Paris Fashion Week Is a Tangled Web of SEO Moments
And Coperni screamed to the Google gods, SHINE THAT SWEET, SWEET RANKING UPON ME.
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Coperni’s uncomfortable spray-on dress stunt.
Ye’s Paris activities, including walking Balenciaga and eating salmon salad.
Karl Lagerfeld’s Met show.
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The runway shows feel split between those offering Fashion and those offering celebrity moments that rank when you search “paris fashion week” in Google. Only sometimes do those things overlap. Perhaps it’s hard to both have a celebrity moment and get people to really engage with what you’re proposing clothing-wise on the runway. Then again, brands that rely on celebrities and viral moments may be trying to distract from the reality that they don’t have anything truly new and fresh to show, either because they lack the creativity or they lack the appetite for risk required to attempt to sell those things.
Fashion designers have to compete in the online attention economy, so the SEO approach is understandable. Before going back to writing full-time, I spent many years as a web editor, and was told repeatedly not to cover the runway shows too much because “no one clicks on fashion week.” This is what designers are up against. Drawing expertly on art or proposing a new silhouette isn’t going to exactly result in the same clicks and engagement via mass audience funnels as, well, this:
However, the ecosystem seems a bit different on TikTok, at least, where the non-SEO shows break through. TikTok is hardly a perfect social media platform, but its fashion community is feverishly into runway shows no matter the celebrity involvement. SEO fashion shows won’t disappear any time soon — nor do many of us necessarily want them to since they are fun to dissect, whether we love or hate them — but I have to imagine this is a relief for designers who can’t afford to involve celebrities in what they’re doing.
Now, onto recaps!
Bella Hadid at Coperni
Bella Hadid had a dress sprayed onto her nearly nude body at Coperni. That checks two big “click me” boxes right there: “nearly nude” and “Bella Hadid.” Coperni is the same label that hired Steve Jobs’s daughter Eve to walk its spring 2022 show in October of last year, prompting a slew of articles, including one on Vogue.com that breathlessly reported the brand “added to the list of rising stars to watch.” Entire explainer posts on Eve Jobs followed. She signed with DNA Models in March.
So, why shouldn’t buzzy models garner headlines for Coperni again this season? Instead of just casting them, this time Hadid was hired to walk onto a mirrored platform wearing nothing but a nude thong with her hand over her breasts, while two fully clothed men sprayed a white substance onto her body that dried as a fabric. Coperni lead designer Charlotte Raymond then came out to fashion off-the-shoulder sleeves and cut a slit up one leg.
Harper’s Bazaar’s Rachel Tashjian pointed out that the spray-on fabric called Fabrican is nearly 20 years old, meaning this wasn’t exactly the technological innovation it was made out to be. She added:
I struggled to see or feel anything other than discomfort at Hadid bending her arms and legs to the whims of these two men and their canisters. Hadid certainly looked fabulous, and clearly sold the idea to many; the whole charade left me convinced of only one thing, which is that Bella Hadid is a true supermodel.
Yet the tone of much of the coverage surrounding the great dress spraying of spring 2023 was as upbeat it was over Jobs’s Coperni debut last year. Vogue.com declared the spray-on dress “fashion alchemy, conjured by Coperni.” WWD wrote that “if anyone can make science sexy, then it’s Coperni…” The New York Times reported that “the [Hadid] stunt was also, for many people in the crowd, genuinely impressive.” The paper added that, owing to Hadid’s schedule, rehearsals were done on a stand-in, who “couldn’t control her shivering on the already chilly runway, as the even-colder spray-on material hit her skin, and as she breathed in its thick, glue-like odor.” Asked about how cold she was, Hadid told the Times, “Honey, cold is an understatement… I really blacked out.”
Coperni chief executive Arnaud Vaillant explained that that Raymond came out to finish the dress instead of creative director Sébastien Meyer because “it would have been a bit pretentious for Sébastien to do it. We wanted something more humble.” This makes no sense.
The purpose of having Bella Hadid saunter practically naked onto your runway is not to make a point about being humble. It’s to scream to the Google gods SHINE THAT SWEET, SWEET RANKING UPON ME.
Ye at Balenciaga, YZY
The Alo Yoga podcast’s first guest otherwise known as Ye opened the Balenciaga show, which was staged on a runway made of mud fashioned by artist Santiago Sierra. Ye’s look included leather pants, a pocket-forward military jacket, heavy boots, and a Balenciaga mouthguard. If you want to really take in this moment, watch it on video since the static runway images are obscured by the dark, post-apocalyptic atmosphere (unfortunately impossible to capture on video was a custom-made scent that Vogue.com described as the “raw odeur of decomposition”). This built on Balenciaga’s last ready-to-wear show staged in a “blizzard” (after snow comes mud, etc.).
Wearing designer clothes in loose, splashy mud is a very rich-person thing to do. Buying or coveting fashion after beholding it in the dark is also a very rich-person thing to do.
Ye seldom stages publicity stunts in a vacuum, so naturally the Balenciaga appearance was leading up to something. That turned out to be an unannounced YZY runway show, which Ye discussed with Vogue.com’s Luke Leitch over “a bowl of salmon salad from the buffet.” Describing the new collection, he said, “There’s just people. From the same planet. And sometimes, in high school, it feels like we don’t fit in. And in a situation like this, we have the opportunity to come together to express who we are.”
The show teaser Ye Instagrammed with photos of Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Gisele proved to be a fantasy casting versus the actual casting but who cares, really? It was still a headline. The actual cast included Michèle Lamy. The actual guests, each of whom were gifted soap on a rope, included Demna and John Galliano. Ye wore a “White Lives Matter” shirt and made a speech covering everything from Kim Kardashian’s robbery in Paris to Tommy Ton’s famous 2009 photo of him with Virgil Abloh. I could tell you about the clothes or you could behold them in this video which includes new music by Ye featuring James Blake. They’re hard to see but do you think they’ll get more attention than Ye’s shirt?
Karl Lagerfeld at the Met
If any designer from the modern era was destined to have a newsworthy moment from the grave in the middle of other designers’ fashion week, it was Karl Lagerfeld. The Met announced during the Paris collections that the Costume Institute’s next exhibition would be dedicated to the late Chanel designer, who died in 2019. The choice feels very Anna Wintour. Anna gives feedback to chief curator Andrew Bolton on his ideas for exhibitions, with the aim, he told me in an interview for ANNA: The Biography, of coming up with something that will appeal to the largest possible audience. She also secures the sponsors, which in this case include Chanel and Fendi. Yet Anna and Karl were also longtime friends. She has described him regularly as an inspiration, including for expanding the scope of her oversight to all Condé Nast magazines in addition to Vogue, the same way Karl designed for a few fashion labels at one time.
Lagerfeld didn’t really have a signature as a designer. He freelanced for the houses that hired him, most notably Chanel. He did this expertly, but never came close to replicating that success with his own namesake brand. So, looking for a signature to tie Lagerfeld’s work together, Bolton unsurprisingly settled on his sketches, which will be shown alongside the clothes.
I had suspected the exhibition would invite some uncomfortable questions about why the Met has chosen to honor someone known to hate fashion retrospectives in museums and to repeatedly express disdain for larger bodies. Why not honor someone who took museum fashion seriously and didn’t ever call Adele “a little too fat”?
BuzzFeed already published an article headlined, “Here's Why The 2023 Met Gala Is Already Facing Backlash.”
Other Loose Threads, SEO Edition
Last week, the Daily Beast reported that British Vogue editor Edward Enninful “is apparently gunning for” Anna Wintour’s job and “believes he can do a better job than Wintour atop the Vogue brand, according to multiple people who’ve spoken with him.” Puck News then reported that Anna, Enninful, and Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch met in Paris during fashion week to “hash out grievances,” though “the official explanation” was “they meet monthly.” (Numerous people have told me that Anna loathes confrontation, so it’s hard for me to imagine her in a grievance-airing meeting.) I confess that after the Met announced the Karl exhibit, I did wonder what Enninful would have picked.
Kylie Jenner is at Paris Fashion Week, where she appeared with bleached eyebrows, “leveled up her style,” and “made tighty whites look chic.” But she didn’t stop there, she also wore a dress that “ma[de] her bare skin part of the design.” I am legitimately impressed with headline writers who divine news for their media companies where none exists.
Not ranking quite as high in PFW searches is Cher, who closed the Balmain show, then sat front row at Rick Owens and Ann Demeulemeester, where, WWD reports, spectators sat waiting when she walked in and then “erupted into applause.” Cher is exciting, sure, but maybe they were also relieved the show could finally start.
To those who are tired of the commercialization of fashion week, I hate to break it to you but L’Oreal Paris is ranking in Google for putting on a show (?!) starring Andie MacDowell, whose age (64) was the headline.
Victoria Beckham showed in Paris for the first time which made her so emotional that she took her walk on the runway, People.com reports, “with tears in her eyes.”
Kaia Gerber collaborated with Zara on a collection and they had a party for it in late designer Kenzo Takada’s old home. Zara chair Marta Ortega, daughter of Zara’s billionaire founder Amancio Ortega, the world’s twenty-third richest person, told WWD that she liked Gerber for a collaboration partly because, “I think it’s very interesting the way she came back with all these ’90s style things.” Gerber was born in 2001. You know who else was at the party? Karlie Kloss and… Eve Jobs!
In your book, I remember you quoted Tom Ford as saying something along the lines of, "the Met gala has turned into a costume party." Fashion weeks these days are giving me the same vibes.
The fact that Ye invited Candace Owens to his show (also in a "White Lives Matter" t-shirt) was so revolting I almost couldn't believe what I was seeing.