What’s With All the Celebrities Walking the Runways?

The enduring image of the last day of Paris fashion week — which also functions as the closing coda on this season’s whole fashion calendar — was of the actress Gillian Anderson waltzing her way down the mossy Miu Miu runway.

Anderson, 57, her hair pulled back by a metallic headband and wearing a near-translucent midi-dress, looked fantastic. Everyone in attendance seemed to think so. Images of the “X Files” actress ambling along flooded my Instagram feed for the next day or so.

Casting an unconventional public figure for the runway has become a reliable stunt for brands. This season’s runways were full of unexpected people known for things other than fashion. At its worst, stunt casting is cynical and obvious. That was the case with Enfants Riches Déprimés, a label that toys with shock value to questionable ends. It picked Marilyn Manson to open the show. (ERD has sold a $1,400 “New York Young Republican Club Sweatshirt” and last year sent out a belt buckle featuring Joseph Stalin’s portrait.)

Manson’s cameo landed like yet another shallow provocation by the designer Henri Alexander Levy. Why does he try so hard? Levy can make great clothes, but when he stokes controversy like this, it clouds what he’s doing rather than clarifying it.

Emily Ratajkowski and the rappers Fakemink and Nettspend (among other known names) on the Gucci runway this season felt right for a collection that was all about base sexiness and posturing. Here, the out-of-the-norm models drove home a point about what the designer was thinking. They also, of course, became another facet of the show for publications to post about.

Miu Miu is the brand that has mastered stunt casting. This season, it pulled together a couple of nepo babies (Sateen Besson and Zola Ivy Murphy), a British French indie riser (Lauren Auder), a beloved actress (Ms. Anderson), a K-pop star with nearly 19 million Instagram followers (Yeonjun), a fine artist with heat (Coumba Samba), an erstwhile It-girl whom the fashion world can’t stop adoring (Chloë Sevigny), a 61-year-old modeling legend for the wistful obsessives weaned on episodes of Fashion TV (Kristen McMenamy) and a German singer with a funny name (Donkey Kid). Phew. Could I identify them all without looking them up? Absolutely not!

But that’s the point. Miu Miu is targeting the entire potential audience for the show. To get the desired effect, you can’t stunt cast for one region, you have to stunt cast for the whole world.

A closing thought on the looksmaxxing stunt casting discourse.

I’ve now seen several articles projecting some deep, pernicious meaning onto the alpha-male influencers who were also stunt cast to walk the runways this season — particularly the nihilistic looksmaxxer Clavicular for Elena Velez and the tech entrepreneur turned smooth-faced anti-ager Bryan Johnson for Matières Fécales. It is worth asking if the industry should be giving these hypermasculine men attention. Clavicular has a history of using a racial slur, and Johnson, as The Times reported, has been accused of controlling past employees and sexual partners through confidentiality agreements.

But I also don’t get why designers who dedicate their lives to making clothes, to transmitting how a great shirt can change your existence, would spotlight people who are anti-fashion.

Looksmaxxers like Clavicular are obsessed with hacking and perfecting their physical appearance but, for the most part, wear banal polos or Saran Wrap-tight T-shirts. They send the message that the clothes you wear are irrelevant, meaningless even, compared with your corporeal body. They see your appearance as something to be painstakingly optimized, and there isn’t much pleasure in their regimens. Certainly, no looksmaxxer would actually tell you to buy that Gucci shirt or concur that a perfect pair of pants might lift your mood. They’d just tell you to do jaw exercises instead.

Other things worth knowing about:

What was with all the grass runways? Miu Miu built a moss-floored set and seating area (with live bugs crawling about), while Louis Vuitton’s catwalk wended through turfy mounds, crafted with the “Severance” production designer Jeremy Hindle. I guess it was a reminder that at the end of all this fashion, we should go touch some grass.
Silly hats. Something about the last day of fashion week brought out the bizarro headwear. Miu Miu served some earflap fedoras like Columbo would wear on a cold day, while Louis Vuitton offered triangular shearling caps as big as the volcano you might have made for your middle school science fair.
Liu Vuitton. The Olympic figure skating champion Alysa Liu was at the Louis Vuitton show on Tuesday, her first fashion show. If I had to guess, she gets a Vogue cover by the end of the year.
But you know who I really liked to see in the front row at Louis Vuitton? Katherine LaNasa of “The Pitt.” What a glow-up for Nurse Dana Evans.
A shady shirt? On Wednesday, my X feed lit up with people giddily posting Telfar’s Fear of Job T-shirt, which looked quite a lot like the logo of a certain other American brand.
Superfans. I’ve been enjoying T Magazine’s series on the head-to-toe brand die-hards outside the shows. You want to know who actually wears this stuff? These people do.