Vogue World Wins and Fails

Plus, couture highlights and lowlights from Paris.

In today’s issue of Back Row:

• The wins from Vogue World Paris, including Anna Wintour, Sabrina Carpenter, and more.

• The fails from Vogue World Paris, including Cara Delevingne’s lines, the jumpsuit I can’t unsee, and more.

• A couture-focused Loose Threads, including Chanel, Dior, J. Lo flying coach, and more.

Vogue World took place in Paris on Sunday for the third year in a row. Also for the third year in a row, people had no idea going into or coming out of the event what it actually was. Having watched internet streams of three of these now, I would sum it up as “fashion but dance it.” Anna Wintour seems determined to teach fashion some new tricks, hence a runway show commingled with dance squads and celebrity models. Why have just a dog when you can train that dog to skateboard? One will give you social media content, the other will give you viral social media content (well, hopefully).

This year’s Parisian iteration in the Place Vendôme hewed more closely to the first Vogue World in New York, which included a dancing runway show followed by a street fair, where Fendi handed out baguettes (the bread, not the bags — ha ha!). Thankfully, the Paris edition veered from last year’s Vogue World in London; the most bizarre of the three, it took place inside a theater and featured a skit by James Corden, whom I did not notice in the livestream this time. (Though it’s always possible Anna had tucked him under her seat.)

At the New York Vogue World in 2022, anyone could buy a cheap seat for $130, with the expensive seats going for $3,000. At Vogue World Paris, seats for riff-raff were eliminated: second- and third-row tickets were available for purchase for 3,000 euros and 2,000 euros respectively, while patrons interested in front-row seats could email to purchase those for an undisclosed sum. Those were the only tickets available. The poors (relatively speaking, this being Vogue) and outsiders could look on from the gates.

The evolution of the ticket strategy speaks to the conundrum of Vogue in 2024. To survive now that big tech has siphoned its ad revenue and is working on making chopped liver of its 100-plus years of content for LLMs, parent company Condé Nast has to sell access to Vogue to anyone willing to pay. Only, the thing that made Vogue Vogue was that it never sold access to anyone. As I reported in ANNA: The Biography, even billionaires couldn’t buy their way into the Met Gala. Now, all you have to do is email paris@vogueworld.com and voilà! You’re in the same room as Anna Wintour, if you can pay for it.

Vogue World was also among the products touted at Condé’s New Front presentation, aka a menu of digital video offerings presented to advertisers. From Condé’s corporate site recapping the event:

“I learned a long time ago that being unified is how you get results. And that is why I’m thrilled that we’ve merged our editorial and video teams,” says Anna Wintour, Chief Content Officer, Condé Nast, and Global Editorial Director, Vogue. “It means we can be more creative and flexible and do work that speaks strongly to who we are.”

This work includes Vogue World, which Condé is trying to make a “major tentpole,” like the Met Gala. The only problem is that it feels like a tentpole — something corporate people came up with in a conference room while throwing around the word “monetize” — instead of appointment viewing. And Anna, who sat front row between John Galliano and Pharrell, looked like she knew it.

The power of merging video and editorial teams in one screengrab.

I was at a wedding when the event walked and was able to watch all forty-three-and-a-half minutes of it when I got home Monday. Ahead, wins and fails from a night that exists, say, 30 percent for fashion and 70 percent so that Condé Nast doesn’t become the Met Gala company.

Vogue World Wins

• Cara Delevingne as host. Vogue has absolutely no excuse for a bad Met Gala red-carpet livestream, now that we know they can hire presenters who can do the job. To be fair, Cara didn’t have to interview anybody and it seemed like everything she said was scripted and read from a teleprompter. But she was one of the least cringe parts of the whole event.

• The Place Vendôme. The setting was stunning and made for some great drone aerial shots. Booking the Place, in the center of Paris, was a flex for Vogue, and I can only imagine that doing so was the result of Anna throwing her clout around. It was symbolically significant, too, having been built beginning in the 1680s “on the orders of Louis XIV, as a grandiose setting that would embody absolute power in the very heart of Paris.” What does absolute power look like in fashion? Anna filling the Place with a squad of dancers dressed as French waiters holding trays of fake wine (Barbie wine).

• Aya Nakamura’s performance. Jean Paul Gaultier pretended to finish dressing her at the beginning of the show, which was corny. That said, she looked great and sang beautifully.

• The retrospective of French fashion. The fashion show was meant to highlight French brands and influence, and organized by decade, beginning with the 1920s. Each decade was paired with a sport, which was both fun and strange, but the clothes themselves were nice to see, including the Chanel dresses that first appeared in Vogue in the 1920s (Anna’s favorite fashion decade).

• The backup dancers embodying each decade’s sport. The waiter dancers with Barbie wine were cheesy and will live on on the internet as an example of how you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.

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  But I was admittedly entertained by the fencing dancers, the tennis dancers, and especially the aquatic dancers, who wore swim caps and goggles on their heads. They entered to an orchestral composition of Tyla’s “Water,” before assembling around the Vendôme Column, where they held their noses, threw one arm up, and wiggled. This is what’s replaced magazines, my friends.

  

• This tweet, when Sabrina Carpenter walked during the aquatic section:

• Vogue kicking some freelance work to its old faces, like Edward Enninful and Carine Roitfeld. See, people think Anna holds grudges against a long list of enemies but I don’t think she has time for that (how could she, when she has ten decades of synchronized sports-themed dancing to oversee?). Enninful is no longer the editor-in-chief of British Vogue, but he hosted a Vogue World afterparty in Paris. And Roitfeld is no longer the editor-in-chief of French Vogue, but she styled the fashion show. They lent legitimacy to the proceedings.

• Anna’s Vogue World #OOTD. I know people will disagree with me because she loves a busy look, but I thought she made Virginie Viard’s Chanel couture look pretty good.

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• Pharrell’s bootcut jeans-and-sneakers combo. The look was similar to what he wore to take his bow after his latest men’s show for Louis Vuitton. The man can somehow pull off just about anything, including a suburban soccer mom uniform that has endured for roughly 25 years.

Vogue World Fails