Hyères, We Have a Problem: Fashion’s Most Cult Festival Faces Reckoning
Behind the rosé and runway shows: sexual harassment allegations, financial mismanagement, and institutional rot at Villa Noailles.
Editor’s Note (May 20, 2025): Since publication, the individual who originally shared their account of sexual harassment has deleted their public post and requested anonymity. At the time of reporting, their allegation was publicly available and privately confirmed. I have updated the piece to reflect their evolving comfort level while preserving the integrity of the reporting.
There’s a storm brewing over the sun-drenched coast of Hyères, and it’s not the Mistral wind. One of France’s most prestigious cultural institutions and fashion’s chicest launchpad, Villa Noailles, long seen as a cradle for emerging talent in fashion, photography, and design, has come under intense scrutiny following a damning investigation into years of financial mismanagement and internal abuses of power. The report, led by Le Monde journalist Roxana Azimi, and an audit by the General Inspectorate of Cultural Affairs (IGAC), has revealed nearly €4 million in cumulative deficit, lavish expenditures, and allegations of toxic leadership that stretch back years.
I was lucky enough to be invited by Lucien Pages to the Hyères Festival back in 2021, an invitation that, at the time, felt like golden validation. The experience was nothing short of fabulous: Chanel-hosted lunches in the countryside, villa views that swallowed the Mediterranean whole, and an air of opulence that felt as if the South of France had been rebranded as fashion’s playground. I covered it for Vogue France before they unceremoniously 86ed me, but the memory remains: we were, as guests, EXTREMELY well taken care of.
Behind that elegant curtain, however, was a ticking time bomb of egos & excess.
The Festival That Built Fashion Legends
Since 1986, the Hyères International Festival of Fashion, Photography and Accessories has been one of the most important global platforms for emerging creative talent. Hosted at the iconic modernist Villa Noailles, the festival is often where rising stars receive their first major spotlight—and where some of fashion’s most legendary names got their start.
Past winners and participants read like a who’s who of 21st-century fashion: John Galliano (who first attended in 1991), Martin Margiela (1992), Viktor & Rolf (1993), Felipe Oliveira Baptista (2002), Anthony Vaccarello(2006), Julien Dossena, Glenn Martens of Y/Project, and more recently, Rushemy Botter and Lisi Herrebrughof Botter, Steven Passaro, and Ifeanyi Okwuadi.
The photography jury has welcomed luminaries like Karl Lagerfeld, Paolo Roversi, and Tim Walker. And in fashion, past jurors have included Haider Ackermann, Natacha Ramsay-Levi, Kris Van Assche, and Louise Trotter. It’s also been a longtime favorite of Chanel, which has regularly provided patronage, parties, and a very well-dressed entourage.
The festival has around 40 other private partners—Mercedes-Benz, Hermès, American Vintage, LVMH, Kering, the European Confederation of Flax and Hemp, and Galeries Lafayette, among them. Public institutions also cover roughly 60% of the budget, with funding from the local municipality, the Var department, the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, the Toulon Provence Méditerranée metropolis, and various government grants.
The vibe is a rare mix of indie experimentalism and old-world elegance. Think avant-garde installations in a Bauhaus villa, rising designers nervously presenting to editors and buyers, and casual cocktail chats with industry royalty, with a smattering of the coolest kids in Paris flown in to keep things edgy.
And once the sun sets, things get… messy. There are raucous techno raves in the Hyères airport hangars (yes, really), invite-only villa parties, a steady drip of rosé-fueled gossip, and extremely incestuous industry hookups. It’s a perfect storm of art, ambition, and chaos, with just enough salt air and sponsor money to keep it all feeling chic.
But now: crisis.
An IGAC audit exposed a staggering €1.2 million in travel and reception expenses, lavish dinners, luxury hotels, endless gifting, plus €2.7 million in unpaid supplier debts. For an institution that receives 60% of its €6.5 million budget from public funds (the rest from private patrons like the aforementioned Chanel and LVMH), the revelations are nothing short of scandalous. Compounding the outrage: Jean-Pierre Blanc reportedly drew a salary of €10,000 per month, a striking figure given the scale of the deficit and the mounting debts left unpaid. The comparisons to the Aix-en-Provence Lyric Art Festival, which required a public bailout, are apt: the scale of Villa Noailles’ deficit is similarly dramatic.
And it’s not just the financials. Serious allegations of sexual harassment have emerged as well. One former Villa Noailles collaborator, who briefly worked at the institution from 2016 to 2017, has accused Jean-Pierre Blanc of sexually harassing him, and ultimately pushing him out when he rejected his advances. He first shared his experience in a now-deleted Instagram post and later confirmed the details to me directly. “I was forced to resign,” he said, describing an unmistakably exploitative power dynamic. The allegations have not yet led to legal action, but they’re now part of a growing chorus of testimonies alleging abuse of power by Blanc.
Editor’s note: The individual’s name has been removed to respect their privacy.
Over the years, Blanc—once hailed for transforming the sleepy commune of Hyères into a fashion-world hotspot—has reportedly cultivated a toxic culture marked by silencing dissent and consolidating control.
Michel Mallard, a key figure behind the festival’s prestige who brought legendary names like Jean Paul Gaultier, Guy Bourdin, Steven Meisel, and Steven Klein to its stages, was unceremoniously fired by a simple email in 2012. “It gave me a depression,” Mallard confided. “Yet I was the one who organized the first exhibition of Guy Bourdin, introduced Steven Meisel and Steven Klein, and brought Jean Paul Gaultier onto the jury. But at some point, Jean-Pierre [Blanc]started to have a big head; he wanted to appropriate my work, even sign in my place.”
Diane Pernet, the iconic fashion critic and festival chronicler for nearly a decade, experienced a similarly cold dismissal. “I once told Jean-Pierre that we needed a new video team to reinvent ourselves,” she recalled. “After that, I heard nothing until a cameraman told me he had recruited my former assistant without informing me.” The American blogger, known for her signature black mantilla, tried to reach Blanc for an explanation—but he ignored her. “After nine years, he just ejected me without the decency to tell me to my face.”
Catherine Geel, co-founder of the festival’s Design Parade, also left amid growing tensions. “At one point, there was no longer any room for discussion about the content,” the historian explained. “I no longer wanted to be the figurehead of something that no longer made sense, especially as a relationship of domination was starting to form.”
Inside Villa Noailles, dissenting voices were quickly ousted. “Jean-Pierre works with affection and charm before mistreating and sidelining those who disagree,” summarized a former employee who wished to remain anonymous—a testimony echoed by several others interviewed by Le Monde. One insider summed up the environment as “a huge Spanish inn out of control.”
Blanc’s inner circle became a revolving door of young assistants, often men, whom he allegedly elevated before discarding. “They thought they were deputy directors,” one former employee said, “until they weren’t.”
Then there’s the curious case of his partner, artist Marc Turlan, whose work was featured again and again at the festival, despite a widely shared sentiment that it simply didn’t measure up. “When I told Jean-Pierre [Turlan] wasn’t good enough, I signed my death warrant,” Mallard said.
Turlan’s art often revolves around portraits of naked young men, a recurring motif that raised more than a few eyebrows. I can personally attest, as can a sizable portion of Parisian gay men, to having been asked to pose for him. The whole thing had the faint whiff of a casting couch masquerading as conceptual art.
Add to that the ill-fated “conservation and documentation center”, a grand-sounding cultural expansion that never materialized, despite the purchase of a 19th-century Roman villa to house it. While that vanity project gathered dust, young artists were sometimes forced to pay out of pocket just to ship their work, because Villa Noailles had supposedly run out of funds. A shocking ask, considering the event’s blue-chip sponsorships.
Meanwhile, private donations were pouring in. So where was the money going? According to insiders, the spending didn’t stop, it just got redirected: luxury hotel stays, over-the-top parties, extravagant gifts for guests. Including, notably, the lavish press trip I had been taken on.
The irony is almost poetic: the more the fashion world poured money into Hyères, the deeper the financial hole became.
And while every year seemed to bring a fresh crop of talent and a new round of sponsor-backed spectacle, the real breaking point came in 2023.
That year, Villa Noailles pulled out all the stops to celebrate its 100th anniversary, a centenary marked not by reflection or restraint, but by extravagant programming and showy cultural flexing. Chief among them: the commissioning of a full-blown opera, Ressusciter la Rose, with none other than Camélia Jordana as the star attraction. Despite Chanel’s significant backing, the centenary celebrations reportedly pushed the institution’s already fragile finances over the edge. It was pomp, circumstance, and cultural self-congratulation, paid for, in part, with public funds and unpaid invoices.
While the media coverage so far has focused primarily on finances, there’s growing pressure to investigate not just the money trail, but the human cost, the careers stunted, the mental health toll, the culture of silence that protected those in power.
The Reckoning
Now, the fallout. The State has dispatched a new administrator, a debt repayment plan of €845,000 per year is in place, and a general manager will soon be appointed to bring oversight to an institution where there has been virtually none. Blanc, for now, remains as Artistic Director, albeit stripped of financial power. But the damage has been done.
To make up for the deficit, free admission may be scrapped, and some projects are being downsized or scrapped altogether.
This all comes at a precarious moment for French culture. Budget cuts have slashed the Ministry of Culture’s reserves, and the political climate in the Var, a region where the far-right is rapidly gaining ground, makes lavish spending on elite fashion events politically toxic. There’s a very real risk that the scandal could serve as ammo for those seeking to defund or delegitimize cultural initiatives entirely.
What’s happening at Villa Noailles is a microcosm of everything wrong with institutional arts culture: the personality cults, the unchecked ambition, the lack of oversight, the obsession with image over substance. And, of course, the vulnerability of young creatives who often find themselves as collateral damage in systems that prioritize egos and champagne over ethics and sustainability.
Fashion may be a fantasy, but behind the curtain of Villa Noailles, the reality has been anything but. And now, the fantasy's been priced…..and the invoice is very much overdue.
Yuck. What a mess. So often the case, though.
Devastating