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Jonathan Anderson’s debut runway show for Dior was scheduled for Friday 27 June at 2.30pm. At around 2.15pm, a friend and I arrived at a bar on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis in Paris, not the location of the show in question, as neither of us secured the golden ticket to attend. Instead, this was a makeshift watch party hosted by fashion internet personality Lyas — who was also not invited.
The designer’s first men’s collection was a sign of what’s to come as the French house enters a new era. It was met with much enthusiasm from the fashion crowd.
What we expected to be a somewhat buzzy affair — busy enough to fill a bar, but chill enough to watch the show — was an impromptu street party. Lyas had brought his own TV to the bar, which I only found out later because I could not even see said screen due to the amount of people overflowing from the sitting area to the street. Instead, attendees were watching the live stream on their phones in little cliques, cheering as guests arrived, sharing thoughts and predictions. It was like watching the Super Bowl. On TikTok, Lyas’s video of the event has almost 500,000 views.
Dior runway presentations tend to be larger than life, with hundreds of guests sitting in huge white-box spaces filling up around 10 sections of five or six rows each. This one’s capacity had been reduced significantly, to only VIPs, top editors and industry folk (a trend among recent designer debuts, from Givenchy to Tom Ford). Few to no influencers were there, no junior, online-friendly press, and don’t even consider a fan or two crashing. It seemed at the beginning of the week that there was more chatter about who was actually going than about what the collection would look like.
Ahead of Sarah Burton and Haider Ackermann’s much-anticipated debut shows this week, we look at what’s at stake for the brands as they enter a new creative era.
Dior had been the most-anticipated show of the season. This kind of buzz, around revamping one of fashion’s most famous brands, cannot be replicated season after season.
For everyone else, whether shows make sense in this day and age — of debuting collections on the red carpet, or via strategically engineered viral online moments — was up in the air, as are most things in fashion this year. Some designers, like Louis-Gabriel Nouchi or Luca Magliano, hosted film screenings. Others, like Maria Koch of 032c, skipped the runway altogether. Rick Owens turned his regular midday show into an evening, standing-only presentation ahead of the opening of his retrospective at the Palais Galliera, and Sacai’s Chitose Abe opted for a breakfast-time presentation at her HQ, which transitioned into a karaoke party in the eve. Today, there are a myriad of ways to reach the desired audience, be that fashion folk or the general public.
The non-shows
“I used to put naked men on the runway, but times have changed,” quipped Nouchi, who this season traded off the catwalk for the screens of nightclub Silencio Paris. Nouchi created a hand-drawn anime, two-and-a-half-minutes long, to screen to guests ahead of co-hosting a massive Pride celebration later that night. The actual collection stayed behind at his showroom, available to buyers and press by appointment only. Nouchi decided that he wasn’t interested in pulling a viral stunt like he had in the past. Seeing as his label is more established now, why not try something new?
For labels like Nouchi’s, it’s become impossible to keep up with the bigger players. Pharrell Williams took over the courtyard of the Centre Pompidou for his Louis Vuitton show, and Anderson’s Dior runway was decorated with two art pieces worth millions, which were directly transported from the Louvre and the National Museum of Scotland. Who could even come close?
Jonathan Anderson’s Dior debut, Julian Klausner’s men’s debut at Dries Van Noten, Grace Wales Bonner’s return and more highlights from Paris Fashion Week Men s.
Perhaps this is why Nicolas Di Felice of Courrèges hosted a summer kick-off rave in the outskirts of Paris in lieu of his usual menswear presentation this season. Courrèges only has runway shows during ready-to-wear season, with men’s being a showroom-only affair. The party gained buzz as the Paris show leg began, and became a much-discussed happening by the time the week wrapped. It was a brilliant and effective way of garnering authentic attention during a busy time; it was far enough for the people to be there to actually want to be there — plus, Di Felice’s clothes lend themselves well to the dance floor.
Similar to the makeshift Dior watch party, the crowds outside of the Courrèges rave rivalled many shows this season. You can’t crash runway shows these days, but you can get into any party if you try hard enough. As Nouchi put it: “The screening will be exclusive, but the party is for everyone.”
The celebrity contingent
After the Dior show, there were no doubts. Fashion shows still matter, no matter how small. The internet has granted them precious real estate in the feeds of anyone who would be remotely — or algorithmically — interested. Anderson can get away with reducing the capacity of his debut because we’re still going to tune in to see it. In this case, if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to see it, it does make a sound — because you can replay it on YouTube after the fact.
Guided by metrics, few activations beat a traditional fashion show, and that boils down to the star factor. Dior invited Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Sabrina Carpenter, and Rihanna and A$AP Rocky. Louis Vuitton had Beyoncé and Jay-Z in its front row, and Prada had Harris Dickinson, Riz Ahmed and more. The showing was a testament to what a huge year it’s been for men on the red carpet — they seem to be having all of the fun. One would think that, with the attention labels have been getting by dressing internet boyfriends from Andrew Garfield to Damson Idris, runway shows feel less necessary than ever before. Except, they’re actually the other side of the coin.
If Dior — or Vuitton, or Prada, or Armani — can turn a show into their own mini-celeb symposium, why would they not? As it turns out, the halo effect the red carpet has had on menswear this year is not to invalidate the runway, but to turn the runway into an event worthy of a red carpet itself. “I think you can’t show the breadth of work on a red carpet,” Kim Jones told my colleague Laure Guilbault earlier this year, speaking on the utility of runway shows today. “On the red carpet, the actors are going where they want to; they don’t want to stand out too much, they just want to look good. Fashion shows are very different.” We’ve now reached the point where brands can have both.
The big leagues
Runway shows don’t just matter to those in the big leagues, they continue to be the Holy Grail for those starting out. It’s less about metrics than it is about appearances, of becoming the next big thing.
Kartik Kumra’s Kartik Research debuted on the fashion show section of Paris Fashion Week Men’s this season. In January, Kumra opted for an intimate presentation with a handful of models and a book of photos he’d taken of the collection in India instead. This season, he did both a book and a show. Kumra is part of a budding generation of designers whose ambition knows no bounds. Why should they not aspire to be the next big thing as opposed to the next cult favourite? Simon Porte Jacquemus closed out the week with a field trip to Versailles, after all. While he wasn’t an overnight success, Jacquemus’s ambitious runway shows, first staged in a lavender field to celebrate the brand’s 10-year anniversary (SS20), followed by wheat fields (SS21) or faraway locations like Hawaii (SS22) and Capri (AW24), certainly helped cement his status in the big leagues over the last five years.
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“I can give you a sports analogy,” Kumra says backstage, when prompted about his reasoning behind continuing within the Paris Fashion Week ecosystem and levelling up to a runway presentation. “Paris is the Champions League, why would I not want to play here?”
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