Nikki’s Summer Party

Art x Outfits Edit #41

Some places do more than just inspire an outfit, they are the outfit. Nikki de Saint Phalle’s Jardin des Tarots in Tuscany is one of them. A labyrinth of monumental arcana, all glittering mosaics and surreal curves. It is a place where you walk into a sculpture and the sculpture stares right back at you.

Saint Phalle, French-American, self-taught, provocateur, began the garden in 1979 and spent over two decades building it. Part Gaudí, part esoteric fever dream, part feminist reclamation of myth, it’s a world where Tarot’s archetypes tower over you, tiled in glass, mirror, and ceramic. She lived in one of the sculptures while working on it: quite literally inside her own work.

For the look, I went full Major Arcana: a silver sequin dress that catches the light like mirrored tile, turquoise shoes echoing her bold cobalt mosaics, a red sculptural bag as dramatic as the Empress herself, and blue earrings that feel plucked straight from the High Priestess’ palette.

The Tarot Garden, like all of Saint Phalle’s work, is not polite art. It is excessive, unapologetic, and deliciously strange, a maximalist playground built on intuition and symbolism. Wearing this look feels the same. It is more than a translation, an inhabiting. Because sometimes the only way to match the scale of the art… is to be the spectacle.