From Ghost Ranch to the Palais Royal
Notes from the opening of the new Ann Demeulemeester store on the Palais Royal in Paris, and why an Antwerp house made sense at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico.
Last night, under the arcades of the Palais Royal, Ann Demeulemeester opened its new Paris store.
It was crowded, dark, and very Parisian in that particular way. People spilling between rooms, conversations beginning in one corner and ending somewhere else entirely.
Creative director Stefano Gallici was there with much of the team around the house. So were people we know from other corners of fashion: collaborators, friends, members of the Rick Owens team. People whose paths cross again and again in different cities.
For us, Ann Demeulemeester has become part of that map.
W Department has carried the collection, and over time we have gotten to know Stefano and many of the people surrounding the house. But our relationship to the world he is creating has also had a particularly unlikely New Mexico chapter.
For Road to Never, the Autumn/Winter 2025 campaign, the house went to Ghost Ranch. Against that landscape (cliffs, dust, enormous sky) the clothes found a kind of clarity that felt both surprising and completely natural. A house born of Antwerp, of black and white, of European streets, suddenly made sense in the desert. The landscape changed, but the identity didn’t.
That thought came back last night in a very different setting.
The new store sits on the Palais Royal, only a short walk from the Louvre and just down from Rick Owens.
It’s intimate.
Upstairs, there’s a private space for bridal and eveningwear and for a slower, more personal way of working with clients.
That feels right for a house that has always depended more on identification than mass recognition.
People don’t wear Ann Demeulemeester simply because they recognize the name.
They recognize themselves in it.
The best fashion houses create that kind of world.
The clothes are one part of it; the music, the casting, the spaces, the people around them gradually become part of the language too.
And then there are the places.
Antwerp.
Ghost Ranch.
The Palais Royal.
On paper, they have almost nothing in common, but once a point of view is strong enough, those differences become useful.
They give it something else to resonate against.
Last night was, on the surface, a store opening, but the more interesting thing was the sense of another point being added to the map.
Ann Demeulemeester has another address now, and for us, that address somehow connects back to a stretch of desert half a world away.
Continue Exploring
- Ann Demeulemeester at W Department, the house, the Antwerp Six years, and what Stefano Gallici has been extending since 2023.
- All Ann Demeulemeester we carry, the Autumn/Winter 2025 buy: clothing, boots, silver jewelry, and the perfume.
- Rick Owens at W Department, whose Paris store stands in the same Palais Royal arcades, on the Galerie de Valois.
- Temple, our writing on the Rick Owens SS26 collection.
- Lemaire at W Department, another house with a store under the Palais Royal arcades, opened in May 2026.
- Report from Paris: Women’s Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2026, written from the shows.
- Report from Paris: Men’s Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2026, the menswear season, from the same week.
- The full designer roster, house by house.
- The Library, our writing on the houses we buy, plus the monthly playlist.
- Visit W Department, 54½ Lincoln Avenue on The Plaza, open daily, 11 to 5.