A Director Walks Into a Concept Store
Philip Andelman, the film and music video director, has stepped into retail curation with a pop-up installation at Merci, the long-running Parisian concept store known for its editorially minded floor space. The collaboration leans hard into psychedelic and natural aesthetics, pulling together products from three distinct brands under a loosely mushroom-themed visual framework.
The result is an eclectic mix that sits somewhere between outdoor gear, counterculture lifestyle, and streetwear – an unusual combination even by Merci’s standards, which has hosted plenty of offbeat partnerships over the years.
What Andelman Actually Built Here
The centerpiece of the pop-up is a product line Andelman developed directly with Au Vieux Campeur, the French outdoor brand with roots in technical gear and alpine equipment. The mushroom motif runs through those pieces specifically – a design choice that reads as both literal and atmospheric, nodding to foraging culture and the broader psychedelic visual language that has seeped back into mainstream aesthetics over the past several years.
Alongside the Au Vieux Campeur collaboration, Andelman selected products from Houseplant, the lifestyle brand co-founded by actor Seth Rogen. Houseplant, launched in 2021, built its identity around cannabis culture expressed through home goods and design objects – ceramics, ashtrays, lighters, and audio equipment with a mid-century aesthetic. Its presence at Merci makes a certain kind of sense given the pop-up’s overall sensibility.
Rounding out the selection is Acid Snow, a streetwear label whose name alone signals where it sits stylistically. Andelman’s curation across these three brands – a French outdoor institution, a celebrity-backed lifestyle company, and an independent streetwear outfit – suggests an interest in mapping different entry points to the same cultural moment rather than forcing a single brand story.
Merci as a Stage
Merci has operated at 111 Boulevard Beaumarchais in Paris’s 3rd arrondissement since 2009, and its model of rotating collaborations and curated retail has kept it relevant in a city full of competing concept spaces. Partnering with a director rather than a designer or brand for this kind of installation is a slight but deliberate shift in framing – Andelman brings a visual storytelling background rather than a product development one, which shapes how the space is likely organized and presented.
For a store that has always positioned itself at the intersection of fashion, design, and culture, a mushroom-themed pop-up co-developed with a music video director and stocked with Seth Rogen’s ceramics is not exactly out of character. It is, however, specific – and specificity tends to be what separates Merci’s better collaborations from its more forgettable ones.
The Broader Retail Picture
Pop-ups built around countercultural or psychedelic aesthetics are not new, but the institutional legitimacy of the venues hosting them has shifted. Merci is not a fringe gallery or a brand-owned activation space – it is one of the better-regarded concept stores in Europe, which changes the context around what Andelman and his collaborators are presenting.
Au Vieux Campeur, for its part, is a brand with a specific French customer base and a reputation built on function rather than trend. Developing mushroom-themed products with a film director for a Paris pop-up is a meaningful departure from that positioning – whether it expands the brand’s reach or simply creates a limited-edition moment will depend on how the pieces actually perform at retail.
Seth Rogen’s Houseplant has been working steadily to establish itself as a design-forward lifestyle brand rather than a celebrity vanity project. Its inclusion in a curated Parisian pop-up alongside an outdoor gear company and a streetwear label positions it in a European context it hasn’t necessarily occupied before. The brand’s visual identity – warm tones, rounded forms, a distinct 1970s California influence – translates reasonably well into the kind of space Merci operates.
Acid Snow’s role in the lineup is the least documented of the three. As a streetwear label, it carries the cultural shorthand of the category, but what specific pieces Andelman chose and how they sit alongside the other two brands is the kind of detail that will define whether the pop-up feels genuinely considered or merely assembled.
The question the pop-up leaves open is whether Andelman’s directorial eye – trained on visual narrative and atmosphere – translates into retail curation in a way that shoppers can actually feel, or whether the mushroom theme is doing most of the conceptual heavy lifting on its own.
