Last Paris Fashion Week, the most coveted address in the city was neither a natural wine bar nor a Dover Street Market happening but a sauna. Sant Roch is a 400sq m spa – France’s largest, its founders claim – just off the Tuileries. It offers contrast therapy, the hot-cold immersion ritual currently dominating the longevity conversation, in sleek, atmospheric surroundings designed by Toronto-based architects Futurestudio. When it opened in March, it clocked more than 4,500 visitors in its first month.
Jules and Chloé Bouscatel, Sant Roch’s founders, have built a business by bringing recent North American trends to the local market. They started in 2016 with Monday Sports Club, a group of three boutique fitness brands in Paris: Dynamo Cycling, Punch Boxing and Riise, a low-impact concept centered around Pilates and yoga. By 2025, Monday Sports Club was generating around €15mn in revenue across 20 studios, although at first it was hard to convince people that there was a market for French fitness. Says Chloé Bouscatel: “When we first raised investment in 2016, people were telling us, ‘Your business will never work. Parisians don’t work out.’ There’s the Parisian image – the girl who is very skinny but doesn’t do sport, who eats bread.” (French Women Don’t Get Fat was a bestseller for a reason, after all.) The couple recently stepped away from operations in the group to focus on Sant Roch, which they say is already on track to hit €2mn in its first year.
These numbers reflect a stark shift in the Parisian lifestyle. According to a 2024 Xerfi study, France’s fitness market is valued at €2.4bn, placing it third in Europe behind Germany and the UK. Running – an anomaly when I arrived in Paris 15 years ago – is now at peak phenomenon. According to the latest figures from L’Observatoire du Running, an annual study produced by Union Sport & Cycle, running competitions in Greater Paris increased by 23 per cent between 2024 and 2025. The 2026 Paris Half Marathon sold all 48,000 bibs in a single day.
“When I first arrived in Paris, even the idea of going to the gym – or simply wearing gym clothes around the city – wasn’t a thing at all. People didn’t show that they worked out, and talked even less about it,” says Claire Thomson-Jonville, Vogue France’s head of editorial content, who has become something of a poster woman for the new French lifestyle. Where the OG Vogue France editor-in-chief Carine Roitfeld likes her Marlboro Reds, Thomson-Jonville is up most mornings for a sauna and cold plunge, breathwork and a session at Barry’s Bootcamp. Still, if the new fitness routines are led by international trends, the French have adapted them: “This is not a 5am-and-go-hard kind of city – Paris is more of a slow-burn rhythm,” she says, adding that French fitness regimes extend beyond the gym floor. Lymphatic drainage – a massage technique designed to move excess fluid – is a fixture of her routine like many Parisian women, with names including Luca Bagnara and Stéphanie Legris in high demand. Wellness in general is by far the top-performing topic on vogue.fr. “There’s clearly a real appetite for it,” says Thomson-Jonville.
Akim Ben Mzakar, a personal coach who works with Nike and Technogym, opened his private training club, La Source, seven years ago. His client roster skews female, and many clock in for three to four sessions a week. “I have good-looking coaches,” he jokes, adding seriously, “when I started, there were no spaces like mine, but now the fitness salon business has completely exploded.” He credits lockdown for motivating the French, as well as the 2024 Olympics; a survey of sports companies showed 55 per cent reporting activity growth in the industry in 2025.
Similarly, when jewellery designer Fanny Boucher started Dynamo’s spin classes almost 10 years ago, they were considered bizarre – most sports classes at that time took place at local gyms. Now her workout schedule includes not just spinning but weight training, swimming and Pilates, all conducted with flawless gel nails. The shift in mindset and access has been welcome, but she points out that you still can’t do a class at 7am. (In 2025, the most popular timeslot on booking platform Classpass was 11am, followed by midday.) Another French particularity when it comes to choosing a workout space? “The surroundings have to be beautiful,” she says.
“The French are more demanding,” says Chloé Bouscatel, who spent €1.5mn on the design and construction of Sant Roch. “It needs to be a five-star hospitality experience, and we need to convince them to come back.” This tracks with a new wave of stylish businesses, including the tech start-up and health clinic Zoī Vendôme, a wood-panelled wellness space with sculptural staircases and diffuse lighting, and the newly reopened Ken Club. The latter is part of the luxe sports and wellness group Masada and was co-designed by French-Italian architects Rodolphe Parente and Marion Mailaender. The €20mn renovation features ’80s pop-inspired interiors and a 20m swimming pool cast in off-white resin.
Locals are also gravitating towards the social aspect. The guided ritual experience at Sant Roch’s sauna – conceived by yoga and breathwork practitioner Clotilde Chaumet and her partner Gabriel Seibel, both former Dynamo coaches – feels like a night out at any time of day. Set to a designed soundtrack with sensory lighting and essential oil bombs thrown onto the sauna’s coals, the collective energy builds to a sweaty crescendo with Bad Bunny on the sound system, the group whooping through the final stretch. “I think it’s why Parisians are embracing sports clubs in general: the competitive level is not as high as, say, the Americans but it’s about having fun,” says Chaumet.
One of France’s most-followed gyms, La Montgolfière, is popular precisely because of this: its three Paris sites blend sport, a restaurant and a co-working space. Here, members tend to settle in for the day. “The French are approaching it with balance: they want to do sport, but also have a glass of natural wine and a dish full of flavour – and that is the way we have created a sense of coherence,” says co-founder Basile Lombard-Latune.
It’s a mindset that Letizia Calcamo, communications director for Moët & Hennessy France, also adopts. She recently ran the Les 10km des Étoiles (an event organised primarily for the staff of Michelin-awarded hotels and restaurants) and, like her friends, has used the hashtag #courirpluspourmangerplus when posting about her twice-weekly 10km runs. “I work out because I like to indulge in a dégustation at a three-star restaurant,” she says with a laugh, adding that the French might have upped their game but they do it on their own terms. In March, Paris’s newly elected mayor, Emmanuel Grégoire, arrived to deliver his victory speech on a Vélib city bike, but he was (thankfully) dressed in a suit. “We would still never spend a whole day in leggings,” says Calcamo of her compatriots.