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      The Windmills Are Back Up on the Moulin Rouge

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      The Paris landmark has completed its restoration after the blades fell off this spring — and just in time for the Summer Olympic Games to begin.The moulin is back. The rouge never left.The Moulin Rouge, the famed Paris cabaret, has restored its iconic windmill after its blades broke and fell to the ground in April. The construction was finished weeks before the Paris Olympics are set to begin — and before the flame passes by on its relay route through Paris on July 15.“We wanted to be ready for this special moment,” said Jean-Victor Clerico, the managing director, whose family has run the cabaret since 1955, adding, “The Moulin Rouge without the blades? It’s not the same.”The cabaret, whose name means “red windmill” in French, has stayed open through the repairs. But it had stood functionally topless since April, when parts of the lettering also fell. No one was injured; a spokeswoman blamed a mechanical problem.Sympathy poured in from around the world, Mr. Clerico said. Fans sent in letters of support, he said. Some even wrote poems. For two months, the Moulin Rouge raced to remount the aluminum blades, pushing a metalwork company to work quickly to meet their deadline.Finally, right on schedule, the cabaret celebrated its full return to glory on Friday evening with a street show. As the bright neon lights on the windmill flicked back on, a crowd of about 1,500 people burst into cheers, Mr. Clerico said.Dancers performed the cancan — an emblem of the city, and of the cabaret culture epitomized by the Moulin Rouge — in blue, white and red costumes. They yipped and kicked, rustling their ruffles and shaking their skirts. Mr. Clerico said that the outdoor show was only the second time that the cabaret put on a cancan on the street. (The first was on its 130th anniversary in 2019.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why More French Youth Are Voting for the Far Right

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      Most young people in France usually don’t vote or they back the left. That is still true, but support has surged for the far right, whose openly racist past can feel to them like ancient history.In the 1980s, a French punk rock band coined a rallying cry against the country’s far right that retained its punch over decades. The chant, still shouted at protests by the left, is “La jeunesse emmerde le Front National,” which cannot be translated well without curse words, but essentially tells the far right to get lost.That crude battle cry is emblematic of what had been conventional wisdom not only in France, but also elsewhere — that young people often tilt left in their politics. Now, that notion has been challenged as increasing numbers of young people have joined swaths of the French electorate to support the National Rally, a party once deemed too extreme to govern.The results from Sunday’s parliamentary vote, the first of a two-part election, showed young people across the political spectrum coming out to cast ballots in much greater numbers than in previous years. A majority of them voted for the left. But one of the biggest jumps was in the estimated numbers of 18-to-24-year-olds who cast ballots for the National Rally, in an election that many say could reshape France.A quarter of the age group voted for the party, according to a recent poll by the Ifop polling institute, up from 12 percent just two years ago.There is no one reason for such a significant shift. The National Rally has tried to sanitize its image, kicking out overtly antisemitic people, for instance, who shared the deep-seated prejudice of the movement’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. And the party’s anti-immigrant platform resonates for some who see what they consider uncontrolled migration as a problem.Young people at an anti-far-right gathering in Paris after the results of the first round of the parliamentary elections. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How A Fashion Critic Mentally Catalogs Fashion Week Shows

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      Theater and dance critics can’t own the subjects they cover, but a fashion critic can — at least imaginarily — by making a hits compilation as the clothes go by.If fashion is a storytelling business, it should follow that runway shows are narratives.Yet they can’t be. For starters, they lack a plot. True, designers can be relied upon to spiel about inspirations, travels or philosophies as a listener’s eyeballs roll back in his head. The truth is that most fashion shows are best consumed, as everything else now is, in fragments. They are elements of an ongoing internal scroll, as continuous, algorithmic and addictive as Instagram reels.That, anyway, is how this critic began viewing the collections in Milan and Paris this season, with the result that the following is best thought of as a mixtape, not anchored to specific nationality or geography or context, random and in some sense impressionistic and probably also solipsistic in the way everything is fundamentally forced to be in an attention economy.Take Hermès. The designer Véronique Nichanian is anything but a household name, probably not even among those in the economic stratosphere this label was created to serve. So what? She’s as consistently fine as — and in many ways better than — other fixtures in the pantheon of men’s wear, people like Giorgio Armani or Helmut Lang. There is a reason you don’t know her.“We don’t do marketing,” Axel Dumas, the Hermès chief executive, said at the company’s show. “We don’t even have a marketing department.”Véronique Nichanian’s jaunty looks for Hermès whispered quiet luxury. Vianney Le Caer/Invision, via Associated PressWhy bother when you are producing jaunty collections for those people whose own initials are enough, as the old Bottega Veneta tagline once held. So-called quiet luxury generally tends to make a racket. Ms. Nichanian’s is a muffled version and whispers wealth.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Paris, Using Dance to Uncover Hidden History

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      Benjamin Millepied, an organizer of La Ville Dansée — a daylong event in Paris and its environs — wants “to tell the invisible stories of the city.”Benjamin Millepied thinks big.La Ville Dansée, a free festival of outdoor dance on Saturday, is the first large-scale initiative from Millepied’s Paris Dance Project. Starting at 11 in the morning and ending after midnight, it involves 12 choreographers and seven commissions; 10 neighborhoods in Paris and its outlying suburbs; podcasts, screenings and live streams. The Paris Dance Project, which Millepied formed last year with Solenne du Haÿs Mascré, is not a dance company, but an organization that creates educational programs and accessible performances. La Ville Dansée (“the dancing city”), part of the Cultural Olympiad — a program of arts events around the Olympics — is its biggest splash yet, intended to show Paris and its environs not just as gorgeous settings for performance, but as places with hidden or forgotten histories.Millepied returned to live in Paris last year after a decade spent mostly in Los Angeles. His last Parisian sojourn, 2014-2016, included a brief, contentious, term as the director of the Paris Opera Ballet, which he said provided some seeds for the idea of La Ville Dansée.“I was running the best-funded institution in France, but only a fraction of society felt invited,” Millepied said in an interview in Paris in May. “It made me think about how much segregation there is, how people can have a very different experience in the same place. I decided we would commission works to tell the invisible stories of the city to gather people together who would never go to the theater, to build empathy and community.”Millepied and du Haÿs Mascré gathered a small core team that included, unusually, a political theorist, Françoise Vergès, and a sociologist, Fabien Truong, as well as the dramaturg Christian Longchamp. Over months of weekly meetings, they discussed and identified sites for dance — some famous, like the Eiffel Tower and the Jardin du Luxembourg; others little known, like an abandoned supermarket in the town of Grigny and Saint-Bernard de la Chapelle, a church that was the site of a notable police raid on migrants in 1996.Millepied researched and chose the diverse group of choreographers. Then came the logistics of raising money, getting permissions and coordinating technical teams across the city.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dancing Past the Venus de Milo

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      I fell in love with the Louvre one morning while doing disco moves to Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” in the Salle des Cariatides.The museum, a former medieval fortress and then royal palace, had not yet opened, and I was following instructions to catwalk and hip bump and point in the grand room where Louis XIV once held plays and balls.The sun cast warm light through long windows, striping the pink-and-white checkered floor and bathing the marble arms, heads and wings of the ancient Grecian statues around me.“Point, and point, and point,” shouted Salim Bagayoko, a dance instructor. So I struck my best John Travolta poses and pointed around the room, my eyes landing on the delicate sandaled foot of Artemus, the wings of a Niobid and the stone penis of Apollo.The woman beside me caught my eye. We giggled.Over the years, I have felt many things in the world’s most-visited, and arguably most-famous, museum — irritation, exhaustion and some wonder, too.This time, I felt joy.The classes are part of an effort by museums and galleries across France to put on Olympics-themed shows as Paris prepares to host the Olympic Games.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Meeting With Xi, E.U. Leader Takes Tough Line on Ukraine War

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      Ursula Von der Leyen, the European Commission president, pushed Beijing to help rein in Russia’s war in Ukraine after meeting with the Chinese and French leaders in Paris.Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, put pressure Monday on China to help resolve the war in Ukraine, saying Beijing should “use all its influence on Russia to end its war of aggression against Ukraine.”She spoke after accompanying President Emmanuel Macron of France in a meeting with Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, who began his first visit to Europe in five years on Sunday. Ms. von der Leyen has persistently taken a stronger line toward China than has Mr. Macron.With President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia again suggesting he might be prepared to use nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine, she said Mr. Xi had played “an important role in de-escalating Russia’s irresponsible nuclear threats.” She was confident, Ms. von der Leyen said, that Mr. Xi would “continue to do so against the backdrop of ongoing nuclear threats by Russia.”Whether her appeal would have any impact on Mr. Xi was unclear, and describing the conflict as Russia’s “war of aggression” in Ukraine seemed likely to irk the Chinese leader. Beijing has forged a “no limits” friendship with Russia and provided Moscow with critical support for its military effort, including jet fighter parts, microchips and other dual-use equipment.“More effort is needed to curtail delivery of dual-use goods to Russia that find their way to the battlefield,” Ms. von der Leyen said of China. “And given the existential nature of the threats stemming from this war for both Ukraine and Europe, this does affect E.U.-China relations.”It is relatively unusual for a top European official to describe the war in Ukraine as an “existential threat” to the European continent. Doing so may reflect Mr. Putin’s renewed talk of the use of nuclear weapons.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Cries of Sexism Greet a Nike Olympic Reveal

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      The sporting giant offered a sneak peek at its track and field outfits for Team U.S.A., and an unexpected backlash ensued.Ever since the Norwegian women’s beach handball team made it known that they were required to wear teeny-tiny bikini bottoms for competition into a cause célèbre, a quiet revolution has been brewing throughout women’s sports. It’s one that questions received conventions about what female athletes do — or don’t — have to wear to perform at their very best.It has touched women’s soccer (why white shorts?), gymnastics (why not a unitard rather than a leotard?), field hockey (why a low-cut tank top?) and many more, including running.So it probably should not have come as a shock to Nike that when it offered a sneak peek of the Team U.S.A. track and field unies during a Nike Air event in Paris celebrating its Air technology on Thursday (which also included looks for other Olympic athletes, like Kenya’s track and field team, France’s basketball team and Korea’s break dancing delegation), they were met with some less-than-enthusiastic reactions.See, the two uniforms Nike chose to single out on the mannequins included a men’s compression tank top and mid-thigh-length compression shorts and a woman’s bodysuit, cut notably high on the hip. It looked sort of like a sporty version of a 1980s workout leotard. As it was displayed, the bodysuit seemed as if it would demand some complicated intimate grooming.Citius Mag, which focuses on running news, posted a photo of the uniforms on Instagram, and many of its followers were not amused.“What man designed the woman’s cut?” wrote one.“I hope U.S.A.T.F. is paying for the bikini waxes,” wrote another. So went most of the more than 1,900 comments.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      #MeToo Stalled in France. Judith Godrèche Might Be Changing That.

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      Judith Godrèche did not set out to relaunch the #MeToo movement in France’s movie industry.She came back to Paris from Los Angeles in 2022 to work on “Icon of French Cinema,” a TV series she wrote, directed and starred in — a satirical poke at her acting career that also recounts how, at the age of 14, she entered into an abusive relationship with a film director 25 years older than her.Then, a week after the show aired, in late December, a viewers’ message alerted her to a 2011 documentary that she says made her throw up and start shaking as if she were “naked in the snow.”There was the same film director, admitting that their relationship had been a “transgression” but arguing that “making films is a kind of cover” for forms of “illicit traffic.”She went to the police unit specialized in crimes against children — its waiting room was filled with toys and a giant teddy bear, she recalls — to file a report for rape of a minor.“There I was,” said Ms. Godrèche, now 52, “at the right place, where I’ve been waiting to be since I was 14.”Since then, Ms. Godrèche has been on a campaign to expose the abuse of children and women that she believes is stitched into the fabric of French cinema. Barely a week has gone by without her appearance on television and radio, in magazines and newspapers, and even before the French Parliament, where she demanded an inquiry into sexual violence in the industry and protective measures for children.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More