By Kharla, Fashion Director, IRREVERENT
She is in the car from Charles de Gaulle. The driver has not spoken since the airport. Paris receives her the way Paris always receives her: as an inconvenience that has been scheduled in advance.
Paris in July is a city that believes in its own mythology. The light is golden in a way that suggests color correction by a committee. The streets are warm with the specific warmth of entitlement. I am here because the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode does not make requests — it issues commands, delivered on cardstock heavy enough to constitute a physical threat. The calligraphy alone suggested consequences.
I am twenty-nine. This is relevant because Haute Couture believes it is relevant, and because the mathematics of how long I have been attending these shows are someone else's problem. Milan was last month, and Milan was complicated. Milan had Marco. Paris has better lighting and fewer witnesses. I find this adequate.
The Negroni arrives at the hotel. It is the first one. She does not think about this. She does not need to.
CHANEL — The House Blazy Built, One Fairy Tale at a Time
Matthieu Blazy's second couture collection for Chanel is called, and I am reading this correctly, "The Beanstalk and the Camellia." I put down the program. I picked it up again. I drank half my Negroni.
Then the first look came out and I forgave him everything.
What Blazy understands — and what his predecessor at Chanel never quite grasped after the early years — is that couture is not a demonstration of difficulty. It is a demonstration of conviction. The house's beloved camellia arrived here as trompe-l'oeil embroidery in double-layer silk mousseline, approximately 165 grams per square meter, with a drape coefficient that made the chest look like a garden deciding to happen in real time. A jacket in ivory bouclé tweed — the real thing, the Lesage atelier, threads looped with a density that only justifies itself at these prices — arrived with botanical detailing at the lapels so precise it looked like the weeds had been personally invited.
There is a swan, because of course there is a swan. A ballgown in white silk duchess satin, structured with internal horsehair boning from hip to hem, opening into a train with the wingspan of something inconvenient and magnificent. The woman in front of me — an oil heiress from somewhere that produced both significant oil and very bad marriages — actually put her hand to her chest.
I found this relatable. I also found it mildly infuriating, because I have spent, by conservative estimate, twenty-nine years cultivating the ability to not do that, and Blazy almost broke me in a single look.
She considers a camellia brooch at the boutique appointment. The brooch is twelve thousand euros. She thinks about this briefly, then stops thinking about it and acquires it. She does not examine the feeling that accompanies this decision. She puts it in her bag. The bag is from last season. No one here knows this.
DIOR — Jonathan Anderson at the Musée Rodin, or: A Sculpture Garden Decides to Get Dressed
The second Negroni arrives. She is, technically, between shows. The Musée Rodin is thirty-one degrees Celsius and smells of antique stone and expensive sunscreen. She is fine. Everyone is fine.
Jonathan Anderson has not looked up from his obsessions long enough to notice that most couture designers would have withered in the shadow of Taylor Swift's wedding dress — which no one has seen, which has been described through a chain of informants terminating in a woman who once watched someone who attended the wedding leave a restaurant. By all accounts it constitutes a moment. Anderson showed up to his Dior couture debut acting as though none of this had happened, which is either extraordinary discipline or extraordinary hubris. I have decided it is both and that I respect it.
The collection is a conversation with sculptor Lynda Benglis — her Peacock series, her Indian chintz obsessions. Anderson translated this through plissé bows in lamé that moved the way water doesn't, fringe in degraded silk velvet falling from shoulders in densities that made the garments technically tasseled and practically transformative. Metallic pleats — knife-sharp, hand-pressed over polished organza — caught light at angles the palm trees didn't fully block.
A coat in red silk faille referenced the 1948 Arizona pattern from the Dior archive. I know this because the program told me. I would have known it anyway.
Across the garden, a man in a light linen jacket held himself the way expensive men hold themselves when they are pretending not to be noticed. For exactly four and a half seconds I thought it was Marco. It was not Marco. It was a Belgian art dealer from Art Basel 2019. We nodded. We did not speak. The show continued.
SCHIAPARELLI — "The Abyss," or: Daniel Roseberry Calls the Void
I find Schiaparelli exhausting. I also find it necessary, the way a very good therapist is necessary — by which I mean expensive, uncomfortable, and correct.
"The Abyss." L'appel du vide. Roseberry looked at Elsa's legacy of surrealism and said: fine. I'll use latex.
Couture latex is not what you're imagining. It is latex developed in collaboration with the Chambre Syndicale to achieve a finish so precisely calibrated — matte in some sections, mirror-polished in others, thickness varying across a single garment to suggest the architecture beneath — that calling it a material undersells it. It is a position paper. Gowns arrived with sugar water-preserved flowers embedded under stretched silicone panels, the blooms visible through a layer that was simultaneously skin and not-skin. Corset bodies in the house's anatomical style, cast in reinforced resin with a warmth that made them organic rather than Gothic.
She is on the third Negroni. The room is very loud. She is aware that she is on the third. This is fine. The flowers in the silicone deserve a third Negroni.
The woman three rows ahead of me looked like she was going to be sick. Elsa herself would have considered this a standing ovation.
VALENTINO — Alessandro Michele and the Comfortable Weight of Interruption
"Interferenze." Interference — the softer word, two signals occupying the same frequency rather than one destroying the other. This is Michele's gift: he reads the archive not as a thing to be honored but as a thing to be in dialogue with.
Volumes were large in the way that confidence is large. Velvet in double-weave construction — the kind of technical decision that produces almost no visible evidence of itself beyond the way the fabric moves when the model stops walking. Embroidery in multi-thread silk, historical references loosened from their context, made strange and new.
A gown in deep aubergine — approximately 380 grams per square meter in silk crêpe duchess, backed with organza to prevent the weight from pulling — had the particular quality of a garment that carries memory better than the person wearing it. Someone in this room will wear it to something that matters. She may not even know. This is sufficient.
FENDI — Maria Grazia Chiuri in Rome, or: The Territory Shifts
Maria Grazia Chiuri's inaugural couture show for Fendi took place on the ninth of July at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome — not Paris — and the fact that Fendi reasserted its Roman identity at the precise moment Rome's other great couture house was being reinterpreted by a Welshman struck me as either diplomatic genius or an expensive accident that became diplomatic genius in retrospect. In fashion, these are the same thing.
The collection suggested she heard the brief. Furs worked in the Fendi tradition — long-haired, manipulated with the house's distinctive inlay technique — arrived alongside tailoring in silk-and-wool ottoman weave that absorbed the gallery's northern light in a way that made the garments look lit from within. Embellishment was architectural rather than decorative. The Baguette arrived in ten variations, including one in intarsia leather with a depth of detail that justified the price the way very few things justify their price.
I watched the exit and felt, unexpectedly, the particular emotion of being present at a beginning. I have been present at beginnings before. I am twenty-nine; I have witnessed several. They feel like this — like the air adjusting to accommodate something new.
The fourth Negroni arrives. Paris has been adequate. Paris has been, on balance, exactly what Paris always is: glorious and self-impressed and completely correct about itself. She does not hate Paris. She would simply prefer Milan. This is different from hate. This is merely loyalty, which Paris, being Paris, has never had to understand.
EXIT
The car from Paris back to CDG is the same car in reverse. The driver does not speak. Paris releases me, or I release Paris — it is difficult to tell, and it has always been difficult to tell, and the difficulty is part of the relationship.
In my bag: a Chanel camellia brooch in eighteen-karat white gold with pavé diamonds that I have decided I needed. In my body: four Negronis and the particular satisfaction of having watched the industry announce itself, loudly and with extraordinary craft, to everyone willing to hold an invitation printed on cardstock heavy enough to cause injury.
I am twenty-nine. The season continues. Paris was, as promised, Paris.
Kharla is the Fashion Director of IRREVERENT. She is 29.