Jordan Roth Brings His West Village Apartment to Paris

During Paris Art Week, the Broadway producer reimagines the home he lived in for 15 years as a meditation on memory and identity.

“I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes,” Vladimir Nabokov writes in Speak, Memory.

True to these words, memory plays a larger role than we think, shaping choices such as the aesthetics we prefer as we grow older. Memory and all its strangeness is something that Jordan Roth, the Tony Award-winning Broadway producer and artist, handles exceptionally well, exploring it through an installation at the Hôtel de Guise during Paris Art Week. Presented in partnership with Design Miami and Salon 94 Design, “To Think of the Tranquil Life of Things” reimagines the West Village apartment where he lived for 15 years, but now in the French capital. Walking through the exhibit, guided by Roth himself, feels like a meditation.

“The work started when my husband [author Richie Jackson], son, and I moved out of the apartment we had lived in for 15 years,” he tells Vogue. “So much life had happened there. We got married there, and our son was born there. It was a place of my whole aesthetic expansion, a place of exploration.”

The first room, his reimagined living room, greets visitors with furniture draped in buttery crêpe de chine silk printed with photo collages of Roth. Photographed by Ben Hassett on the last day of the move (“The shoot took the entire day”), they honor the different stages of his life in the apartment. 

The series begins with a black Prada suit, his uniform for many years, then traces his aesthetic evolution: a gray Rick Owens dress, a printed Comme des Garçons frock, the memorable floral Valentino ensemble he wore to the 2024 Met GalaGalaA formal fundraising or celebratory event known for black-tie dress, high-fashion red-carpet looks, and elaborate dinners. Galas let designers dress public figures in statement gowns and tuxedos, and they oftenGo to Gala Glossary, and so on. It is eye candy for the sartorially obsessed.

“Fashion is fabric activated by the body,” Roth says, leading us into the library. There, chairs draped in silk with printed images of him—one in a custom striped Zac Posen suit, another in a bright blue Balenciaga dress—greet us. Lamps carry different renditions of the photographs from the first room. Moments later, we step into the chintz room, enveloped in a fabric Roth developed with Adam Charlap-Hyman, who also worked on the exhibition design. Inspired by the art of chintz, it centers on a dahlia print, a flower Roth grows himself. On closer inspection, traces of his face from the Valentino outfit appear in the pattern.

This is where his idea comes into focus. “You can see the aesthetic leap from one place to another,” he explains. “We change our clothes every day, and over time, as our aesthetics evolve, our clothes keep pace with us. But we don’t change our home every day, so they lag behind. When we move in, they reflect how we expressed ourselves at that point in our lives. We evolve and grow, and the home stays the same, until we move. Then the home catches up, and then we grow beyond it again. In this case, my aesthetic growth in this home was such a leap.”

In the final room, more chairs and lamps feature different angles of the photo collages. The last piece returns us to the same Prada suit we saw at the beginning of the exhibit, but this time the focus is on the hands, highlighting the long nails he wears now.

So much can happen in 15 years. In the end, the exhibit encourages reflection on, and appreciation for, the life one has lived and the life still to come.