RÉTROMOBILE
Early February · Paris Expo Porte de Versailles · Five Days · Since 1976
Rétromobile is five days of collector cars at the Porte de Versailles at the start of February, and the first major show of the motoring year. Five hundred cars, four hundred and fifty exhibitors, a hundred and thirty thousand people through the doors.
What sells here sets what everything else is worth for the next twelve months.
The Invention
The first Rétromobile was held in February 1976 at the Gare de la Bastille, a disused railway station since demolished and built over by an opera house.
The idea was not obvious at the time. Collecting meant stamps and paintings. An old car was a used car, and a used car was worth less than a new one. The people who put that first show together were arguing that a motor car could be a piece of heritage, and almost nobody agreed with them.
It moved to the Porte de Versailles in 1981 and grew alongside the market it had helped to create. The fiftieth edition was held in 2026.
The Auctions
The show is a marketplace before it is anything else, and the auction houses treat the week as the opening of their year.
Artcurial, Bonhams and Christie’s have all sold in Paris during Rétromobile week. Cars that have sat in one collection for thirty years surface here, and prices set in these halls in February are quoted for the rest of the season.
There is a preview evening before the public days, given over to professionals and to collectors who have been asked. That is where the serious looking is done, and by the time the doors open a number of the best things have already changed hands.
What to Know
Two pavilions, four and seven. The layout is not obvious and the plan repays study before arriving.
The clubs are the reason to come. Marque clubs, coachbuilders’ associations, restorers and parts dealers take stands alongside the auction houses, and the people behind those tables know more than anyone else in the building.
The show is as much exhibition as sale. Each year it mounts one or two themed displays, and they are museum work rather than dressing.
February in Paris is cold and grey and the halls are very large. Wear something you can walk five hours in.
The mistake is treating it as a car show. It is a fair for a market, and the conversations worth having are about provenance, restoration and what a thing is actually worth.
The Court
Rétromobile is not the Court’s own. Preview access, introductions to the auction houses and viewings of particular lots are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward.
