“Remind me,” said the actress Mindy Kaling, as she walked into a cocktail area staged on the Paramount Lot in Los Angeles, where a phalanx of celebrities and fashion luminaries were milling about. “What is this thing about?”
It was just past 5 p.m. on Sunday afternoon and the event Ms. Kaling was appearing at was Vogue World, the livestream spectacular hatched by Condé Nast and its editorial overlord, Anna Wintour.
Ms. Kaling teetered through the crowd in sky high Christian Louboutin stilettos and a creamy leather Hermès gown.
To the left was the filmmaker Tyler Perry, clad in a checkerboard patterned Louis Vuitton coat. To the right was the singer Lizzo, clad in a metallic gown from LaQuan Smith.
Similar to the Met Gala, Vogue World is a celebration of the synergy between fashion and entertainment. Celebrities appear in borrowed or gifted clothes, money is raised for a preselected cause through ticket sales, and an endangered media brand is able to manufacture a news event that places it in the cultural conversation for at least forty five minutes.
Which was about how long the event on Melrose Avenue lasted on Sunday and which was, in fairness to its host, its sponsors, and its ticket buyers, three times longer than the average runway show.
The first installment of Vogue World took place in 2022 on a cobblestone street in New York’s Meatpacking District. It came at a point when two years of pandemic-induced isolation was being melted by mRNA vaccines, an improbably resilient stock market, and the pent up appetites of party hungry people.
After that, the event moved to London (where it celebrated and raised money for the city’s arts organizations) and Paris (where it celebrated the Olympics and young athletes).
The idea to do an iteration of Vogue World in Los Angeles started to form in 2023 during a writer’s strike that hobbled the entertainment industry. The wildfires in January provided Ms. Wintour and her minions with a clearer sense of mission, and the event raised $4.5 million for the Entertainment Community Fund.
The donations will help costume designers in the Los Angeles area who lost their homes in the disaster. But with the event being expected to generate more than $30 million overall, philanthropy was less like the event’s raison d’être and more like an added bonus.
The acres of designer dresses being served up here were meant to light small fires; the acres of destruction from real fires remained mostly in the rearview mirror.
Sunday’s event also provided Ms. Wintour with an opportunity to take a victory lap.
Earlier this year, she gave up her job as the editor of Vogue and installed Chloe Malle, a staffer at the magazine, as the magazine’s head of editorial content. That fed speculation that the big boss was finally gearing up for retirement. But on Sunday, as guests such as Gwyneth Paltrow and the superagent Bryan Lourd ambled in, Ms. Wintour said, “that was never the plan.” (She added: “I don’t know where that came from.”)
In other words, what Ms. Wintour was facilitating in Ms. Malle’s promotion was not her exit but her own ascension at a point when Vogue has ceased, at least principally, to be a magazine, and transformed, instead, into a content business whose main engine is mass scale events.
The sponsors have changed with the times, too. Arrivederci trendy fashion brands of Milan. Hello, megacorporations from the S&P 500. Here was Cynthia Erivo clad in a vintage blue Dior gown, posing in front of a truck full of vintage duds brought in by eBay. There by the Starbucks station, where waiters served espressos in shot glasses, was Miley Cyrus in a black, belted, Saint Laurent leather trench coat.
The theme of the runway show, which started at 6 p.m., was the link between fashion and the movies. It involved the participation of some of Hollywood’s most high profile female costume designers, among them Catherine Martin (the director Baz Luhrmann’s Oscar-winning wife and creative partner) and Arianne Phillips (the Oscar-nominated costume designer whose film credits include “Once Upon A Time in Hollywood” and “Walk the Line”).
Rather than having ushers direct people to their seats, production assistants used bullhorns to call out “places please,” and “quiet on set.” Rather than having a runway, the models simply walked the concrete grounds.
The seating chart reflected the hierarchy of power among the attendees.
What better way to celebrate Ms. Malle’s status as a Conde starlet appearing in a movie still not her own than by placing her next to the Oscar-winning actress Viola Davis?
What better way to convey Ms. Wintour’s status as chief rainmaker than to have her seated next to the most powerful man in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom?
It so happens that this was his first Vogue event.
No Met Gala as of yet, he said. (When asked where his sharp blue suit was from, he said, “My closet.”)
But slender-waisted fashion people and slick haired politicians have their similarities, one of which is a propensity for offering lofty proclamations such as “This is all about the return of glamour” or “This is all about post fire recovery. This is all about jump starting our film productions.”
Which is what Governor Newsom said, shortly before Nicole Kidman, fresh from signing her divorce papers, strutted her way down the catwalk in black Chanel.
Providing directions on a microphone from the side was Ms. Kidman’s “Moulin Rouge” collaborator, Mr. Luhrmann, who told her to prepare for the second shot, at which point she announced that she was headed to the trailer for a “touch up.”
After that, models such as Kendall Jenner and Liya Kebede took turns on the runway with crusty camera operators, prop stylists and grips.
The whole point — if there was one — was to be meta.
But it wasn’t absent a sense of fun.
The actress Julia Garner, who is expected to play Madonna in a biopic that is in development, sauntered out in a look that recalled the singer during her 1990 Marie Antoinette phase. Angela Bassett wafted by in a costume that paid homage to her role as Queen Ramonda in Marvel’s “Black Panther” franchise.
Vogue World’s finale had the singer and rapper Doja Cat performing in a Tina Turner-like chain mail get up. Her tune for the evening was called “Gorgeous” and its most memorable line was “We make a killing being so beautiful.”
What else, really, could better sum up her hosts’ chief aspiration?
Jacob Bernstein reports on power and privilege for the Style section.
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