The Insurgents of 2010

While the silly rumors of French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld somehow dethroning our Queen Anna have quieted down, her darling son, Vladimir Restoin-Roitfeld, has been making himself into a “curator,” or an “art tailor,” as he reportedly prefers to be called.

Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld grew up in Paris (clothier Christian Restoin is his father; fashion photographer Mario Testino is his godfather); graduated from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he also worked as an assistant to a producer at Paramount; and modeled for Rock & Republic before arriving in New York last year to pursue his new career. Le petit roi has organized three shows in New York—two of them coincided with Fashion Week, when his parents and family friends were in town—featuring the work of artists such as Richard Hambleton and Nicolas Pol. He has named his company Feedback Ltd., renting an office on West 26th Street and hiring an assistant.

“I am still discovering everything as I’m doing it,” he told The Observer recently by phone from his Upper East Side apartment. “I love New York. When you’re young and studying a business, it’s a city that inspires you to do a lot.”

His shows, which take place in large spaces he rents downtown, feel much more like an evening at the Beatrice Inn than a typical overlit Chelsea gallery opening with cheap wine (though Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld himself is no velvet-rope worshiper; after a period dating the requisite model, Lily Donaldson, he said he has moved on to someone more obscure).

“I was going to different exhibitions and it always had this feeling of a closed circle, and it was something very hard to enter for many,” Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld said. “So I thought if I just did it in a different way, I could capture the interest of a different crowd of people”—including Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, Jean Paul Gaultier, Gisele Bundchen, Mary-Kate Olsen, Genevieve Jones, Patrick Demarchelier, Mary J. Blige and the Hilton sisters. “I just decided to rent very large spaces and invite a huge crowd of people and present art that I believe to be amazing and just make it more fun and open-minded.”