome,” Jean Cassegrain says, noting that galleries can sometimes feel intimidating. Longchamp wanted something “warm, friendly, welcoming”. Correctly so, the Maison calls the festival a “gift to the city”.

On opening night, with the late-afternoon light still pouring in and many of the artists standing alongside their work, it feels like a particularly Parisian gift at that.

The following morning, we're back at the festival. The gallery feels different again – an illustration of the shifting program Sophie Delafontaine and Olivier Bassuet have designed, where the experience changes depending on the hour you arrive. The day begins with a conversation between Sophie Delafontaine and journalist and curator Géraldine Sarratia.

It's one of those conversations that reminds you how much more interesting it is to hear someone talk about what they genuinely love. Sophie Delafontaine's relationship with art feels personal – something shared across the Cassegrain family as much as it is embedded within Longchamp itself.

“I don't know why and how,” she had told me with a laugh when we spoke about the family's tastes, “but the fact is that we like the same kind of art.”

As the conversation between Sophie Delafontaine and Géraldine Sarratia concluded, the space made way for a new type of dialogue – between body and canvas – as Caroline Denervaud began a surprise performance right in the centre of the gallery floor.

Having visited her studio the morning before, there's an added pleasure in watching a new piece come to life. I think back to those books and references crammed onto her windowsills as we watch her body move across the work, gesture becoming mark in real time.

It's a particularly beautiful expression of the idea that has followed us throughout the trip: movement not simply as a theme, but as a creative act.

And then, almost as quickly as it began, our time at the festival is over.

Stepping back out into Le Marais, Paris resumes around us. The neighbourhood continues moving with the same energy it had when I arrived. There is, however, the possibility that the Longchamp Art Festival might eventually move with it.

Jean Cassegrain describes the format as deliberately flexible – “a concept that can travel” and “a concept that can be done again.”

Naturally, I ask about Australia. There are practicalities, he concedes. Paris is home territory. “In theory, yes.”

Sophie Delafontaine points out that the connection is, in some ways, already there: Australian artists form part of Longchamp's collection, just as artists from Africa, the UK, Korea and elsewhere do. For her, creating those links across cultures and countries – allowing people to discover work they might not otherwise encounter – is part of the festival's purpose.

For now, its first iteration feels very much at home here: Longchamp, Paris, a gallery in Le Marais and a few September days dedicated to art, artists and the freedom to create.