On Sunday evening, in honor of International Olympic Day and just before the couture shows began, Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue and global chief content director of Condé Nast, flexed her muscles.
Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Literally speaking, she shut down Place Vendôme — the gilded center of high jewelry brands in Paris and home of the Ritz hotel — for the third edition of Vogue World, the fashiontainment extravaganza she introduced in 2022 as a cousin to the Met Gala and as a potential path forward (and revenue stream) in the face of glossy magazines’ decline. Imagine P.T. Barnum meeting Florenz Ziegfeld and together they hatch a fashion show, and you’ll get the idea.
Like the Met Gala, Vogue World, which was previously held in New York and London, is a live expression of Vogue’s power and an effort to position the magazine as an arbiter of influence, culture and people. Like the Met’s annual fund-raiser, it involves great eye candy, in terms of both clothes and celebrity. Unlike the Met, however, anyone who can afford a ticket, or wants to watch the livestream from afar, can get inside. Can be part, that is to say, of Vogue’s world. Aspiration is part of the price of admission — if you want to buy in.
This time around, that meant about 800 guests, many of them paying 3,000 euros (or $3,205, including tax) for a second-row seat, and €2,000 for third row, as well as the chance to hob nob (or at least be close to) the first row, which was largely reserved for every French designer under the sun as well as fashion-adjacent friends of Vogue such as Emma Chamberlain, Selma Blair and Russell Westbrook. Ms. Wintour herself was sandwiched between John Galliano — in yet another show of her support for that designer — and Pharrell Williams, the Louis Vuitton men’s wear designer (among many other things).
And it meant celebrating what the program labeled the “100 years of French fashion and sport” between the previous Paris Olympics, in 1924, and today.
Cue more than 180 looks on more than 150 models and various celebrity guest stars parading around the obelisk in the center of the square in new fashions from a variety of French brands inspired by each decade from the ’20s on, each time period paired with an athletic endeavor that was represented by dancers and occasionally actual athletes pantomiming the sport. Think cycling and the ’20s, track and the ’30s, gymnastics and the ’70s, and so on. (As for why what sport went with what decade, there was a rationale, such as soccer in the 1990s in honor of France’s first World Cup win, but it was not always entirely clear.)
Then cue Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner in Hermès, riding in on Hermès-outfitted horses. Maluma, in a Thom Browne look. Sabrina Carpenter surprise modeling a red-and-white cabana-stripe Jacquemus look in the 1940s section and Katy Perry wearing a Noir Kei Ninomiya piece that resembled leaves strung together with bristling fur pompoms for the 1980s. Cue lots of flags and fencers.
Aya Nakamura, the French-Malaian singer, whose rumored appearance at the Games set off a firestorm in March, was there, wearing Jean Paul Gaultier couture and opening the shindig with her song “Fly.” So was Bad Bunny, serenading soccer players (the 1990s) with “Monaco” and break dancers (the 2010s) with “Titi Me Preguntó.” And so were athletes: Venus and Serena Williams, strutting their stuff in Off-White and Marine Serre.
As a finale, Victor Wembanyama, the French basketball player who was the No. 1 pick in the 2023 NBA Draft and who presumably was on his way to an Olympic training camp, took a turn in a white Louis Vuitton suit along with Marie-José Pérec, the 1992 and 1996 French Olympic track star, who wore an Alaïa gown in the colors of the French flag.
Plus there was the actual French national cycling team, though it kind of got lost in all the hoo-ha and under bike helmets (not to mention the appearance of some dancing waiters with red wine bottles glued to their trays — because of the Café de Flore or something?). As did the eight judokas from the French national team.
Vogue is donating what it described as “a minimum” of €1 million from the proceeds of the event to Secours Populaire Français, a nonprofit organization dedicated, in part, to helping young French athletes access sports and the necessary equipment. And yet, after the show was over and everyone filed out through the Ritz and into the night and tried to sort through the haute kitschiness of what they had just seen, it was hard not to think that sports, the nominal inspiration for the whole thing, was actually the least of the matter.
That it was just the backdrop for the fashion, which was itself just the window dressing for the boldface names, who were there for the brand with its name on the front of the program.
That in the end, Vogue was the only real winner. Even if this particular gold medal was more like a foil-wrapped fondant.
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