But let’s take a little walk down memory lane shall we?

The Paris incident

On February 24, 2011, John Galliano was arrested after a couple accused him of launching into an antisemitic tirade at La Perle, a café-bar in the Marais, Paris’s historically Jewish district. He was drunk. A separate woman came forward saying he’d subjected her to a similar attack at the same bar in October 2010. Days after the February arrest, a video surfaced, filmed at La Perle, published by The Sun, of Galliano, visibly intoxicated, telling another patron: “I love Hitler,” and “People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed.” A witness who was there for the February incident described him repeatedly insulting a woman’s appearance and using a slur against her partner, who she said was Asian.

Dior suspended him within days and fired him outright once the video went public, calling his conduct “particularly odious.” Sidney Toledano, Dior’s CEO, who is Jewish, said the incident was “very painful.” Natalie Portman, the face of Dior’s perfume line at the time, publicly said she would not be associated with him. He was also dropped from his own namesake label, which Dior majority-owned.

Galliano was tried in September 2011 for “public insults based on origin, religious affiliation, race or ethnicity.” He testified he remembered nothing due to what he called a “triple addiction” of alcohol, barbiturates, and sleeping pills, and said he’d already been through rehab in Arizona and Switzerland. He was convicted and given a suspended fine of €6,000, no jail time.

The apology tour

Galliano’s first public statement came within days of his 2011 arrest: “Anti-Semitism and racism have no part in our society. I unreservedly apologize for my behavior in causing any offense.”

The rehabilitation process began almost immediately after his firing and conviction. First, the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) enlisted Rabbi Barry Marcus of London’s Central Synagogue, who leads the organization’s school trips to Auschwitz, to work with Galliano. Separately, Abe Foxman, then the ADL’s national director, arranged for Galliano to visit Auschwitz himself.

Marcus took Galliano to his own synagogue, one with Holocaust survivors among its congregants, as part of the process. Speaking to the Jewish Chronicle in 2015, Marcus described having built a relationship with Galliano “over time” and said he considered him a friend. He addressed skepticism about the arrangement directly: “I know cynics say his motivation for seeing me was to restore his reputation.” He added: “I’m absolutely satisfied that to brand him as an antisemite would be an injustice... As a human being, as a Jew, as a rabbi, as a humanist, I’m almost duty-bound to open the door to somebody who wants to make amends.”

In 2013, Foxman said the ADL believed Galliano had demonstrated “true contrition,” stating: “Mr. Galliano has worked arduously in changing his worldview and dedicated a significant amount of time to researching, reading, and learning about the evils of anti-Semitism and bigotry.” Foxman went further than a statement of belief — he asked retailers to resume stocking Galliano’s designs.

That same year, Galliano gave his first major interview since the firing, to Vanity Fair, accompanied by an Annie Leibovitz photo shoot. He said: “It’s the worst thing I have said in my life, but I didn’t mean it.” He said he had been sober for two years and described trying to understand why his anger had been directed at that group.

Foxman later told the Forward that Galliano, in the course of their work together, had asked him what more he could possibly do to prove his atonement — “did he have to get circumcised?”

Foxman’s successor at the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, inherited the relationship, and by 2024, Greenblatt was reportedly satisfied with the steps Galliano had taken toward teshuva, the Jewish concept of repentance. Foxman died in May 2026.

The comeback

In October 2014, Galliano was named creative director of Maison Margiela, a role he held for the next decade. His friend Kanye West publicly celebrated the news on Twitter at the time, tweeting his excitement upon hearing the rumor confirmed.

In 2023, a documentary titled High & Low: John Galliano, directed by Kevin Macdonald, premiered at the Telluride Film Festival before a wider theatrical release in March 2024. It was produced in part by Condé Nast Entertainment and distributed by Mubi. Anna Wintour appears in the film as one of several on-camera defenders of Galliano, alongside Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Charlize Theron, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Enninful. Sidney Toledano, the Dior CEO who fired Galliano in 2011, also appears.

The one dissenting voice in the film is Philippe Virgitti, one of the victims from the original 2011 incidents. At the time of the 2011 court proceedings, Virgitti had said he didn’t believe Galliano was racist, just “very ill.” In the documentary, he retracts that assessment, saying he does not forgive Galliano and that the incident continues to affect his daily life.

The documentary received a largely positive critical reception, with a Tomatometer score of 87%. Several reviewers characterized the film as making an implicit case for forgiveness; one described Galliano in the film as “the Met Gala before the Met Gala.”

That same spring, at the 2024 Met Gala, Margiela pieces designed by Galliano appeared throughout the red carpet, including on co-chairs Zendaya and Bad Bunny. The Forward published a piece titled “Everyone was wearing John Galliano at the Met Gala — is that kosher?”, which included a quote from Rabbi Marcus reiterating that branding Galliano an antisemite would be unjust, and a quote from Jonathan Greenblatt indicating the ADL was satisfied with the steps Galliano had taken toward teshuva.

In March 2026, Galliano entered a two-year creative partnership with Zara, described by the retailer as a process of “re-authoring” its archive — reworking past garments rather than designing from scratch.

Some will say this is apples and oranges but my thoughts immediately drift to the semi-exiled-from-fashion Kanye West. It’s worth remembering that fashion didn’t put up with him out of charity. In 2009, the same year Anna Wintour invited him to his first Met Gala, Kanye was collaborating with Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton on his own sneaker line, the Don, the Jasper, and the Mr. Hudson, a level of design access rarely handed to a musician by a storied maison. He’d just come off 808s & Heartbreak and was already calling himself the Louis Vuitton Don. That is the version of Kanye Anna Wintour was investing in: not yet the billion-dollar Yeezy mogul Adidas would later credit with turning sneakers into luxury objects, but a cultural force whose design ambitions the industry had already decided to take seriously.

Over the following decade, she attended numerous Yeezy fashion shows, sitting front row, and in April 2014, ahead of Kanye and Kim Kardashian’s wedding, put the engaged couple on the cover of Vogue in wedding-style dress — a decision so controversial at the time that Wintour had to publicly defend it in an open letter. Reports claimed Kanye had personally lobbied her for months to give Kardashian the cover, telling Ryan Seacrest that year, “There’s no way Kim Kardashian shouldn’t be on the cover of Vogue right now. She’s like the most intriguing woman right now.” Wintour, according to reporting at the time, was said to have little patience for the broader Kardashian family but a genuine fondness for Kanye specifically. The influence went both ways and ran deeper than the magazine, Kardashian later said it was Wintour's approval that convinced the couple to name their first daughter North West, calling the decision "genius."

Kanye referenced the relationship himself on the 2012 DJ Khaled collaboration “Cold,” rapping: “Dinner with Anna Wintour... I told you motherfuckers it was more than the music, in the projects one day, to project runway.”

As recently as September 2022, weeks before the break, Wintour modeled a pair of Kanye’s new Yeezy sunglasses in press images promoting their launch.

The relationship ended in October 2022. On October 3, Kanye staged his YZY SZN 9 show during Paris Fashion Week, where he and attendees including Candace Owens wore “White Lives Matter” T-shirts — a phrase the ADL classifies as a hate slogan created by white supremacists in 2015 to co-opt Black Lives Matter.

Vogue global fashion editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson criticized the show on Instagram, writing: “The tshirts this man conceived, produced, and shared with the world are pure violence. There is no excuse, there is no art here.” Kanye responded by posting a screenshot of her Instagram profile alongside mocking commentary about her appearance, writing, “This is not a fashion person.” Vogue publicly defended her, stating: “Vogue stands with Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, our global fashion editor at large and longtime contributor. She was personally targeted and bullied. It is unacceptable.”

Reporting at the time indicated Wintour first attempted to salvage the relationship by trying to reconcile Kanye with Karefa-Johnson directly, arranging a private meeting between the two. That effort did not hold.

The break became public one day after Kering-owned Balenciaga, with whom Kanye had a longstanding relationship built on his friendship with creative director Demna Gvasalia, dating back to around 2014, and which had grown close enough that Demna creatively directed Kanye’s Donda listening events and the two launched the Yeezy Gap Engineered by Balenciaga collaboration in 2022, announced it was severing ties, stating it had “no longer any relationship nor any plans for future projects related to this artist.”

A Vogue spokesperson told Page Six that Kanye’s “White Lives Matter” T-shirts and his remarks against Jewish people were “too much for Wintour,” and that neither Wintour nor the magazine had “any intention” of working with him again. An unnamed insider told the same outlet: “Anna has had enough... She has made it very clear inside Vogue that Kanye is no longer part of the inner circle.”

Around the same time, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt sent a letter to Adidas urging the company to reconsider its continued partnership with Kanye, after Kanye had publicly stated, “I can say antisemitic shit and Adidas cannot drop me.” Adidas ended its partnership with him days later.

In December 2023, Kanye posted an apology in Hebrew on Instagram, writing, “I sincerely apologize to the Jewish community for any unintended outburst caused by my words or actions... I deeply regret any pain I may have caused.” That apology came roughly two months before the release of his 2024 album “Vultures 1.”

In October 2024, Kanye and wife Bianca Censori were photographed together with Galliano, Margiela owner Renzo Rosso, and Arianna Alessi at a Margiela party in Tokyo. By then, Kanye had already been permanently dropped by Adidas, Balenciaga, CAA, and Vogue, and remained industry-exiled, which made the sighting even more notable. Here is a complete history of the Kanye/Renzo Rosso relationship.

A year after the Hebrew apology, he rescinded it. He wrote on X: “I AM A NAZI.” In 2025, he sold a T-shirt bearing a swastika and released a song titled “Heil Hitler.” A former employee, who is Jewish, alleged in a lawsuit that Kanye had told them he was a “Nazi” and compared himself to Hitler.

In January 2026, Kanye took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal to apologize again, days ahead of the release of his album “Bully.” In the ad, he attributed his conduct to a four-month manic episode brought on by bipolar disorder and a traumatic brain injury dating back to a 2002 car accident, writing: “In that fractured state, I gravitated toward the most destructive symbol I could find, the swastika, and even sold T-shirts bearing it. I regret and am deeply mortified by my actions in that state... I am not a Nazi or an antisemite.” He said he had since sought help, encouraged by his wife Bianca Censori, and described a routine of “medication, therapy, exercise and clean living.” He said he was not seeking “a free pass,” but forgiveness and patience “as I find my way home.”

He expanded on the apology in an email interview with Vanity Fair, denying the timing was about “reviving my commerciality” and citing his continued commercial success as evidence: “My upcoming album, Bully, is currently one of the most anticipated pre-saves of any album on Spotify.”

A spokesperson for the ADL called the apology “long overdue” but said it “doesn’t automatically undo his long history of antisemitism,” citing the “Heil Hitler” song, “the hundreds of tweets, the swastikas and myriad Holocaust references.” The statement added: “The truest apology would be for him to not engage in antisemitic behavior in the future. We wish him well on the road to recovery.” A guest column in the Hollywood Reporter from three Creative Community for Peace co-founders was similarly skeptical, writing that “an apology without meaningful, sustained change is simply a pause until his next cycle of hate begins.”

“A pause until the next cycle of hate begins” is an interesting thing to write about Kanye while Galliano gets a Costume Institute retrospective, because if she’s to be believed, according to Lauren London, his cycle never actually ended.

On her Instagram, London, a longtime New York publicist first profiled in New York Magazine’s iconic 1998 “Power Girls” cover story, where she repped trendy restaurants and charity events, spoke out disputing the premise of the honor. She wrote: “This news is very upsetting to me. Galliano did not just make antisemitic comments. He IS an antisemite. A crazy talented designer but a VILE human who does not deserve forgiveness.”

London said she personally witnessed an incident in 2019, eight years after Galliano’s firing from Dior, at the Henri Chenot spa in Merano, Italy, an environment she noted was free of alcohol, drugs, sugar, or caffeine. She wrote that a friend of hers was on the phone with her daughter, speaking English, before switching to Hebrew. According to London: “The minute Galliano heard Hebrew he started screaming ‘Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas...’ Over and over. On repeat until my friend hung up the phone. It was July.”

London said that when her friend asked Galliano directly whether he had a problem with Hebrew, “he promptly and very unapologetically responded that he did.” She said her friend told him she owned several pieces of his clothing and would dispose of them once she returned home to Israel. London wrote: “He told her to please do.....”

She closed the post: “This man does not deserve honor, forgiveness or acceptance. He is a racist and a Hitler-loving antisemite both drunk and sober. And as we have seen, his hatred and bigotry is also not limited to Jews. I know antisemitism is en Vogue in New York (and virtually everywhere now) but this is surprising nonetheless. Shame on you Anna Wintour!”

I was inclined to believe her, up until the lowkey Mamdani jab at the end because Paris is like a village, if you hang out in the Marais or at La Perle after a few glasses of Sancerre, a regular will tell you about some encounter they had with Galliano, and some of them are…… not so great. So it’s not entirely far-fetched that there were other incidents. Personally, I’m not a Galliano fanboy. I respect his artistry and his contributions to fashion. I also think what he did and said was outrageous, and I don’t think it’s ridiculous that people feel some sort of way about the continuing image rehabilitation of him.

I think there are varying tolerances for image rehabilitation when it comes to things like this, and a lot of the push from Anna, Condé Nast, and the rest of the industry comes down to more than just profit. Some of that gap is simply time; Galliano’s incident is now 15 years old, while Kanye’s is barely three. But even accounting for that, Galliano went through something Kanye never got: an institutional rehabilitation process, with rabbis and the ADL signing off, that gave fashion permission to let him back in. He’s also fashion’s own, trained at Central Saint Martins and inside the house system for decades, and the industry protects its own in a way it never extended to Kanye.

Now I am not condoning anything Kanye did, said, or tweeted either. But by the same metric they used for Galliano — an addict whose behavior got explained away by triple addiction and a decade of rabbi visits — why doesn’t that same grace extend to Kanye citing bipolar disorder and a traumatic brain injury as part of his path back? If addiction earns you a synagogue trip and eventually a Met exhibition, why doesn’t a documented mental health diagnosis earn you anything close to that same runway? Both are medical explanations for behavior, but only one of them seems to count.

Anyway, these are just my thoughts and the inconsistencies that are glaring to me regarding Anna Wintour–sanctioned fashion comebacks.

Explainer guide for those new here: Roach didn’t come up through the traditional stylist pipeline with years spent assisting someone bigger, etc. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago, started as a vintage dealer, opened a shop called Deliciously Vintage Harlem, and built his client list from the ground up at the same time Zendaya was still a Disney kid. Everything after that, the CFDA Stylist Award in 2022 (the first one ever given), the role as a judge on HBO’s ballroom reality show, Legendary, the Project Runway seat, the retirement in 2023 where he said flatly that the “politics, the lies, the false narratives” finally got him, and the return last year, all happened while he and Zendaya were building each other in real time through their creative partnership. He was also early to a lot of designers who were just starting out, like Christopher Esber, Mônot, Peter Do, and Jason Rembert’s Aliette which is an attestment to his visionary eye.

Now onto The Odyssey press tour. I’ll start with the jet, since that’s actually what kicked this all off. The day of the London premiere, Roach told fashion commentator Lyas that he flew in specifically for the Schiaparelli’s Fall 2026 couture show and had a private jet ready to take him and the finale dress to London for Zendaya to wear that same night.

Now I’ll say what I actually think, which is that this particular little anecdote was in extremely bad taste. I cringed watching the clip. It’s not that I think stylists shouldn’t have resources or move fast, but because THAT particular gesture had no purpose beyond celebrating its own excess. It wasn’t solving a problem so much as broadcasting one, loudly, specifically engineered to generate viral headlines. Irritating yes, but for someone who has been this explicit for this long about where he’s trying to end up, the fashion house he says he wants to own (Ungaro), the billionaire social circles, the general project of becoming inarguable in his brain, the jet story isn’t a scandal to him at all. It’s more material for the never-ending Law Show. I think he’s fully aware this is the kind of story that gets repeated till the end of time, the stylist who moved a plane for a dress, and that self-aggrandizing mythology has always been part of his plan right alongside the client list.

Next, the earrings. Zendaya wore gold plaque earrings to the London Odyssey photocall, pieces believed to date to the first millennium BCE, sourced through the antiquities dealer Barron London and remounted in diamonds by Glenn Spiro. Of course, per the Law Roach handbook, this was just another chapter in the method dressing he’s become known for: when she’s playing a goddess from a myth that old, you give her something actually that old. It’s coherent styling logic that says nothing about the origin of the pieces.

Archaeologists, however, were more than ready to push back. They traced the pieces to the notorious Ziwiye hoard, a trove of gold, silver, ivory, and bronze artifacts plundered from a citadel hill near the village of Ziwiye (in modern Kurdistan Province, northwestern Iran) around 1947. The discovery was never a proper archaeological excavation: local villagers (accounts vary between shepherds, laborers, and peasants) stumbled upon the material, cut up many of the repoussé gold objects to divide them, and funneled the rest into the antiquities market through dealers. No controlled digs ever recovered comparable treasures there, and scholars like Oscar White Muscarella have long argued that the “Ziwiye” label became a convenient catch-all for hundreds of unprovenanced objects , some likely authentic, others from nearby sites or outright forgeries, with no clean chain of custody ever established.

The optics only got worse once people clocked the timing: Iranian artifacts, fresh off a global press tour, paraded during a period when the United States was actively bombing Iran. This is one where I think the criticism is also a bit valid. Because….Law……let’s research mama. Now do I think he had ill intentions? Not in the least. Do I think Law is a busy professional mostly occupied with the surface value of what he’s doing? Well... yes.

And then there’s another significant dress itself, separate from the jet anecdote. The Matières Fécales gown from the New York premiere, with its angel wings and raw feathered train.

Roach told the press he’d seen that exact look walk the runway two or three years ago, before The Odyssey was even filmed, and asked the house to hold it. And they did.

@entertainmenttonightLaw Roach had his eye on Zendaya’s Matières Fécales fit for ‘The Odyssey’ premiere before the film was even done! #zendaya #lawroach #theodyssey

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They turned down other placements on that dress for two years, according to Roach and confirmed by the brand itself, because they’d made the promise. Now some people are reading that as a beautiful almost obsessive piece of planning, proof that Roach thinks in decades while everyone else thinks in seasons. But other people are reading it as something akin to a small house getting strong-armed into sitting on its own best asset for two years so one stylist could control the timing of his own narrative. Most emerging brands don’t have unlimited runway looks to spare. Every season is inventory, is press, and tying up your most striking piece for two years on the promise of one future red carpet moment is a real bet and one that only pays off if the person asking you to make it is exactly as powerful as Roach turned out to be. It worked because it always works for him. But “it worked” and “it wasn’t a slightly extractive ask” aren’t mutually exclusive, and I think that’s throwing further fuel on the fire that is the backlash to Law this press tour.

One thing about Law which I think actually explains a lot in reference to the other two stories is that he genuinely, unapologetically loves this life. The diamonds, the Birkins, the paparazzi, the whole apparatus of being visibly, undeniably a somebody. He’s not performing humility or pretending to be reluctant about his fame the way some people in his position do, with the “oh I just love the clothes” posturing. He wants the attention! He wants to be a star! He built toward it on purpose. It’s what keeps him highly paid and in high demand. We are in an attention economy after all.

Which is probably why the Lauren Sanchez styling gig which saw him dressing her in archival Versace for Paris Fashion Week and getting dragged online (and written about by me) , for lending his eye to someone widely mocked as “allergic to serving,” for supposedly cheapening his brand by association with Bezos money (with all its connotations, Amazon’s ICE contracts, Trump associations, and the broader optics), probably didn’t even register as a real event to him. That backlash lives entirely inside a value system he’s not operating in. People were furious that he’d cheapened his carefully cultivated taste by associating with a woman who’d shown up to the Trump inauguration in a lacy bra, but Roach has spent years constructing a life specifically insulated from having to care about that kind of judgment. He’s already got the billionaire circles, the star clients, the CFDA trophy, the television deals. Styling Sanchez isn’t a compromise from inside that world, it’s just another workday.

So you’ve got all these different flavors of controversy piled onto one press tour, yet they keep getting flattened into one big referendum on Roach’s character. Really, only one of them is an actual ethics story. The rest are about power, excess, taste which are very real critiques, but not the same critique. Roach benefits from the confusion, because it’s easier for people to write him off wholesale than to admit he might be guilty of one thing and basically innocent of the others.

Where I feel the real conflict is this other layer. I’ve heard how some people in Paris talk about him, always that “he’s doing too much” diatribe, like he’s got too much personality for a job that’s supposed to keep him in the background. Lauren Sherman hit on that in her 2023 Puck piece, which I thought was pretty ugly, basically painting him as the help who got too big for his britches. At the end of the day, a lot of the pushback comes down to that sentiment.

Now that’s not to say I think he’s above critique. I do think he deserves criticism, especially on the ethics side. But at the core of it, Roach runs on one fixed point annd everything either serves that point or it’s noise. That’s his whole operating system because he has big goals that need big money, and big money is rarely clean. That’s why the dress hold, and the jet for a dress, and the provenance stuff don’t really register as problems for him. He’s never going to care about being liked the way people expect him to, because he’s managed to make himself matter to the people he aspires to be.

I was abruptly roused out of my moral quandary by screams and camera flashes as a small army equipped with umbrellas swelled forward through the security checkpoint below me. The umbrellas parted, and out stepped Chinese actress Fan Bingbing, back now, no longer in hiding after her $129M tax evasion scandal, in a glittering gown. Assistants scattered at a simple gesture as the actress stared blankly into a sea of long lenses and iPhones that would soon beam the footage from these steps across the world.

“We are so back,” I quietly said.

Back indeed. This was my triumphant return to Haute Couture Week, specifically the Georges Hobeika couture show. I had finally been un-blacklisted from the PR agency handling the event after one of their prized clients threatened to sue me for reporting on their legal mishaps ( they SA a minor and went to jail ). That same client had even gone so far as to email every major PR agency in Paris, warning them about me.

But as my friend inside the agency whispered outside the venue, “That’s all in the past.”

I understood exactly what she meant: play nice, don’t piss off the rich people, and you can have your seat back at the table.

After all, the luxury houses themselves don’t ask too many questions about where their clients’ money actually comes from, so why should I?

It was an ethical gray zone for a journalist, no question, but then again, was haute couture ever a bastion of moral purity?

A few months ago, I wrote a piece digging into the dirty money quietly funding the world of haute couture. That article unexpectedly birthed a TikTok series I still need to finish called Couture & Corruption.

While the various oligarch wives and their ilk piled into the show seated by people who may or may not know whose money is under sanctions yet aren’t paid enough to care, my PR friend and I spoke about the need for more fashion critics, especially in France, who actually address social issues and politics, and how deeply everything is intertwined. For all the artistic posturing of the creative scene in Paris, the keys to the kingdom are still held by powerful men who lean right and use their influence to elect politicians whose rhetoric harms the very people propping up their empires.

In Paris, you have to be extremely careful with how you speak and write about the Arnaults, for example. You’ll never find a critical word in any of the major French fashion media, that would be biting the hand that feeds them. Conversations like this among industry people only happen in hushed tones behind closed doors. Talking so candidly at a couture show felt a little dangerous.

As I entered the venue and took my front-row seat among the internet’s favorite commentators, Substackers, and TikTokers, I thought to myself: despite all the “I’m over it”s I tell myself, it still feels good to have tangible proof of your worth in this industry. This time, I silently promised, I wouldn’t fuck it up for the hundredth time.

Five minutes later, I was whispering behind my fan, recounting my investigation into the client who had gotten me blacklisted a year earlier.

Oh god, I’m not very good at playing the fashion game, am I?

Just before the lights went down, I spotted a familiar face: Heart Evangelista, the Filipino actress, influencer, and couture client who was actually the inspiration behind my Couture & Corruption series. Her husband, Senator Francis “Chiz” Escudero, had been embroiled in scandals involving the alleged embezzlement of public funds, including money intended for flood relief and disaster aid. Many believed that Heart’s extravagant couture purchases were funded, at least in part, by these embezzled funds which led to protests with signs featuring her face and allegedly caused her to skip an entire couture season. And yet here she was again, back smiling serenely in the front row like none of it had ever happened. I wondered if I was the only one in the room that was even remotely curious about the truth.

The next day, as I was entering Stéphane Rolland’s couture show, I bumped into an old friend who had the good fortune to get pregnant by an extremely rich man. She now lives a life of leisure, hopping between various residences and her absolutely insane yacht, the one I’d spent a lovely time on in Cannes.

“DARLING,” she said in that booming register wealthy people use when they feel their presence needs to fill the entire room. “Your TikToks are so funny, what are you making next?”

“Well actually, I’m interviewing some of the students who were displaced from their residences and green spaces to make room for the Louis Vuitton show and Balenciaga couture. I really feel like rich people shouldn’t be able to take over spaces like that, and it’s important that the students’ voices are heard.”

She stared at me blankly and said, “Uh huh, great,” as she fiddled with her diamond rings and scanned the crowd for more important people. I may be slightly autistic, but even I could tell this topic was of zero interest to her.

“But maybe I’ll see you in St. Tropez in August?” I asked.

“Yes darling,” she said, taking my hands. “Let me know when you’re there.” She clicked away in her René Caovilla heels to air-kiss someone more firmly in her tax bracket.

As I watched rich women in increasingly complex creations push their way onto the photocall, I wondered to myself: Am I truly the troublemaker I’m made out to be in Paris? Am I a “good person” for caring about more than just clothes, or am I a bad person for disturbing the peace in the inner sanctum of the wealthy? By standing here oohing and aahing over $100k gowns, am I a hypocrite?

I thought back to a few years ago, when I was dating a Communist. We were at a protest, chanting in unison about being anti-capitalist, when my boyfriend at the time looked down at me and said, “Bitch, you’re wearing Christian Louboutin boots.”

The next evening, as I sat on the terrace of Le Gratin in that same pair of PR gifted shoes, slurping oysters and chugging champagne at the Pandora party, still mulling over my existential crisis, Gabriella Karefa-Johnson hopped out of a black van. We’d never met in person, only interacted online, but she immediately pointed at me and said, “Oh bitch, we have to talk about these META glasses.”

Later, after we all lost our minds dancing to Madonna’s “Vogue” and the DJ slid into full wedding-reception mode, Gabriella and I finally had a proper chat.

She encouraged me to publish a piece that had been rotting in my drafts due to me being afraid of people reacting negatively. Then she laughed and said, “Yes, you’re known to stir up trouble, but who cares?”

In that moment, something shifted. If someone as successful, glamorous, and connected as GKJ could move through this world so unapologetically then what the fuck was I doing sitting here wringing my hands suddenly worrying about if having a brain was bad for business.

So yeah… Can you be woke at couture?

Turns out the answer is the same as everything else in this ridiculous industry: if you’ve got the balls to try.

Let’s fucking go.

I have never been so happy for men’s fashion week to end. That shit was brutal.

I’ve lived in France long enough to lose my AC tolerance completely, I get sick now if a fan even blows on me while I sleep. But this heat wave? I had that thing cranked to Antarctica, aimed directly at my face, pneumonia be damned. Because wow.

Turns out I was also living directly under a zinc roof this whole time (there’s a great article on how these roofs turn Parisian apartments into ovens — RIP to the servants who used to live up there). By the time I got to the shows, I was so dehydrated I cramped up and nearly whited out at a café. I was irritable, snapping at myself mid-sentence like “okay bitch, calm down.”

Physical discomfort turns me extremely feral. So naturally, I spent the week taking notes on everything that pissed me off during men’s fashion week and naturally I’m sharing it with you. Fair warning: I curse out a few of your favorite fashion people.

BEGGING FOR UBERS IS NOT CHIC !

OK so literally before the shows even started I was already in a pissy mood because I saw this post on Instagram from Eugene Rabkin, who, listen, this is not meant to come across like I’m bashing him, I’m a fan of his work, I like what he does. But I think it was a great example at some point of the entitlement of some fashion people. He made a post about how climate change is real, and because it’s going to be 102° in Paris, showrooms should give independent editors vouchers for taxis and Ubers to make it easier to come to their appointments.

I had to laugh a little bit, as somebody who lives here and gets to all of my appointments just fine using public transportation. I’m fine and dandy on the metro, the bus, I love a good Lime bike too, and I do all that during fashion week too. I’m proud to say I’ve converted many of my friends who come for fashion week onto the virtue of Parisian public transportation. And you get there faster, yes, it’s not the most glamorous thing, but sometimes it’s just more practical.

So I just felt like for him to ask independent brands or showrooms, who are probably already stretched thin financially, to send you an Uber, when you just talked about climate change… we don’t need more vehicles on the streets of Paris making more trips. But anyways. I just felt like that was such a crazy thing. Entitlement is so real. And also — what constitutes who’s an “independent editor”? I know Eugene has a Substack, but so does everybody now… I just think it’s such a crazy thing to ask a brand to pay for you to be in a nice air-conditioned car. An invitation isn’t a summons, it’s completely voluntary. And also, I’m sorry, I don’t wanna be a cunt, but you do not have to do Paris fashion week in a car. So many people do it without a car. I do it without a car. I was lucky for like two seasons, Paris Fashion Week gave me a car for a partnership, and even then I was late to stuff, I was in traffic, I was like oh my God, I kind of miss the metro.

But that kind of set me on edge for the week because that was a reminder of this wave of entitlement that invades Paris 4x a year We’re all hot, OK? I think you’ll survive five days of crossing the city for men’s fashion week. There are hundreds of people who wake up at the butt crack of dawn all summer, get on the hot and crowded RER, to go do a shift you would never in a million years want to do, and you think you’re entitled to a car. You will survive. Man up.

CONVICTIONS OVER COCKTAILS

speaking of running all over the city for events

This past week I received an invitation to the Casablanca x Ladurée Paris Fashion Week launch event at the Champs-Élysées which royally pissed me off and this is why.

About a year ago I was reporting on Carl Hirschman, the Heavensake founder who was convicted of sexually assaulting a child in Switzerland and served time. That reporting came with consequences of course. Hirschman’s team sent multiple cease and desist letters and made explicit threats to damage my reputation and career in Paris. I kept reporting anyway, and while I was working on that story, threads started leading elsewhere. People began reaching out about Charaf Tajer, the founder of Casablanca Paris, and a pattern of behavior toward women that had been known about in certain Paris fashion circles for years.

I posted a TikTok about it this week. Shortly after it went up, someone sent me proof of a court judgment. Charaf Tajer is a convicted domestic abuser. He received a suspended four-month sentence, meaning he remains free unless he reoffends. The judgment is public record. It cannot be broadcast but it can be spoken about. (If he wants to sue me for publishing this…so be it.)

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Outside the Hôtel Le Meurice, in the brutal afternoon heat, a woman’s backpack had been grabbed hard enough to nearly knock her over, someone had tried to rip a medical-grade SPF mask off her face, and a voice was screaming ‘I know who you are, bitch’ at her in front of a crowd that had gathered to watch Connor Storrie walk into Saint Laurent’s front row beside Madonna. Connor, who had sparked a fierce bidding war among the houses before YSL won, was one of the week’s most anticipated front-row arrivals. The woman being screamed at was Simone Cromer. Online she’s better known as Club Chalamet. I would know, she’s had me blocked on Twitter for a while now.

Cromer’s account, posted afterward under her Storrie-focused handle, is detailed. She’d spent the first half of the day at Giverny, touring Monet’s garden and lily pond, before heading to the Meurice and standing in direct sun for over two hours. She was dressed for it, cap, sunglasses, and a dermatologist-recommended SPF facial mask that made her look, in her own words, like a mummy. Another fan in the crowd had been clocking her from the start, staring, pointing her out to companions who smirked, then crossing to the other side of the line to loop in still more people. Cromer stayed put. When hotel security adjusted the barriers, pushing the other fan’s section back and giving Cromer’s a cleaner view, she could feel it hadn’t helped.

Around 5:10, as the crowd surged forward when Storrie appeared, the person grabbed her backpack hard enough that Cromer nearly lost her footing. She turned to find them glaring and hissing: “I know who you are. I know who you are, bitch. You bitch.” Then they went for the SPF mask. Cromer pushed their hand away, told them not to touch her again, snapped photos of them , describing one as their “Manson family recruitment photo” , and got a word in of her own. The C word to be exact. The individual responded by loudly calling her a stalker to anyone within earshot. Other people nearby told them to calm down.

After Storrie got into the car with James, his stylist, Cromer says the situation escalated further. “The crazy stood right in front of me and had a defensive stand in such a way that she deliberately blocked me,” she wrote. As the crowd pressed forward for photos and video, she was pushed up against them. “She went feral and pushed back at me and we had an embarrassing brief scuffle. It was humiliating. All I wanted to do was leave after standing there for over two hours and being gawked at, assaulted, verbally harassed, and her trying to remove my mask.”

The other person posted their own version earlier that day — “just had a fight with clubchalamet” — framing it as something they’d started, apparently on the grounds that Cromer’s presence was itself a threat to Storrie. No video has surfaced and neither Storrie nor hotel security has commented. I have reached out to Cromer for comment and have not yet received a response.

To understand why this exploded the way it did you have to know who Cromer is. She created the Club Chalamet Twitter account in 2018, following Chalamet’s breakout role in Call Me by Your Name, and has spoken out against judgment for being an older fan, being 29 years his senior. Her nearly full-time passion for the young actor provoked intrigue from internet users who were surprised to see a professional woman in her 50s so vehemently stan a rising actor. Her penchant for flowery language, general seriousness, and fluency with clap backs made her a continual character in the collective feed. She built a following that treated her posts as essential reading and ran the account with the energy, as one writer put it, of a professional publicist with a single client.

Then Kylie Jenner entered the picture. In a 52-minute Twitter Spaces session, Cromer suggested that Chalamet had been blackmailed into the relationship, a session that became prominent for her observation that the couple had never been seen visiting Olive Garden, despite Chalamet liking Italian cuisine. She referred to Jenner in posts not by name but as “a guest” or “Ms. K,” and described Jenner as “spiritually low IQ” — someone who didn’t mesh with the prestige class Chalamet brought to the table. Cromer later claimed the negative backlash was orchestrated by Jenner’s family, the Kardashians. When Vanity Fair posted a photo of the couple and captioned it “Club Chalamet, our heart goes out to you,” she responded: “Hey, @VanityFair, I’m fine, I’m always here for Timothée. Always!”

The cooling came gradually. Cromer had been losing faith in part due to Chalamet’s continued relationship with Jenner, and seemingly because of his increasingly boastful behavior, most notably when he claimed “no one cares” about ballet or opera. She later wrote that she “felt seen” by a post that read: “defending a person and then experiencing why nobody likes them is very humbling.” She announced she was taking a step back from the account, writing: “Once I don’t fully believe in it anymore, I have to recenter my focus on things I believe in and that make me happy.”

That recenter landed on Connor Storrie. His existing fanbase received her with predictable wariness, some actively suspicious of the baggage she carried, others treating it as an inevitable collision of overlapping online orbits. It’s telling, some noted, that the pivot happened as rumors swirled about a Chalamet-Jenner engagement, and that her Chalamet activity had itself coincided with the marriage of her previous obsession, Michael Fassbender.

I reached out to @mikadontyoudare, the fan on the other side of the confrontation, and their account reframes the whole thing. They’d been there since early morning and had a first-line spot they’d earned by staying all day. They knew who Cromer was before she arrived. “We all knew who she was,” they told me. “She’s well known in fan spaces, especially because she’s a danger and a security risk to the celebrities she targets.” Cromer had allegedly been targeting Connor for weeks by then “making weird tweets about his personal life and friendships, making up stuff she couldn’t possibly know for sure” and the fandom had been bracing for her to show up in person. “There weren’t many 60-year-old women there in the first place so she kind of stood out. We’d been expecting she might show up at some point.”

While everyone else had dressed up hoping for a selfie, Cromer had arrived in a mask, hat, and full-length clothing in a heatwave. “That’s enough to stand out like a sore thumb anyway,” @mikadontyoudare said.

Security also allegedly already knew who Cromer was, and @mikadontyoudare says that was its own kind of relief. They were standing directly in front of her when Connor came out.

The day had been brutal. Hours in direct sun, a crowd getting more restless by the minute. “We’d all been on edge the whole day, it was hot,” @mikadontyoudare told me. Then Connor came out and the energy shifted immediately. “Connor had just come out looking good, it was a frenzy.” That’s when Cromer allegedly ran at him — not walked, ran, cutting directly through the crowd toward him as he was leaving the hotel. Nobody does that. “Something in my head panicked,” @mikadontyoudare told me. “Oh, she’s gonna do something now. She had been doing nothing all day, but maybe she had been biding her time and now was her moment.” Their body moved before they could think. They grabbed Cromer to stop her, got in front of her, and security reached them fast. It was over in seconds.

Afterward, fan accounts tagged @mikadontyoudare thanking them for intervening. It’s also worth noting that Cromer referred to @mikadontyoudare as “she” throughout her account. They use they/them pronouns.

Cromer has since posted: “Do not pity me. My age is not an issue, I’m not a wilting flower, and I know how to defend myself. I wasn’t hurt so I didn’t file a police report. I’m posting this for public record in the fandom. Karma works better that way.”

The internet, predictably, is divided. One camp is hailing @mikadontyoudare a hero for intervening. The other is pointing out that physically grabbing someone for whatever your reasons, is not the same as protecting a celebrity.

Nobody is going to accuse me of being a Club Chalamet sympathizer BUT the irony of the whole scene is still hard to ignore: every single person standing outside the Meurice that afternoon, staking out a spot in the heat for hours to catch thirty seconds of a movie star, was doing some version of exactly what Cromer has spent years being criticized for. The person who grabbed her had also been standing there all day. The difference, according to @mikadontyoudare, is that they weren’t planning to run.

So I’ve written before about looksmaxxer Clavicular, whose real name is Braden Eric Peters. A refresher: he is a 20-year-old American Kick streamer who has become the most recognizable face of the looksmaxxing movement. He gained massive online attention by openly documenting extreme self-improvement, including multiple cosmetic surgeries (jaw work, rhinoplasty, otoplasty, and more), heavy PED use, strict dieting, and constant facial ratio measurements. His nickname comes from his well-known obsession with achieving wide, prominent clavicles, which he frequently measures and shows on stream.

He remains deeply controversial for his repeated use of racist slurs on livestreams, dismissive comments about Black women, and associations with far-right figures, elements he has downplayed as edgy humor rather than ideology, even as critics label his worldview as shot through with misogyny and racial hierarchy.

Fresh off his latest round of surgeries, what he called “Ascension Week,” he traveled to Paris ahead of Men’s Fashion Week with the goal of testing his newly enhanced look. Instead, he dealt with Parisian women rejecting him, and complained about French rudeness and living conditions, leading to discussions about whether looksmaxxing could actually improve his real-life results.

Now, I’ve written a lot about how harmful his content is, especially given how much time young people spend online these days and how much their worldview is shaped through these male improvement advocates, so I decided to hop on his stream to see how he was getting on around Paris. Imagine my surprise when I recognized the restaurant he and his female friend were streaming from. It was Père & Fish, a fish burger shop around the corner from me.

Back in 2019, I discovered the world of streaming while on Twitter and started seeing videos of a guy named “Ice Poseidon” livestreaming himself around Paris. I became fascinated with how he treated the city like a video game. It was like a real-world Truman Show. Soon I became familiar with streamer slang, especially what is called a “stream sniper,” which is someone who deliberately, and typically maliciously, makes themselves part of someone’s stream in a targeted manner. I quickly realized that people would track the streamer by watching their live stream, go find them, and interact with them to get on camera.

So when I saw Clavicular was 150 meters away from my house, I thought: this is my chance to ask him a few questions. He doesn’t do many interviews, and the ones he does tend to be very performative, or combative like his Piers Morgan Uncensored appearance, or he walks out like on 60 Minutes Australia when pressed on incel associations and Andrew Tate. So I summoned the audacity of that Balenciaga conspiracy theorist who confronted me at a Substack panel and set off to interview Clavicular, guerrilla style.

Armed with two phones, one with his live stream and one ready to record in 4K, I set off down the street to Père & Fish, only to realize that in the time I had been in the elevator, he had left the restaurant and was briskly walking across the 10th arrondissement with his female friend and his Black bodyguard. “Fuck,” I said under my breath, and scrutinized the live stream for familiar landmarks. QUEEN NAILS. I quickly Googled it, saw it was nearby, and began walking in that direction. As I neared it, I began to see clusters of children glued to their phones, looking around. We were all on the same scavenger hunt, and the prize was a surgically enhanced specimen of social media.

Still watching the live stream, I saw him pass my neighborhood kebab shop, the one I’m pretty sure is a money laundering front, because how can they afford to pay Offset £10,000 to eat some fries for five minutes? His female friend then stopped in a shop I recognized in front of my metro stop, and I knew that’s where I’d catch him. As I turned the corner at the top of the street I could see the hulking bodyguard, and then caught a flash of brown curls. TARGET ACQUIRED.

I slowed my pace, partly because I didn’t want to spook him, and partly because the street was already full of mini incels-in-training. Ok, maybe that was uncharitable, but that’s what it felt like to me. He was now facing me and I thought to myself… is this the wrong guy? Because this definitely doesn’t look like the pictures GQ took of him. Instead, in front of me stood a slightly puffy, awkward young man who seemed nervous taking a picture with ten-year-olds. Time to make this even more awkward.

Phone up. Record. “Clavicular!” I said, stumbling a bit over his digital moniker. His eyes flickered to me anxiously and then back to the phone screen of someone’s unattended child. I decided to lead with a general question about his naysayers, me. “Do you have any comment on people who say your content is hurting young men?”

I think I’ve been watching far too much TMZ.

His female friend rolled her eyes and walked out of frame while his bodyguard gave me a silent look. With a half smirk, he replied: “My content does nothing but HELP young men.” (Reminder: his content glorifies extreme cosmetic surgeries, heavy PED abuse, bone-smashing, racial hierarchies, and misogyny.)

I followed up with “So what would you call what you do?” He turned away and wished me a good day. The bodyguard said “Alright brother, have a good one” and I said YOU TOO. LOL.

As they continued up my street to the female-run yoga juice bar under my building, where he would wax poetic about the tiny benches not made for Americans, I glanced at the live stream chat, where everyone was calling me the N-word and saying “chimp attack.” Racist streamer chat is racist? Shocking. The “why do all gay leftists speak like that” was particularly funny to me, because… ACCURATE.

Almost three million views and one invitation to go on French radio to talk about Clavicular later, I’m still unsatisfied that I didn’t get to the extra chewy questions. Men’s Fashion Week starts tomorrow. I’ll leave the mogging to the models, that’s what they’re there for. But a surgically enhanced jaw doesn’t have much to say for itself when the questions get harder, and mine are getting harder. Stay tuned.

Happy Monday and welcome back to DISCOURSTED.

Unfortunately, we’re starting the week with a tragic industry accident.

If you’re not familiar with Kartik Research, it’s a New Delhi-based artisanal menswear label founded in 2021 by designer Kartik Kumra. The brand, known for its contemporary reinterpretation of Indian craft, textiles, and subcultures under the banner of “Indian future vintage,” has enjoyed significant international attention recently.

The brand known for its contemporary reinterpretation of Indian craft, textiles, and subcultures under the banner of “Indian future vintage” gained widespread visibility when New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wore a custom eri-silk tie by Kartik Research to his swearing-in ceremony earlier this year and also when head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri wore a look to the Met Gala. The label was also named a semi-finalist for the 2026 LVMH Prize (its second time on the shortlist), became the first Indian brand to appear on the official Paris Fashion Week calendar, and has attracted global stockists and celebrity interest.

That momentum has now been overshadowed by tragedy. On May 28, 26-year-old Divyanshu Joshi, who had managed the brand’s Delhi retail outlet for the past two years and had also modeled for Kartik Research, including walking in Lakmé Fashion Week, drowned while scouting locations for a commercial photoshoot in Kerala.

Joshi was part of a small team from Delhi that arrived early at an abandoned, water-filled stone quarry in the Mudakuzha area of Ernakulam district, ahead of the main production crew. The disused quarry, inactive for more than two decades, is widely known locally as a hazardous “death trap” and is off-limits to the public. According to police, Joshi entered the water as a friend filmed him, slipped from a shallower area into a much deeper section (approximately 30 feet down), and drowned.

Allegedly Kartik Kumra, the brand’s founder, entered the water in an attempt to search for and rescue Joshi but was unable to locate him though the Station House Officer of Kodanad Police Station told Indian media outlet Mint Lounge “Nobody jumped in the lake after Joshi”. Rescue teams from the Kerala Fire and Rescue Services later recovered Joshi’s body. He was pronounced dead at Perumbavoor Taluk Hospital.

The shoot was being facilitated by Kochi-based Rubberband Productions. An FIR has been registered at Kodanad Police Station, and officers are investigating what they have described as “logistical lapses” that led the team to the unauthorised and dangerous location.

On May 31, Kartik Research issued a statement on Instagram expressing heartbreak over the loss of their “dear colleague and friend.” The brand noted Joshi’s warmth and dedication, clarified that he “was not participating in any swimming-related activity as part of the production,” and addressed what it called “inaccurate accounts” and “mischaracterised circumstances” circulating online. It requested privacy for Joshi’s loved ones and said it would make no further public comment.

The incident has triggered widespread discussion and backlash across social media about safety standards, risk assessment, location choices, and accountability in fashion production as well as worker safety especially in India.

Police investigations are ongoing.

Today on DISCOURSTED: corporate brand protection meets queer creativity, environmental language finds surprising new political homes, media aesthetics blunt the climate crisis, and a key legal twist in the Riccardo Tisci case.

The full stories and the rest of this week’s edition are for paid subscribers only.

Continue reading below.

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For anyone coming to this fresh: Cooper v. Tisci is a civil case currently before Judge Lewis Kaplan in the Southern District of New York, in which plaintiff Patrick Cooper alleges that fashion designer Riccardo Tisci drugged and sexually assaulted him on the night of June 29-30, 2024. Tisci denies all allegations. My last background piece on the case is here.

Before getting into the new filings, something I want to make clearer than I did on Monday is that this isn’t just a story about a witness who happened to be in the room. Cooper’s amended complaint alleges, under the battery count, that Tisci is liable for “either personally spiking, or directing Mahmood to spike, Plaintiff’s drink.” Mahmood is named as a possible direct participant in the alleged drugging — the person who brought Cooper his drink, who was alone at the table with Cooper and Tisci when Cooper’s friend, Michael Alexander, stepped outside, and who left the bar without a word to Alexander alongside Tisci and an incapacitated Cooper. That framing matters for everything that follows.

Now Mahmood is not a defendant in this case. He is a witness — one Tisci’s own legal team identified as having direct knowledge of the events of that night. Tisci’s lawyers requested that Mahmood appear voluntarily for a deposition. He declined. Because Mahmood lives in Milan and is outside the jurisdiction of the US courts, the only mechanism available to compel his testimony is the Hague Convention on the Taking of Evidence Abroad, which allows a US court to formally request that an Italian court order and conduct his examination. That process can take six months or more, which is why Tisci’s team filed the motion when they did.

To understand how Mahmood ended up in New York that fateful weekend, and with Tisci specifically: Mahmood had performed on night one of LadyLand Festival, the annual LGBTQ+ outdoor festival produced by Ladyfag and The Bowery Presents, held under the Kosciuszko Bridge in Brooklyn on June 28 and 29. In a photo diary he gave to W Magazine after the festival, Mahmood described arriving in New York two days before his performance, going clubbing, taking long walks around the city — and catching up with friends, naming Riccardo Tisci specifically.

Ladyfag and Tisci have been friends and collaborators for years; I know this firsthand, having helped cast club kids for a Givenchy party Tisci threw in Milan in 2015, which was creatively directed by Ladyfag, when I was working for the PR agency that helped organize it. The night of June 29 into June 30 — the night Cooper alleges he was drugged and assaulted — was the same night Ladyfag’s festival was holding its second evening, at which Madonna made a surprise appearance to judge a vogue ball. One of the competing houses at that ball was House Tisci.

As soon as my reporting went viral on Twitter, Mahmood’s fanbase mobilized. Stan accounts took to their timelines to paint both journalists covering the case and Cooper himself as not credible, despite the fact that the court records are public documents that anyone can read on PACER.

Now to the filings….

Cooper’s team doesn’t object to deposing Mahmood. What they object to is doing it right now, before they’ve received Tisci’s initial document production. They argue that the questions submitted through the Hague process may be the only sworn testimony they ever get from him, and they want to work from a complete picture when drafting those questions. They’re asking the court to wait until after July 10, which would give them ten days after Tisci’s June 30 production deadline to formulate their questions.

Tisci’s team’s urgency argument is grounded in something real. The Federal Judicial Center estimates that Hague responses can take six months or more, meaning every week of delay now is a week of real pressure against the discovery deadline later. The case schedule was built with this motion in mind, and Tisci’s team says Plaintiff never indicated he wanted to delay it until the opposition was actually filed.

There’s also a specific complaint about what Tisci’s team has produced so far. On May 7, Tisci’s lawyers provided what they described as all the Mahmood-related documents in their possession. Cooper’s team says what they received was a single message exchange, and that the exchange clearly referenced two voice recordings that were not included. Tisci’s team notes in their reply that Cooper didn’t raise the voicemails until the May 20 filing, and says they turned them over the same day. Both recordings are apparently extremely short — six seconds and three seconds. What two people say to each other in six seconds and three seconds, in the hours after the night in question, is its own kind of detail.

Tisci’s reply argues there’s no legal basis for conditioning a Hague letter of request on prior document production and notes that nothing stops Cooper from filing his own separate letter of request after July 10 if he wants to pose additional questions. Tisci and his legal team are also now offering to add any questions the voicemails might inspire to the letter of request.

Which brings us to the questions themselves. Tisci’s team submitted 64 of them to be put to Mahmood by an Italian court. The full list is available on PACER for anyone who wants to read it. But these are the ones worth noting:

Between the time when the bartender handed you the drink for Patrick Cooper until you delivered the drink to Patrick Cooper, did the drink leave your sight?

Between the time when the bartender handed you the drink for Patrick Cooper until you delivered the drink to Patrick Cooper, did the drink leave your possession?

To your knowledge, did Riccardo Tisci place any drug into Patrick Cooper’s drink?

Did Riccardo Tisci ask you to place any drug into Patrick Cooper’s drink?

Did you place any drug into Patrick Cooper’s drink?

During those communications, did Riccardo Tisci tell you that he had had sexual relations with Patrick Cooper?

Can you please read those WhatsApp messages aloud for the record, indicating, for each message, whether it was you or Riccardo Tisci writing the message.

Tisci’s team filed these specific questions because they believe the answers help their client. That is either a very confident legal strategy or an extremely revealing one.

The court hasn’t ruled yet. The case continues and as it does I’ll be updating in real time over on Twitter.

Bonjour from Paris ( unfortunately )because I’m missing my first Cannes Film Festival in 6 years. The reason for that is I spent the past week coming off my anxiety medication, inadvisedly cold turkey, which was a 0/10 experience. Do not recommend. I thought the pigeons outside my window were speaking to me at one point, and it’s only today, six days in, that I can begin to tolerate light. I went out to get croissants this morning and almost got run over by Romain Gavras on a bike because my eyes were a disaster. (Btw, it was just announced he’s making a film about the Louvre heist.) Anyways, I’m through the worst of it and am looking forward to learning holistic ways to deal with anxiety. I never want to see another Alprazolam in my life. Now that that’s out of the way, here’s what I’ve been watching instead.

The Tisci Case Has a New Name to Watch

ICYMI, and you probably did because I’m the only person reporting on this: last Friday in an update to the ongoing sexual assault case, Riccardo Tisci’s legal team filed a motion to depose Alessandro Mahmood, the Italian singer-songwriter better known simply as Mahmood, via the Hague Convention on the Taking of Evidence Abroad. The Hague Convention is the legal mechanism used when a witness is outside US jurisdiction and is not presenting themselves for questioning voluntarily.

For readers who don’t know who Mahmood is: he has won the Sanremo Music Festival twice, in 2019 and 2022, with both victories sending him to represent Italy at Eurovision. He appeared in Tisci’s first holiday campaign for Burberry, titled “What is Love?”, alongside Carla Bruni and a cast Tisci publicly described as people who had always supported him.

To understand why that matters, you need the December 2025 ruling in which Judge Lewis Kaplan denied Tisci’s motion to dismiss most of Patrick Cooper’s claims. That opinion laid out the factual record Cooper has alleged in full.

On the night of June 29-30, 2024, Cooper went to a bar with his close friend Michael Alexander to celebrate Pride Weekend, with Alexander planning to drive him home at the end of the night. After midnight, the two ran into Tisci and Mahmood. Alexander had a previous relationship with Tisci and made the introductions, and the four of them drove together to a bar in Harlem. Cooper had no intention of engaging in any sexual activity with Tisci, in part because he knew about Tisci’s history with Alexander, which made Tisci off limits as far as Cooper was concerned.

At the Harlem bar, Cooper had one drink. Alexander paid for it. Mahmood was the one who brought it to him. Cooper was sober going in, had a high alcohol tolerance, had taken no drugs, and then blacked out in a way he says he had never experienced before. When Alexander stepped outside for around fifteen minutes, Cooper was still at the table with Tisci and Mahmood. By the time Alexander came back, all three of them were gone without a word, and none of them responded to his calls or texts.

Cooper woke up several hours later in an unfamiliar apartment, completely naked, with Tisci on top of him. His clothes had been folded neatly in a pile nearby, which Cooper says was uncharacteristic of him, and his phone had been turned off, which he also says he would not have done himself. He left in a near-panic, and it was only once outside that he realized he had been in Tisci’s apartment. When he asked Tisci what had happened, Tisci said only that Alexander had “sponsored the night.”

Judge Kaplan allowed Cooper’s claims of battery, assault, false imprisonment, and violation of New York City’s Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Law to proceed. The IIED claim was dismissed, but only on technical grounds that it overlapped with the surviving tort claims rather than standing independently.

Mahmood was present for the entire sequence leading up to Cooper’s blackout. He brought the drink. He left the bar alongside Tisci and Cooper without alerting Alexander, and went unreachable in the hours that followed. He is not a peripheral figure in this account. Whether Tisci’s legal team believes his testimony supports their defense is the open question, but they are the ones who filed the motion, and they are the ones who need the Hague Convention to get him to talk.

The case continues.

Behind the paywall: The full Enfants Riches Déprimés racism scandal tied to the new “Racist Uncle Loafer,” Gizelle Bryant’s AI bag scam horror story, Bethenny Frankel’s messy shoe gifting drama, and the dark kitchen hazing story still haunting Biarritz’s fallen Palace hotel.

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ANOK YAI VS. THE WASHINGTON POST

Last weekend, The Washington Post implied that supermodel Anok Yai pissed herself at the 2024 Met Gala. They didn’t use those words, but that was the story they were telling, and she was not having it.

It started with a May 4 piece by writer Maura Judkis titled “How do stars pee at the Met Gala? An investigation.” Harmless enough concept, obvious engagement bait. Judkis spoke to celebrity stylist Mickey Freeman, who shared an anonymous anecdote about a client he had sewn into an elaborate sheer mesh jumpsuit covered in hand-stitched Swarovski crystals and pearls after the zipper broke before the event. Later that evening, the client allegedly couldn’t make it to a bathroom in time, tore a hole in the gown, and handled the situation. Freeman didn’t name her but The Post, however, decided to play detective.

Their methodology, which they cheerfully described in the piece as “Detective Google”, landed on Anok Yai’s crystal-covered blue ombre tulle jumpsuit from the 2024 Gala as the match and they published her name without a confirmation from Freeman, or a comment from Anok or her team and suddenly one of the most prominent Black models working today was being implicitly linked to a story about destroying a couture piece to urinate at the Met Gala.

Anok posted on Instagram tagging both the paper and Judkis directly: “I usually stay quiet and keep to myself but @washingtonpost @maurajudkis HOW DARE YOU MISALIGN MY CHARACTER AND IMPLY THAT I RIPPED MY OUTFIT AND PEED ON MYSELF DURING THE MET GALA OF 2024! FACT CHECK NEXT TIME! ARE YOU CRAZY?! If you find any photos of my outfit ripped or urine dripping down my leg, send it to me.”

Freeman responded the same day: “Nope! It was not Queen @anokyai.” He made clear he has never worked with her, called the whole thing a “hilarious non-story,” and confirmed she was not his client. The Post quietly scrubbed her name and added a correction at the bottom: “A previous version of this story included the name of a model wearing an outfit that matched Mickey Freeman’s description. On Sunday, Freeman said he did not work with this model. Her name has been removed.” Maura Judkis then made her Instagram private.

A lot of people online went in on both the paper and the writer, and the racial dimension of it is hard to ignore. Anok has been openly vocal about racism in the fashion industry throughout her career, and the idea that a major national newspaper casually linked her name to a degrading and completely unverified rumor with Google Images as their sourcing is not nothing. The correction appearing only after she publicly called them out makes it worse.

Now I decided to do some research of my own and go through Mickey Freeman’s Instagram, all the way back to 2012. He is an enthusiastic poster to say the least. Every client, every editorial placement, every bit of press he generates for himself or the people he works with gets documented. The only Met Gala client visible anywhere on his feed is Cody Renard Richard at the 2025 Gala, which Freeman described as his first. There is nothing from 2024 or before. No behind-the-scenes, no red carpet moment, no proud stylist caption, no trace of any client in any elaborate jumpsuit at any Met Gala at all. Which raises a pretty obvious question to me about whether this anecdote was possibly embellished or entirely fabricated for the sake of having a Washington Post mention.

after the jump I get into the racial component of the Audemars Piguet x Swatch discourse, an update on the Riccardo Tisci sexual assault case, Dorit Kemsley’s designer disaster, and the fashion icon that’s headed to jail.

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The 2026 Met Gala, formally the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Benefit, takes place tonight. The spring exhibition it supports is called Costume Art, an exploration of fashion as an embodied art form, and the dress code is “Fashion Is Art”, a theme that gives guests the widest possible interpretive runway, though if the rumored Silicon Valley contingent shows up looking like they raided a luxury rental service at Anna Wintour’s instruction, we may need to revisit what art means to men who have never worn collars voluntarily.

Who’s running the room

The official co-chairs are Beyoncé ( who hasn’t graced the carpet since 2016 ), Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams, and Anna Wintour, whose title at Condé Nast is now chief content officer but whose functional role at the Met Gala remains what it has always been: the person the whole operation orbits around. The honorary co-chairs and lead sponsors are Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, who reportedly paid at least $10 million to host the evening and sponsor its exhibition. That donation, and the visibility that came with it, is why you’ve been seeing the event referred to in coverage as “the Bezos Met Gala”, a framing that has proven extraordinarily difficult to shake. It is worth noting that this is not the Bezoses’ first Met rodeo: Bezos attended the 2012 gala with his then-wife MacKenzie Scott, and he and Lauren made their couple’s debut at the 2024 gala with her in custom Oscar de la Renta before skipping 2025 entirely. The escalation to lead sponsor and honorary co-chair this year has been extremely engineered.

The host committee is co-chaired by designer Anthony Vaccarello of Saint Laurent, which also sponsors the exhibition catalogue, and actress Zoë Kravitz, with Sabrina Carpenter, Doja Cat, and others rounding out the broader committee. Additional corporate support comes from Condé Nast, and the sponsorship architecture reportedly extends to layers involving Amazon, OpenAI, Meta, and Snap. The carpet will be heavy with contractual obligations tonight, Kidman to Chanel, Kravitz locked into Saint Laurent, Anne Hathaway will parade in Prada and with Vaccarello co-hosting, there will be no shortage of smoking suits and sexy little black dresses on the steps.

This is the first time a tech billionaire couple has occupied a lead sponsor and honorary chair role simultaneously at the Met Gala, and it has not gone unremarked upon. Individual tickets this year are priced at $100,000, up $25,000 from last year — while a table starts at $350,000, numbers that have circulated widely this week in a way that feels less like context and more like accelerant. As Amy Odell, author of Anna: The Biography, put it: what used to be a closed-door networking event for fashion people is now a big-box clout store for the richest people on the planet.

The protests

The backlash against the Bezos sponsorship has been organized, creative, and genuinely disruptive at the level of narrative, even if the physical actions have remained symbolic. The group behind it is Everyone Hates Elon, a UK-based anti-oligarch activist collective that cut its teeth on Musk-focused campaigns and pivoted here to Bezos. They raised between $10,000 and $13,000 and have centered their messaging on Amazon warehouse conditions, accounts of driver mistreatment including lawsuits and worker reports referencing urine bottles, Amazon contracts with ICE and CBP, Amazon’s ties to the Trump administration, and the broader politics of extreme wealth inequality — a combination that has made the Bezos involvement feel more loaded than a typical corporate sponsorship. Amazon has maintained that it offers competitive pay and benefits and complies with applicable laws.

The campaign began in mid-April with a wheatpasting blitz across New York City, covering subway stations, sidewalks, and the Upper East Side near the Met with posters reading “Boycott the Bezos Met Gala,” spoof ads referencing Amazon’s ICE ties, and Bezos imagery in satirical contexts. The group released the designs as free downloads, which accelerated the spread considerably.

On April 30th, activists placed over 300 miniature fake urine bottles inside the Metropolitan Museum itself, each labeled with a laughing photo of Bezos and a “Boycott the Bezos Met Gala” tag, a direct reference to the Amazon driver allegations. Amazon admitted that some of its delivery drivers were sometimes forced to urinate in bottles due to a lack of toilets. Staff removed the mini bottles, but the photos circulated widely.

In a follow-up move lifted from their playbook at Windsor Castle, the group slipped custom “commemorative plates” and novelty items into the Met gift shop — merchandise mocking the Bezoses with captions like “The Bezos Met Gala: The World’s Most Expensive Midlife Crisis” — before staff caught and pulled them.

Going into this week, the campaign escalated to nighttime building projections of boycott messages, a counter-event called “Ball Without Billionaires” organized by labor unions including SEIU and the Amazon Labor Union, and continued postering citywide. NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani will be skipping the gala, noting that his focus is on affordability and making the most expensive city in the United States affordable. Bella Hadid and others have engaged supportively with the campaign online.

The pre-gala party

Before the main event, the Bezoses hosted their own on Saturday, May 2nd at their New York City residence in the NoMad neighborhood. The invitation arrived via email with the subject line “INVITE: Jeff and Lauren Bezos Invite You” — a disco-themed digital card featuring a stylized close-up profile of a face with glittering red lipstick and a slightly open mouth, reading: “Pre-Met celebration on May 2 at 8 p.m. Address: to come upon confirmation.” The withheld address was a deliberate move to limit protest exposure, with the location only revealed to guests upon RSVP.

Paparazzi captured guests arriving and departing throughout the evening, which is how we know who was there, and I’m sure there are others who made very sure not to be seen. Among the confirmed attendees: Kris Jenner and Kendall Jenner, Sam Smith with designer Christian Cowan, Nicole Kidman, Gayle King, Nicky Hilton, Donatella Versace, Serena Williams and Alexis Ohanian, Venus Williams and Andrea Preti, Baz Luhrmann, Anna Wintour, Law Roach (who serves as an occasional stylist to Lauren), Ashley Graham and Justin Ervin, Brooks Nader, Lisa Rinna, Vittoria Ceretti, Grace Ann Nader, Lindsey Vonn, Laura Harrier, Stacey Bendet of Alice + Olivia, Tommy Hilfiger, Huma Abedin, Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad, model Loli Bahia, Fai Khadra, and Georgina Rodriguez.

The evening was described as intimate and warm, a high-glamour warm-up framed around the Bezoses’ now-central position in the fashion and celebrity ecosystem they have, over the past few years, purchased their way into quite deliberately.

The people who will not be there

Zendaya is sitting out. After back-to-back press runs for The Drama and Euphoria Season 3, she opted for a break, which tracks with her broader pattern of curating her public presence carefully. It is worth noting, in that context, her reported distance from co-star Sydney Sweeney amid the latter’s rumored pro-Trump leanings and increasingly polarizing public image, Zendaya has been consistent about what rooms she chooses to be in, and this year the Met Gala is not one of them.

Her longtime stylist and collaborator Law Roach will attend solo, which is one of the rare instances where the Met Gala centers on him as a figure in his own right rather than as the architect behind a client’s look. Those who were paying attention during Paris Couture will have clocked that Roach has been stepping into a new kind of visibility, including his work styling Lauren Sánchez Bezos, a collaboration that has placed him squarely inside the Bezos orbit and made his presence at tonight’s gala feel less like a plus-one situation and more like a seat at the table he has been working toward. Tonight he will wear a custom soft-structured three-piece white suit by Ami Paris, hand-painted with an abstract “embrace” motif by Gabonese-Ghanaian artist Naïla Opiangah. The most discussed Law Roach look of the evening will be the one he is wearing himself.

Another pointed absence is Meryl Streep. Word is she was invited to co-chair again this year, and her well-documented friendship with Wintour certainly suggests the offer was made and genuinely meant. Amy Odell and a significant portion of the online conversation believe Streep passed specifically because of Bezos’ involvement. She was reportedly set to co-chair years ago before backing out.

Lauren Santo Domingo, a Met Gala fixture and someone who was present at the Bezos wedding, is also skipping this year, though she was characteristically careful to stay out of the camera’s way about it. Nicolas Ghesquière and JW Anderson are sitting this one out as well. Lady Gaga’s name has also yet to appear on any confirmed list, which at her profile level is conspicuous rather than incidental. Nicki Minaj, for her part, is rumored to not have received an invitation at all, the newest name, reportedly, on Wintour’s unofficial list.

Katy Perry added last-minute drama when she polled her followers on X asking “Should I go to #TheMet?” amid the ongoing boycott pressure and backlash against the Bezos sponsorship. This comes just weeks after she flew to space with Lauren Sánchez on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket as part of the high-profile all-women crew flight in mid-April.

Notable Debuts

Among the notable first-timers expected on the carpet tonight are Heated Rivalry breakout stars Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams. The duo, who have seen an explosive rise in popularity over the past six months, have been spotted in New York this weekend, fueling strong speculation that they will make their Met Gala debuts with Connor most likely in Saint Laurent and Hudson in Balenciaga.

Prediction Markets Are Cashing In on All the Uncertainty

All this speculation , who’s coming, who’s skipping, and what everyone will wear, has created a perfect storm for prediction markets. These platforms let people bet real money on the outcomes of future events, with current prices reflecting the crowd’s best guess at probabilities.

This year, traders on Polymarket and Kalshi have already wagered well over $750,000 across Met Gala contracts. On Polymarket, the market “Will Lady Gaga attend the Met Gala?” sits at just 24% Yes (nearly $98,000 traded). On Kalshi, traders are pricing an 82% chance that Kim Kardashian will wear Gucci tonight.

An anticipated look

Tom Ford is reportedly attending tonight, which is itself a headline given how rarely he has been seen publicly since selling his brand. He is said to be seated with Emily Blunt, who will be wearing an unreleased Ford runway sample, not anything by Haider Ackermann, who now runs the house, meaning the look exists in a kind of fashion limbo, a garment from a chapter that is already closed. For anyone who finds the current conversation about creative succession and brand legacy more interesting than another Saint Laurent moment on the carpet, that is probably the look to watch. Also ironically Blunt plays a seemingly Lauren Sanchez Bezos inspired character in The Devil Wears Prada 2.

What’s happening with the money

In a piece published May 1st, New York Times chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman reported something that had not been publicly disclosed before: the Costume Institute has been quietly setting aside a portion of Met Gala proceeds since 2016 to build what curator in charge Andrew Bolton described to the Times as a “quasi-endowment.” According to the reporting, that savings strategy could give the department enough of a financial cushion by 2028, and certainly by 2030, to cover its basic operations independently, regardless of what happens with the gala or the broader museum budget.

This year’s gala appears to have smashed records once again. Rachel Tashjian of CNN Style reported that the event raised a record $42 million, up from the previous record of $31 million in 2025.

In the same piece, Met Director and CEO Max Hollein directly addressed the controversy around the Bezos sponsorship, telling Tashjian:

“This is not a show for Amazon. This is not a show about Lauren Sánchez’s dresses. It’s important to understand that what our donors are supporting is the Met’s program, the ideas of our curators, and the integrity of the institution.”

This matters because the Costume Institute is the only department at the Met required to fund its own operations, and it has been almost entirely dependent on the annual benefit to do so since the gala began in 1948. Over the past decade alone, the event has raised $166.5 million for the department. Bolton told the Times he has long wanted the Costume Institute to be less reliant on the fundraiser because “the shine of the event dwarfs everything” — a remarkably candid admission from the person whose work is most consistently overshadowed by the spectacle surrounding it. The 2020 pandemic cancellation, he said, served as “a real wake-up call.”

The timing of this disclosure, arriving the week of a gala that has become unusually contested and unusually corporate in its public identity, is its own kind of editorial statement.

I’ll be penning a live reaction piece for Everything Is Political with my full thoughts. Stay tuned.

Happy Friday all! I hope you’ve had a delightful week. The highlight of mine was attending a screening of Brokeback Mountain with Sir Davis ( Beyonce’s LVMH backed whiskey brand ) on the roof of the Terrass Hotel in Montmartre hosted by my friend, French journalist Pascal K. Douglas. It was tres hilarious watching the tourists on the other side of the bar react to the sounds of Heath Ledger bottoming for Jake Gyllenhaal. Even funnier while we’re on the topic of LVMH entities was the profile French newspaper Libération put out about Bernard Arnault’s wife that I’ve been laughing about all week so I must share it with you!!!

Madame Arnault tells all!

Hélène Arnault, née Mercier, Canadian, classically trained pianist, married to the seventh-richest man in the world since 1991, has apparently decided, after three decades of disciplined discretion, to simply start talking. She released an album with a young Swedish violinist, did a full press circuit, went on France 2 and said things that caused, according to Libération, “sideration at headquarters.” We now know Bernard Arnault sleeps in briefs. His communicators are apparently losing their minds. The children from his first marriage are dismayed. Her own children are, the paper reports, half embarrassed and half bluffed by a mother who frequently tells them: “Money puts everything to sleep. You are brainwashed, prisoners of a system.” She says this from inside the system.

What I find extremely delightful about this piece is how it reads as a portrait of a woman who has spent thirty-five years inside one of the most controlled image operations on the planet and has decided, at sixty-six, that she is done. She runs around with her gay media advisor Louis Jublin, a former aide to the also gay former Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, who is about to release a podcast confessing to cocaine parties, and she toasts champagne with him at Laurent’s, the Parisian restaurant that functions as a canteen France’s financial elite, while her husband’s PR team watches in horror.

When Bernard gives her a angry look about the press coverage, she describes it with the energy of someone who finds it mildly amusing. “I do this a little secretly,” she says, like a teenager. It is worth noting that this whole media operation was apparently engineered by her son Frédéric, 31, a polytechnicien who runs Loro Piana and wanted to improve LVMH’s public image. It is not going exactly as planned.

Before any of this, there was also the small matter of her going on RTL and describing homelessness as “a life choice,” which Le Canard Enchaîné then dug up and circulated, and which did not stop her from continuing the press tour.

She calls Xavier Niel, Delphine Arnault’s partner, founder of Free, Le Monde shareholder, “El Diablo,” and claims he is personally responsible for every critical article written about her husband, as though the man who built the most visible luxury empire in the world while befriending Trump hadn’t given journalists anything else to work with. She told a Christmas dinner that if forced to choose between the extremes she’d vote for the left leaning Jean-Luc Mélenchon. At a dinner with the Macrons, First Family of France, Brigitte having been the literature teacher of two of the Arnault sons before the Élysée, so yes, they’re that close, she announced

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Sunday afternoon I was on a panel at the Printing Fashion Festival at the Union de la Jeunesse Internationale, fortified by an espresso martini for my nerves. The roundtable was on Substack’s role in media culture, with a PR and Comms Director and the Head of Lifestyle Partnerships at Substack France, moderated by the always fabulous Melody Thomas, professor at Parsons Paris, who had previously invited me to give a lecture there on fashion criticism. Funny how life works out. I grew up obsessed with that school thanks to Project Runway, applied, got rejected, and eventually got invited to teach a class. You get in how you get in!

After the panel, several of Melody’s students kept me occupied with questions. I enjoy giving advice about what not to do in a fashion career, mostly because my career is basically a PhD in that subject. They seem particularly interested in the drama. I cannot imagine why ;)

I was mid-sentence on the Nylon France invoice situation, which at this point the entirety of Paris is following via my Instagram stories, when I noticed a man who had slipped into the back of the room near the end of the panel now walking toward me with purpose. He was considerably older than almost everyone in the room, clearly not there for the fashion, and carrying a large backpack. Even though I’ve been in Europe 16 years now my brain is still on US time and I saw that big ass bag and tensed up. I thought, this is it, I’m getting pew pewed in my Tabis. I wondered if my cat would miss me.

He waited patiently while I was asked if anything from my childhood influenced how I work in fashion and then finally interjected asking me if I remembered a story I had tweeted about: the CGT, France’s largest trade union, first filing a report in 2024 with the French parliamentary inquiry into violence and abuse in cinema, media, live performance, fashion, and advertising, targeting Kering and François Pinault specifically, and then again this past February when their newsletter reported that Balenciaga was under official government investigation for alleged child maltreatment, undeclared work, and failure to follow legal protections stemming from their November 2022 ad campaign. The one with children holding bondage-gear teddy bears and court documents about child sexual abuse law visible as set dressing.

I said yes, of course I remembered. He asked about the current state of the case. I told him it was, as far as I knew, still ongoing.

He looked at me and said: “You didn’t think to follow up or reach out to the group to uncover more information? Are you not a journalist?”

The Parsons students went very quiet.

This was not my first time being confronted about a story I’d reported on ( throwback to Mowalola conspiring to have me attacked in Cafe Charlot during Paris Fashion Week for reporting on her then partner Ian Connor’s rape allegations). I kept my composure and said, diplomatically, that he was absolutely right, and that I would look into it. He said, “Or you could just ask me, since I’m the person who filed the report and the one whose emails you haven’t responded to. Do you not care about the abuse of children?”

Readers.

The tension in that room was something you could have sliced and served as a canapé.

So now for some background.

Back in 2025, I was contacted by Francesca Gee, now a journalist, but more famously known in France as a survivor of French pedophile author Gabriel Matzneff, and a longtime activist on abuse of minors. She was the one who first brought me information about the CGT’s efforts to hold Balenciaga, Kering, and François Pinault accountable for the alleged child labor violations. She also alleged that Pinault and Kering were actively intimidating her over her Balenciaga coverage, and she claimed ties between former Kering executives and Matzneff.

What she documented publicly goes further than what I initially reported. Gee wrote that after she published a post about the Balenciaga campaign, she received a legal threat from Pinault’s lawyer accusing her of defamation. That threat, she noted, failed to get the post removed.

So what allegedly came next was, to put it lightly, an escalation. Her mother, 93 years old, needed to sell her apartment to move into appropriate care. The buyer who materialized, without Gee’s ability to intervene, was Johan Fleury, who had just been appointed Balenciaga’s Brand Image Director. The sale was scheduled for January 31, a date Gee described as not chosen by accident: it was the same week Pinault and Demna were due to be questioned by the parliamentary Commission of Inquiry. Whether or not you believe this constitutes coordinated pressure, the timeline is the timeline.

A few months later, in July 2025, I received an email from a French doctor who had co-authored the parliamentary report titled “Violence against the six children of the Balenciaga campaign.” He had seen my retweet of the original article and wrote to express his frustration at the Commission of Inquiry’s inaction, despite their direct exchanges with the Commission. He mentioned that the Chair of the Committee on Cultural Affairs and Education had made a personal written intervention to ensure their report would actually be examined. He then told me they planned to bring the report to public attention before the lavish farewell party Kering was organizing for Demna during Haute Couture Week, and that they wanted to interview me and use that to challenge Kering directly.

To be completely honest, I wanted no part in that.

I did not want to be legally or governmentally entangled with Kering. I did not want to lend my name to a report on abuse of minors that, truthfully, I had only skimmed. I have already had my share of history with that company. After Daniel Lee was fired from Bottega Veneta, I tweeted a scoop I’d received from inside the house about his alleged use of racial slurs. Kering responded to me directly on Twitter denying it, followed by a cascade of DMs from their executives. The rumors that they sued me are false. What actually happened is that they invited me to Matthieu Blazy’s first show in Milan, and then had someone from inside the house offer to nominate me for Forbes 30 Under 30, even though I was already over 30. Draw your own conclusions.

So no, I was not eager to let my name be attached to accusations of pedophilia against François Pinault personally. I preferred to stay on the perimeter and report on the case as it developed.

The man standing in front of me was the doctor who had written those emails.

He then looked at my shirt and asked, “Who owns that brand?” I was wearing Courrèges. A Pinault family-owned Artémis holding company brand. He smirked and shook his head slowly, as if something had just clicked into place for him, as if my shirt had confirmed a theory he’d been developing for a while.

To be quite fucking clear, I am not in Kering’s pocket. But I am also not going to pretend that moment wasn’t uncomfortable, or that his implication wasn’t pointed and that my veneer of civility was in danger of cracking. At that point I told him to email me whatever information he had so I could stay current on the case, because the conversation had shifted from confrontation to something else, I was still standing with a group of students who had come to talk about their thesis projects and my blood sugar was low. He finally left and we all stood there for a few seconds like what the fuckkkkkkk.

This morning he sent an email in which he expressed dismay that neither I, nor Melody, nor Marisa from Substack could provide him with a contact in the fashion industry interested in combating child abuse. He made clear that as someone who presents himself as being at the forefront of fighting mistreatment in fashion, which is news to me in those specific terms, I should be contacting the French Labor Inspectorate, who is currently refusing to release the results of their investigation, and demand they release what he has titled the “Balenciaga Files,” because, in his words, “this case is the most serious in the history of fashion and six children are left without protection.”

In January 2026, the CGT confirmed that the Labor Inspectorate had completed its investigation of Balenciaga based on their report. The findings were not ambiguous. No mandatory authorization had been requested before photographing the children. The parents, who were Balenciaga employees, had been abused in their capacity as employees. The CGT’s own characterization of how those children ended up in that shoot has stayed with me since I read it: they described it as “Machiavellian deceit,” noting that Balenciaga had specifically summoned the children of their own staff, people whose livelihoods depended on Kering, and called it a trap. These were not child models, these were the kids of people who could not say no and the Labor Inspectorate has those findings and are not releasing them.

Meanwhile, the corporate architecture around the original scandal has been reshuffled. Demna left Balenciaga and moved to Gucci. François-Henri Pinault stepped down as Kering CEO, replaced by Luca de Meo. Cedric Charbit left his post as CEO of the house to decamp to YSL. The people most directly implicated in commissioning that campaign have moved on to other chapters, and the story has largely been allowed to move with them.

Now this was not quite the Sunday afternoon I had imagined when I left the house but here is where I am on this: my hesitation throughout has come from the case drifting, at points, toward conspiracy territory and allegations of a satanic pedophile cabal, which I think you can understand makes a journalist cautious about their proximity to the story. The doctor also informed me that one of the journalists who had made those accusations and was subsequently sued by Pinault has since removed herself from the case entirely. That, too, gives me pause about the motivations of some of the people circling this.

But the French Labor Inspectorate withholding the results of their investigation into Balenciaga is not nothing, it’s a thing that should probably be looked at. So I am going to make some calls, send some emails, and report back, I’m already blacklisted by Kering so nothing to lose!

Stay tuned for the Balenciaga Files dun dun dun.

So big news of the week: Kendall Jenner and Jacob Elordi are allegedly dating, which means Pinterest moodboards this summer are about to lose their minds and company executives are running their hand together with glee…and greed. Prepare for the onslaught of the most insufferable fashion couples you know posting fit pics with captions like “You’re the Jacob to my Kendall”. Her in The Row, him in Aimé Leon Dore. I can already smell the coordinated paparazzi walk down some sun-bleached Los Angeles side street, both of them staring just past the lens with that practiced non-expression pretending that their teams didn’t call them.

I mean, it makes sense aesthetically. They’re both tall, both thin, both committed to a particular brand of beautiful blankness that photographs well from a moving car. They’ve each already done the Bottega paparazzi pipeline independently — Jacob with his Veneta bag slung just so, Kendall walking her dog, both of them demonstrating an almost clinical mastery of the genre. Together, they are going to make Backgrid even richer. There are photographers whose children are going to go to college on the back of this relationship.

The content economy around them is also going to be insane. Entire SEO article verticals are about to be created at every major fashion and lifestyle publication. “Kendall Jenner and Jacob Elordi deliver a masterclass in matcha run dressing”, “How to dress like Kendall and Jacob at the airport”. The couple that quiet luxuries together stays together. Editors are already assigning. Junior writers are opening new Google Docs as we speak.

The question is whether we get a joint campaign out of it, the way Kendall and Bad Bunny did that Gucci moment together. Jacob’s Bottega era seems to be winding down — he’s just been announced as the face of Bleu de Chanel — so Chanel is the logical home. Will they hard launch at Chanel Cruise in Biarritz next week? Unknown. But a joint campaign does come with one significant structural risk: what happens when you break up and still have contractual obligations to look happy about each other.

A few years ago I did a Pride campaign with my ex for Dockers. We had one of our many breakups right around the time it dropped. There is nothing quite like being legally required to post a “happy” relationship that has just, again, ceased to exist. I walked past a Dockers store and there we were, blown up in the window. I changed my walking route after that.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

BEZOS IS BAD BUSINESS FOR THE BOB

In other news that is sweet music to my ears, it would appear that Bezos and his bride are bad for business.

Rob Shuter’s Substack this week had some VERY interesting whispers about what’s actually happening to the Met Gala economy. After years of $75,000 tickets and $350,000 tables, prices are apparently coming down because they have to, designers aren’t buying like they used to, and the demand simply isn’t there. The piece’s sources are doing the kind of anonymous frank-talking that suggests people are rather rattled. That Vogue doesn’t control the conversation anymore. And if Vogue isn’t essential, neither is the Met Gala. Anna’s power to make careers overnight, the thing that justified the price tag for decades, is apparently fading. Brands are running the numbers and concluding that influencers deliver bigger audiences, faster buzz, and measurable results for considerably less than the cost of a table at which Lauren Sánchez will be photographed looking like she lost a fight with her own mood board.

Shuter’s piece gets at the core of the issue which is that the Bezos-Sánchez moment tipped something. The Met stopped feeling aspirational and started feeling more like a billionaire circus which, when you think about it, is the worst possible thing a luxury event can become. Aspirational and exclusive is the product. Watching Jeff Bezos’s fiancée in custom couture while his Amazon workers are on strike is something else entirely, and the streets of New York are literally saying so. The British activist group Everyone Hates Elon has been wheatpasting posters across the city ahead of Monday’s event, targeting Amazon’s alleged exploitation of warehouse workers and the company’s links to ICE through Amazon Web Services. The posters read: “The Bezos Met Gala. Brought to you by the firm that powers ICE,” and “The Bezos Met Gala. Brought to you by worker exploitation.” They’ve since spread to the subway system too , one reading “Jeff Bezos proudly presents: The Met x avoiding taxes.” The group raised around £10,000 through an online donation portal to fund the postering campaign, and they are the same people who crashed Bezos and Sánchez’s Venice wedding last summer with a banner in the Piazza San Marco reading “If you can rent Venice…” I so respect the commitment to the bit.

New York City’s new mayor Zohran Mamdani has also confirmed he will not be attending, which is its own kind of statement, given that the previous four mayors all showed up. Anna Wintour, for her part, told CNN that she thinks Lauren is going to be “a wonderful asset to the museum and to the event” and that she’s “a great lover of costume.” Anna Wintour defending a choice by praising someone’s love of costume is the fashion equivalent of saying someone has a great personality. So diplomatic.

Anyways the summary from Shuter’s sources is that Vogue used to decide what mattered but now it’s chasing relevance like everyone else. More like Vogue trying to keep up with a conversation already happening without it, mostly on TikTok, mostly in the form of people being irritated, and apparently also on the side of buildings in Williamsburg.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ I’ll be penning a live reaction for Everything is Political. Stay tuned.

BILLY’S BITCH FIT

While we’re on the topic of the Met, Billy Porter has revealed on Radio Andy’s Bevelations with Bevy Smith that he hasn’t been invited back since 2019, the one and only time he attended, on Ryan Murphy’s ticket. He was notably absent from last year’s Black Dandyism gala, a theme for which he would have been, on paper, an obvious guest, and has since concluded, with considerable dignity, that he doesn’t go to places where he’s not welcome and has reached a level that doesn’t require outside validation.

Billy. Honey. You called Anna Wintour a bitch in the Telegraph.

What exactly were you expecting? A save-the-date? A hand-written note on Condé Nast letterhead? Anna Wintour does not forget. Anna Wintour does not move on. Anna Wintour is sitting in her office right now, in her sunglasses, indoors, with a list, and your name has been on it since 2021. You don’t get to call the woman who controls the guest list a bitch in a national newspaper and then be surprised when the invite doesn’t arrive. That’s not how any of this works.

The “I don’t go where I’m not welcome” pivot is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. You weren’t going regardless, Billy :(

REQUIRED READING FOR THE WEEKEND

Fashion & culture journalist Scarlett Newman just launched “Fashion People Feast” “a celebration of food, drink, and home cooking through the lens of fashion people, those who work directly in the industry, are adjacent to it, or have a deep connection to fashion and the art of personal style.”. I love things like this because i’m always nosy on the details of people’s lives like what their favorite foods are so i’m excited to follow this project.

That’s all folks!!! See you on Monday unless you’re seeing me IRL on Sunday!!!!

For anyone unfamiliar with the mechanism: a press trip is when a brand, company, or institution flies you somewhere all-expenses-paid in exchange for coverage, content, attention, or ideally all three. Journalists, influencers, and celebrities are installed in hotels and shepherded through a curated itinerary whose entire purpose is to colonize your social media feed and generate FOMO on behalf of whoever is picking up the bill. In theory it sounds decadent. In practice, as I will explain, it is the most socially exhausting thing you can do while technically eating for free.

I say this as someone who spent years on the other side of the equation, watching influencers get flown to Capri for Bulgari bashes or the Maldives for Tarte brand trips, religiously consuming the YouTube documentation of these pilgrimages while telling myself that if I were ever lucky enough to be among the chosen, I would be the most gracious, drama-free, eternally grateful guest who ever took a gifted hotel room. I was sure about this. I was wrong, though not in the ways I expected.

The invitations came slowly. First with no travel covered, then with no accommodation, then with both. The hunger of those early years is very formative in a way I think about a lot now, mostly when I’m watching someone throw a fit about their free hotel room. I once took a seven-hour train from Milan to Puglia for the opening of a luxury baby clothes shop owned by the family of a Milanese it-boy who had provided travel and accommodation for the big-name influencers on his list. I was not a big name but was determined to honor the invitation as if I were. I took the train back to Milan the following morning having walked around the city all night after the event because the accommodation offer did not extend to me. The point is that the humility of those early trips lives in my body in a way the free Veuve Clicquot never quite does.

Now I am lucky enough to be flown out with travel, accommodation, and sometimes a fee, and I want to be clear that I know how fortunate that is. But if you have ever watched a press trip on anyone’s Instagram and thought it looked like a holiday, I am here to tell you with great conviction that it is not. It is work. Intensive, overstimulating, relentless work dressed up in an open bar and a sunset view, and the reason I am still refusing to leave my apartment four days later is because I spent a week running on tequila, alprazolam, and anxiety, and my body has finally submitted its invoice.

Barcelona, Day Zero

I always arrive a day early at 080 to decompress before the schedule takes hold. This year the press hotel is the ME Meliá on the Passeig de Gràcia, which is very sexy, though the breakfast buffet might be the sexier offering between the two. In the early years I refused the free hotel and booked my own Airbnb because the thought of making small talk over huevos rancheros before noon with industry people was genuinely more than I could budget for socially, but last season I finally relented, mostly because my partner has a certain relationship with comfort that a 5-star hotel can more than accommodate.

My free afternoon is spent oscillating between naps and pestering the PR who invited me, a close friend and one-time agent who relocated from Paris to Spain and — not that I’m taking credit for this — definitely got the job partly from being in the right rooms at the right shows when he was my plus-one. Around 8pm I wake up craving a spicy margarita and some attention, so I meet a local DJ for a tour of the city that ends, predictably, with the city spinning, because by the time I remember that I need to eat, the tapas places are closing and three margaritas are sitting in a completely empty stomach. I get back to the hotel, wash an alprazolam down with some Takis and tap water, and pass out. Seven seasons in and the pre-week strategy remains unchanged.

Day One

I wake up hungover, which is not an unfamiliar state for my body during fashion week. I make the rookie mistake of heading to breakfast before noon and discover that every other journalist and influencer has beaten me down there. My alprazolam is still doing its job so I survive the experience, then head to a fitting at the PR agency’s showroom where nothing except a crop T-shirt fits me. Mounjaro consultation is next month, and I have never needed it more than I do standing in this showroom. I return to the hotel and find that my friend Pascal K Douglas, a French journalist, has just arrived in a mood because nobody told him his assigned hotel is not this hotel, is farther away, and has no rooftop pool. Terrible.

Once Pascal returns from his own hotel and fitting situation, we spend the afternoon at the pool with a small British girl in water wings and a young ginger on what is clearly a sugar daddy date, dissolving into a Catalonian sun-drenched Aperol spritz haze that I could happily retire into. But I have contracted deliverables, as the PR reminds me via WhatsApp, so when the afternoon ends we dress and head to the Barcelona port because the show’s venue on Barceloneta is most quickly reached by boat.

We both have content to film on the way, and Pascal, who is considerably more direct than me about filming in public, politely asks the tourist couple standing in our only viable shot if they plan to be there permanently. We get my vlog intro. I look fat in all of it, but the boat ride is gorgeous and I’ll stress about it later.

We arrive at the Custo Barcelona show with minutes to spare, and then comes the first real drama of the trip: my assigned front-row seat is directly beside the editor I am currently in the process of suing for nonpayment of an invoice for work I did for him and his magazine from the last time I was on this exact press trip.

Read more

Over the weekend tennis superstar Coco Gauff’s Miu Miu Spring Summer 2026 campaign went viral on the hellscape that used to be Twitter. Now to me the campaign is fab, it captures something specific and true about Coco, the athleticism, the ease, the preppy quality that has always been part of how she moves through the world, and it feels like someone actually looked at her rather than just dropping her into a set. I liked it, I moved on, and then I went back and made the catastrophic mistake of reading the comments, where I found people calling her hair “undone” and “embarrassing” and, in one comparison that has probably already given me multiple aneurysms, likening her to Ruby Bridges. Ruby fucking Bridges. The six-year-old who was escorted into a New Orleans elementary school by federal marshals in 1960 while white parents rioted outside. That photograph of a small Black child in her school clothes walking alone through a mob of adults who wanted her dead, people reached for that image to describe Coco Gauff’s hair in a luxury fashion editorial, and they meant it as a criticism.

I feel like the people making that comparison don’t seem to understand what they’ve actually said about themselves, because the reason Ruby Bridges looks the way she does in that photograph is that she was a working-class child in the Jim Crow South, and the texture of her hair and the simplicity of her clothes are inseparable from that reality, which is part of what makes the image so shattering. So when someone looks at a world-ranked tennis champion in a Miu Miu campaign and the first thing their brain reaches for is that photograph, what that reveals is that natural Black hair, to them, reads as poverty. As unfinished. As something that needed to be fixed before she showed up. Guess what? That’s not a read on Coco Gauff, that is an admission and they are telling on THEMSELVES.

The thing underneath all of this, which I don’t think is getting said clearly enough, is that this is a class conversation being disguised as a cultural one but to understand why it’s so explosive, you have to understand that it landed inside a war that was already in progress. For the better part of fifteen years, Black women’s hair has been one of the most contested terrains in intra-community identity politics, and I mean that with no exaggeration. The natural hair movement that took off in the early 2010s started as something very radical which was a collective decision by Black women to stop chemically straightening their hair and reclaim the textures they’d been taught since childhood to see as unprofessional, unattractive, and unmanageable. It was a real cultural shift, it produced real community, and it also, pretty quickly, produced its own rigid hierarchy. Certain textures got coded as more authentically natural than others. Protective styles were acceptable, but the acceptable ones kept changing. Women with looser curl patterns got accused of dominating spaces that were supposed to center 4C hair and the movement that began as liberation calcified, as these things tend to do, into its own set of rules about what counted and what didn’t.

On the other side of that you have a completely different aesthetic world, the one of wigs, weaves, lace fronts, elaborate protective styles, long acrylic nails, full glam (commonly referred to as the Baddies aesthetic) and the contempt that flows between these two camps is extremely vicious in both directions.

The natural hair community has a whole vocabulary for dismissing the other side: women who wear wigs get accused of self-hatred, of chasing Eurocentric beauty standards, of being unable to love what actually grows out of their heads. And the women on the receiving end of that give it right back, calling the natural hair crowd self-righteous, calling their aesthetic dusty or unkempt, arguing that a woman who spends four hundred dollars on a lace front is expressing just as much pride and creativity as someone who does a wash-and-go. Both sides have a point and both sides are also being completely exhausting about it, and what neither side tends to interrogate is how much class is entangled in the whole argument from the very beginning. But also i’m not a Black woman so maybe my opinion isn’t required.

ANYWAYS!

Writer Alex Malcolm posted during the discourse that this aesthetic is “very ‘summer on Martha’s Vineyard’, leaving the court to go to the film festival, then maybe the beach later,” and what was fascinating was watching how completely differently people received that framing. For some it was immediately obvious and true, and for others it landed as either incomprehensible or as an accusation, like Coco was being charged with performing whiteness. Malcolm’s point is about what the visual language of a certain kind of Black upper-class life actually looks like rather than about racial performance, which is apparently so unfamiliar to a lot of people that they can’t recognize it when they see it and instead read it as a failure.

I’ve spoken about it a lot, I grew up in private school, mostly around white kids, and the Black kids including myself who were there came from a world that looked a lot like what Coco looks like in that shoot, and crucially it didn’t look like anything to them/us because it was just their/our life. When your weekends involve boats and tennis courts and beaches, an elaborate hair situation isn’t a priority you’re avoiding so much as a practical impossibility you’ve never really oriented around, because a silk press doesn’t survive a match and a wig at the beach creates more problems than it solves and the whole logic of your active outdoor life runs counter to a presentation style that requires you to stay relatively still and dry. The privilege isn’t in the hair. The privilege is in the activity, and the appearance is just what the activity produces. When I got to public high school for the first time I encountered a totally different calculus, and I want to be precise about what I mean here because I’m not describing a hierarchy. Someone told me my hair was dusty, asked where my lineup was, told me I dressed like a white boy, and what I was actually bumping up against was a completely coherent alternative system of signals where the appearance had to carry the weight that the context wasn’t carrying. Long nails, expensive hair, the right lashes, these are legible, visible markers of care and income in a world where you can’t just gesture at your sailboat. That logic makes complete sense, and the problem has never been the logic itself, it’s the insistence that it’s the only logic, that it functions as a universal standard rather than one class-specific framework among several, and that anyone operating outside of it is somehow failing or being made to fail by the white institutions around them. A lot of the criticism of the Miu Miu campaign was ultimately dressed up as concern. The idea that Coco was being done dirty, that a white fashion house had somehow gotten her to show up looking like less than she is. But the fashion house didn’t do anything to her. She looks like herself, and the self she looks like is one that a specific segment of Black Twitter has decided doesn’t count, or doesn’t represent, or needs to be corrected and that correction is being framed as solidarity when it is pretty much the fucking opposite of that.

I’ve tried to have versions of this conversation online before and it usually ends with someone finding a photo of my white partner or surfacing an interview where I talked about growing up with a white father and using that as evidence that I’m not qualified to be here, as though the price of entry for talking about intra-community policing is first proving that you perform Blackness according to the approved aesthetic. Which is, if you sit with it for a second, something people online are not prone to doing, is the exact same mechanism I’m describing.

END RANT.

When I was in elementary school, I read a book called Bloomability by Sharon Creech. In it, an American girl named Dinnie Doone, accustomed to a transient lifestyle not unlike my own military family upbringing, is taken to Switzerland by her aunt and uncle after he lands a job as headmaster at a prestigious school in Lugano. The students go on ski trips to glamorous St. Moritz for a two-week “ski term,” where half the school day is spent on slopes, and later to the Dolomites in Italy, where they get trapped in an avalanche. I still remember how vividly Creech described the Swiss Alps as both devastatingly beautiful and quietly dangerous. One of the characters would periodically scream “libero,” the Italian word for free, into the open mountain air, and it lodged itself somewhere in the ribcage of the child I was, the one for whom freedom felt perpetually like something other people, with less strict parents than I had, got to have. I made myself a solemn, deeply sincere elementary school promise that one day I would feel that in the Alps. Wind in my face, snow everywhere, completely uncontainable. Liberooooooo!

That promise sat quietly in the back of my mind through middle school, where it was periodically reactivated by a very specific and very potent form of jealousy. Every year, without fail, we would return from spring break and the kids whose parents had whisked them off to ski resorts would casually wear their jackets with the lift passes still dangling off the zippers. Not tucked away. Not removed. Dangling. As if they had simply forgotten to take them off, which of course they had not forgotten at all. Now, with my full adult faculties intact, let me be clear: I was not underprivileged. I was not unlucky. I had two loving adoptive parents who happened to be, in the deepest possible sense, beach people. My father grew up on Cape Cod. My mother grew up in Trinidad and Tobago. We had a boat. We had a waterfront house. By any reasonable measure, I was a fortunate child. But to my twelve-year-old self, none of that was the point. The point was that those kids had access to a mythology I had been excluded from, a whole secret geography of places called Steamboat and Vail and Aspen that I, who prided myself on being the cultured kid who had lived all over the world, knew absolutely fuck all about. Eventually a bigger boat and a bigger house quietly smothered the resentment, and I stopped thinking about it. For a while.

Twelve years and four and a half thousand miles later, I found myself tucked into a banquette at the Dolce & Gabbana Martini Bar in Milan during Fashion Week, back when that was still an morally uncomplicated thing to do, sitting across from my former blogger nemesis turned unconditional best friend Alaiia, FashionTV host Hofit Golan, and Russian Playboy model, television host, packaging empire heiress-by-marriage Victoria Bonya, who was narrating a slideshow from her most recent holiday. Somewhere called Courchevel. As she scrolled through picture after picture of her and her friends in Fendi print ski suits making duck faces on immaculate French Alpine slopes, I was Googling it under the table. The images that came back were genuinely absurd. Fur coats on gondolas, champagne at altitude, an entire parallel civilization constructed entirely out of money and snow. I had been living in Europe for 6-ish years at that point. What exactly was stoppinng me? I made a mental note. Courchevel was next.

Two years after that, I finally collected on it, and the circumstances were, in retrospect, entirely on brand for that chapter of my life. I was living between Milan and Paris at the time, owing to a French boyfriend who studied philosophy by day and completely lost the plot by night. He was slightly brilliant and and catastrophically, operatically bipolar. We argued about the meaning of life. We argued about whether meaning itself was a construct. We argued about the arguments. One night, in the middle of one of those fights, he drunkenly pushed me down the stairs of his beautiful duplex in the 5th arrondissement, and I had myself back on the first TGV to Milan before the bruises had properly settled in, because there are many things I will negotiate in a relationship and that particular one is not among them. I spent the next month rebuilding my equilibrium and throwing myself back into my PR job until one day, out of nowhere, he texted asking where I wanted to go for Christmas to make things right. The audacity was impressive. So I returned it. I sent back a single word. Courchevel. A few weeks later I was white-knuckling a seatbelt as we careened around icy mountain roads in the dark, which should have been a metaphor I paid closer attention to. But this piece is not about that trip. It’s about the one I just got back from, my tenth ski season in Courchevel. A decade. Let’s begin.

It starts with the ski train, which is itself a whole social document if you know how to read it.

If you have serious money, you’re either paying two thousand euros for a chauffeured Mercedes Sprinter from Paris or you’re flying into Geneva and transferring by helicopter or private plane directly into the resort. I do not have serious money, so I find myself on the OUIGO, France’s high-speed budget rail option, which gets you there in exactly the same time as the expensive train but does so in a very specific shade of blue that communicates, loudly and without ambiguity, that you are not traveling in any kind of luxury and also that you will not be charging your phone at any point during this journey. My boyfriend, who has spent his entire life taking family ski trips in a warm, spacious Sprinter van with functioning outlets, looks at me booking the OUIGO as a betrayal of trust. His mood, I tell myself, will rise with the altitude. In the meantime, I do what I always do when left to my own devices in a train carriage and start cataloguing everyone around me, because the ski train is one of the finest people-watching environments in France and I refuse to waste it.

There are the Gorp-core baddies: semi-attractive men in Arc’teryx jackets and Oakley sunglasses, almost certainly employed at one of the resorts in the Trois Vallées, carrying themselves with the specific physical ease of people who spend their winters outdoors and their summers doing something equally enviable.

There are the crunchy old French mountain people, the ones who have been going up since before any of this was fashionable, probably named Marie-Thérèse or Jean-Claude-Henri, in some beloved vintage sweater with honest wear and tear and hiking boots that have seen actual terrain, a beaten leather satchel almost certainly containing homemade sandwiches. There are the well-to-do young Parisian couples in coordinated fleece and turtlenecks, headed to a family apartment or modest chalet that has been in someone’s possession since the eighties. In every such couple, one person is on a laptop for the entire journey and one is deeply, unapologetically asleep. There are large British or Australian families with screaming children in neon windbreakers intent on popping our ears before we even get to higher elevations. And there are the fashion people and influencers, radiating a very particular frequency of irritation at finding themselves on the budget option, performing a kind of resigned glamour that says I am above this but I am also, technically, on this train.

My boyfriend has now given me the silent treatment and is watching Showgirls on a phone at eleven percent battery. This is fine.

Six and a half hours later, we pull into Moûtiers about twenty minutes behind schedule, somewhere around four in the afternoon. As we descend onto the platform, I clock a twink in a full three-piece suit and tinted sunglasses wrestling an enormous piece of luggage down from the overhead rack, followed immediately by a gay in what can only be described as his grandmother’s mink coat and a Vuitton bag, moving through the crowd with complete serenity. We have arrived.

The station for once is not glazed in ice, which is almost certainly a sign of the late season rather than any climatic mercy, but the rates this time of year are sooooo much cheaper, and I choose to receive this as a gift.

Inside the station, the crowd divides itself with a swiftness that is almost editorial. The first group moves toward the main entrance, where a small fleet of black vans and taxis idles, waiting to charge north of a hundred euros per car for the privilege of being driven up the mountain in heated leather seats. The second group peels off toward the right exit, toward the bus, twelve euros a head, which also happens to serve as the school bus for the rambunctious children from the surrounding villages on its afternoon run. I count at least 3 of their backpacks falling from the overhead racks onto fellow tourists’ heads.

If you have never been to Courchevel, the easiset way to understand it is as a vertical class system, one that operates with a transparency that more democratic societies would find embarrassing. The higher you go, the better the snow, the thinner the air, and the thicker the fur. Each altitude has its own distinct atmosphere and its own specific flavor of wealth.

Courchevel 1300, Le Praz, is the only part of the resort that still functions as an actual village rather than a concept of one. There are charming narrow cobbled streets lined with traditional wooden chalets. There is a frozen lake that the locals guard with a ferocity entirely disproportionate to its size (they told Moncler to fuck off when the brand wanted to stage a fashion show on it, and I respect nothing more). There is a village chapel and year-round residents who exist outside the service economy. It also has France’s 1992 Olympic ski jumps, because why not pair your raclette with some institutional nostalgia. The people who seek accommodation here are either the quietly clever rich who gondola up to the expensive parts in eight minutes while paying a fraction of the price, or committed authenticity cosplayers who want to post “the real Courchevel” while retaining full access to the Three Valleys, or sensible families who have simply looked at the numbers and declined to pay penthouse rates for the same snow. The restaurants serve proper Savoyard food with no gold leaf in sight, the bars are mostly pubs, and French is spoken by people who actually live there. Extremely revolutionary stuff.

Courchevel 1550, Courchevel Village, is the sensible, quiet middle option, described universally as “family-friendly,” which is code for we brought the children and the nanny and we are not here to post. Again this one has actual village energy by Courchevel standards and pricing that will not require a difficult conversation with your accountant. The slopes are gentle and so is the general atmosphere. You will not trip over a Birkin here. This is a compliment.

Courchevel 1650, Moriond, is the cheerful extrovert of the group, the one sibling who actually receives sunlight well into the late afternoon. The pricing is only mildly alarming, the slopes are sunny and sociable, and the energy is genuinely electric in a way that can’t be manufactured from above. This is aspirational wealthy Brit territory, large blended families, finance types who ski red runs and tip their ski instructors in crypto, people who will actually speak to you at the lift queue rather than checking if your jacket is new season Moncler. It gets lively without tipping into full performative table-dancing for an Instagram story.

And then there is Courchevel 1850, which is something else entirely.

Courchevel 1850 is the glittering, gaslit penthouse of the Alps, and it knows it, and it wants you to know it too. This is where the helicopter crowd congregates: Premier League players with coordinated partners in matching everything (those early 2000s photos of Victoria Beckham in a Chanel ski suit that live rent-free on your Pinterest board? That was here), tech founders operating at various altitudes of their own making if you know what I mean ( sniff sniff ), royals performing the relatable family ski holiday version of themselves (William and Kate had been there just weeks before our arrival ). George Clooney has been known to pass through incognito. Elton John has held court at après. Paparazzi orbit the chalets, which are not really chalets at all but private palaces with underground Bentley fleets and art hanging on the walls that costs more than most people’s entire neighborhoods.

The shopping is its own theatre, ripe for people watching. Chanel, Dior, Hermès, Prada, and Moncler flagships line the main street. Jacquemus snowboards and Prada skis leer at you from the windows. One can practically ski into the Louis Vuitton boutique. Reservations at the right restaurants are a blood sport conducted months in advance, and there are entire TikToks dedicated to coaching you through securing a second seating at Bagatelle so you too can spend the afternoon making the exact same video that sixty influencers made the week before, several of them carrying Hermès bags in custom shearling protective covers because at a certain level of wealth, your bag also needs a coat.

If you are lucky enough to have the right accommodation, there is Les Airelles, the fairy-tale snow palace with its turrets and crackling fireplaces and fleet of custom Rolls-Royces. Or there is Cheval Blanc, the sleek LVMH property housing Le 1947, the only three-Michelin-starred restaurant on the mountain, where a ski butler will have your equipment ready and waiting each morning and will personally open your boots for you, and where, if you somehow forget your wallet in your room mid-slope, a staff member will ski it out to you with a straight face and no commentary whatsoever.

It is absurd. It is completely untethered from any version of reality the rest of the world inhabits. It is a winter Versailles where everyone has entered into a collective agreement that the outside world simply does not exist, except when the lobster needs to be helicoptered in, which it does, regularly, without irony.

This season, however, the idyll had a crack in it that no amount of money was going to plaster over.

As we pulled into 1850, the first thing that hit us was the smell. Cold, acrid smoke, still clinging to the mountain air weeks after the fact, the kind of smell that has no business being in a place like this and therefore makes itself completely impossible to ignore. There, right at the heart of the village, at the very foot of the slopes, stood the gutted remains of the Hôtel des Grandes Alpes, one of the most prominent five-star properties in the resort. The roofline was gone. The windows were blown out, empty and black like eye sockets. The once-grand facade had been reduced to a scorched skeleton standing open to the freezing wind, an architectural ghost of itself, and it looked less like the aftermath of an accident and more like someone had delivered an extremely pointed, extremely expensive message to exactly the right address.

I started asking questions, the way I always do, piecing the story together over the following days through bartenders and locals who offered it up with the attitude of people who had been half-expecting some kind of drama up here eventually. What I gleaned was a story with the specific texture of a fable that has not yet decided whether it is funny or not.

Just weeks before our arrival, while Ksenia Sobchak, Putin’s so-called goddaughter, Russia’s most photographed socialite and the woman with arguably the most strategically complicated Courchevel attendance record in history, was still very much in residence and the broader Russian contingent that descends on 1850 every season was riding the full wave of après during a brand trip, the fire broke out during the early evening. It followed one of those parties that Courchevel 1850 was essentially built to host with an actual red carpet rolled across the snow, jeroboams of champagne, helicopters ferrying guests, caviar and oysters on ice, the whole spectacular, airlifted production playing out in real time on social media while, back home, Putin had been making increasingly pointed remarks to the Russian elite about the optics of exactly this kind of behavior. Keep a low profile. Do not flaunt it. Soldiers are dying on the front, and you are being photographed at altitude with a Fendi fur coat and a five-thousand-euro bottle.

One minute the Courchevelski glory days were fully reconstituted, as if the war were simply something happening somewhere else to other kinds of people. The next, one of the grandest hotels on the mountain reduced to a smoking ruin that had 300 or so of the resort’s wealthiest guests fleeing in the middle of the night.

Suddenly the winter fairy tale suddenly felt rather less permanent than advertised. Though not to everyone, apparently. Because from the long shadow of the Grandes Alpes, a group of comprehensively drunk Brits came spilling out of La Planté de Bâton, the gloriously unreconstructed 80s-themed après-ski bar at the base of the slopes, bellowing something by Bon Jovi into the cold Alpine air completely oblivious to the blackened ruins behind them, or to anything for that matter.

I turned to my boyfriend. “Margarita?”

The full story of that week, everything I saw and heard and what five days in the snow looked like with all of that as a backdrop, coming in part 2.

I got tagged under a clip from The Cutting Room Floor, Recho Omondi’s fashion industry podcast on Patreon. If you’re not familiar, Omondi is an American fashion designer who shuttered her label in 2020 and has since built a podcast with an enormous following, guests have included Law Roach, Steve Madden, rapper JT. She’s willing to go places that more buttoned-up industry media won’t, which is what gives the show its reputation.

She is also the person who interviewed Leandra Medine after Man Repeller imploded with pandemic layoffs, allegations of a hostile (racist ) work environment and closed the episode by saying she couldn’t stomach “another white assimilated Jewish American Princess who is wildly privileged but thinks she’s oppressed,” with a detour through some commentary linking Medine’s Jewishness to slaveholders. Which, whatever your feelings about Leandra Medine, is a genuinely unhinged thing to say into a microphone.

For transparency: I was approached to appear on the podcast in 2022, filming scheduled during Recho’s Paris Fashion Week trip in 2023. We did the pre-interviews months ahead of time. Then about two hours before we were supposed to sit down, she cancelled, emergency in the States and never rescheduled with my agent. Fine, annoying, I moved on. I kept following the podcast. Which is how I ended up watching this clip yesterday and ruining my afternoon.

The episode has Lauren Sherman on it, the veteran fashion journalist now at Puck News, who once described me indirectly as an “internet gremlin,” which honestly, fair enough. In the promo clip, she and Recho are discussing Sherman’s interview with Alexander Wang, and the framing they use is something I had to watch twice because I couldn’t believe what I was hearing the first time.

Sherman calls it “cancel culture.” As in, that’s the lens she applies to a situation where eleven people formally accused a man of drugging and sexually assaulting them, with many more sharing accounts anonymously. Cancel culture, the framework we usually pull out for a comedian who made a bad tweet or a politician who said something fucked up on tv. She also says the subject is “very poorly covered in major press,” which I’d push back on, because cancel culture is one of the most exhaustively covered media topics of the last five years. It’s a whole cottage industry of op-eds and cable segments and think pieces written by people who all agree it’s undercovered.

But what actually pissed me off was Recho Omondi saying that Wang’s “fall from grace” was “surprising and unfair.” And then, and I need you to stay with me here, describing the accounts of people who said they were drugged and assaulted as “negative experiences.” Like he gave them a bad fitting.

I genuinely don’t know what to do with that. I’ve turned it over multiple times trying to find the generous read and I can’t get there. And maybe part of why I can’t get there is because once upon a time in my early 20’s I was drugged at a party with GHB, without my knowledge, by someone who was targeting me, and I had no idea what was happening to my own body until I came to having hit my head on a toilet. So when I say I think drugging someone without their knowledge should be charged as attempted murder, I’m aware that’s an extreme position. I’m also not moving off it. Because I know what it feels like to have someone make that decision for you, and there is nothing in that experience that reads as a “negative” one.

Sherman, to her credit, does eventually say something useful ( one clap for you Lauren ) and that is that the industry itself needs to reckon with how much it enabled this, the way Wang’s whole persona, the parties, the nightlife, the being-out-at-night thing that Anna Wintour apparently clocked and filed away as a charming quirk rather than anything worth examining, was something the industry constructed and celebrated. That’s extremely true and worth saying. I wrote about it for Technikart. But it gets so buried under everything else in that clip that it barely lands.

I remember when this all first came out. I remember Fashion Twitter in real time, I remember co-hosting a Clubhouse room hours after the first accounts went public with hundreds of people in it, editors, designers, people who had been in those rooms, people who knew people who had, and nobody was being careful with their language. We were talking about the specific machinery of how someone like Wang operates, the way that fashion’s investment in his genius, his shows, his commercial success, created a kind of protection that the people around him were actively participating in maintaining. That conversation happened and it was real and it mattered.

And then the comeback shows happened and Julia Fox rushed to defend him in the media after a big fat check. He opened an art museum and hung out with Ice Spice. His front rows filled back up with people who had very recently been making statements. And now here we are, with two of the more prominent voices in fashion media describing the whole thing as cancel culture and unfair and a negative experience. If reducing drugging and rape to mild workplace drama is now the sophisticated take in fashion media, then count me the fuck out.

END RANT.

Last night though, I had 5 hours and bad wifi and Twitter, which meant I was fully caught up on the Raymonte Cole clothing line discourse by the time they discharged me.

Quick disclaimer before I get into it: Raymonte has me blocked. This is because I commented on a post where he told Essence Magazine to fuck off after they wrote a genuinely nice piece about his birthday trip. You can read more about that drama here. I don’t follow his content, I’m not a fan, and I want to be clear about that upfront because I’m about to defend the principle of what happened to him this week and I’d rather you know my position than wonder about it.

So this week Raymonte Cole, a Black gay lifestyle and travel influencer known for his unfiltered commentary and propensity for landing in online drama, launched TERMS, his first independent clothing line. The drop included hoodies, sweats, and basics, promoted as a passion project built without major collabs or sponsorships, on his own terms, hence the name. Before anyone even got to the actual clothes, a tweet griping about the oversaturation of influencer brands got widely read as shade directed at him specifically.

Raymonte clapped back, his people clapped back, critics called the line weak and called him messy, and the whole thing devolved at a speed that would be impressive if it weren’t so familiar.

A few years ago Denzel Dion, another Black gay lifestyle and fashion influencer probably best known for palling around with Rickey Thompson, was in this exact position. When he launched NOID, an artsy, high-priced, unconventional line that some reviewers memorably described as giving “Mary Poppins vibes,” he got the same treatment, people calling it overpriced, low effort, AliExpress, the full rotation. He showed up to publicly defend Raymonte during the TERMS rollout and immediately caught strays himself, with “AliExpress” jabs getting aimed at both lines within the same thread. I get a sense of deja-vu watching the Raymonte situation unfold, two Black gay creators attempting to build something with the same pile-on but different names on the hoodie.

Now not to be that friend that’s too woke

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I took a few days to decompress, but I did do one big thing: I went on the iconic Sandra Bernhard’s Radio Andy show, Sandyland, where I taught her about the influencer ecosystem, Asian KOLs ( key opinion leaders ), fan armies, and the whole circus. She told me that when she was in Paris for the Loewe show, she had no idea who any of these people in attendance were. Relatable.

Anyway, I had a whole list of things I wanted to cover about the internet this week, but me being the hater that I am, I want to talk about everything I hated at Paris Fashion Week. Because girl, what was going on??????

Without a doubt the biggest WTF of fashion month was Marilyn Manson opening for Enfants Riches Déprimés at Paris Fashion Week.

It was truly so bizarre watching the crowd clap, and publications posting clips like “iconic moment,” and a bunch of industry people flooding their stories calling it cool. Meanwhile I’m sitting here like… are we all just pretending the past few years didn’t happen?

This man has a stack of allegations that haven’t gone away. And literally weeks before this show, in late January 2026, a judge revived Ashley Walters’ civil sexual assault lawsuit against him. Her case, filed back in 2021, accuses him of sexual exploitation, manipulation, and abuse from 2010 to 2011, when she was his assistant. It got tossed in December 2025 on statute of limitations grounds, but California’s AB 250 kicked in January 1st, giving a two-year window for older adult sexual assault claims to come back. The judge said yes, it applies—case reopened January 26th. Manson denies it all. No criminal charges ever stuck after the investigation closed in 2025. But the civil case is alive again. And instead of laying low, he’s front and center at a luxury show getting applause.

ERD isn’t new to this either. Their SS25 campaign was shot by Terry Richardson, the same Terry who’s been persona non grata in fashion for years over allegations of sexual misconduct and exploitation from multiple models and assistants. Most major magazines and agencies dropped him long ago, but ERD was like, nah bro, come shoot our stuff. And now Manson as opener.

It’s tired. It’s stale. The brand thrives on this overpriced rage-bait aesthetic—provocative, “countercultural,” priced for the one percent who want to look like they’re sticking it to the system while dropping thousands on a hoodie.

The part that makes me side-eye everyone is how many people in the room, and online, treated this like a fabulous, bold flex instead of the desperate stunt it is. Clapping. Posting. Calling it a highlight. It’s straight-up gross. Deeply embarrassing for everyone involved. Don’t buy into it. Don’t clap for it. Stay fucking alert.

On to something else that had me groaning in front of my phone: I think Pierpaolo Piccioli and Balenciaga grossly underestimated how much people still hate Sam Levinson.

Balenciaga showed their Fall/Winter 2026 collection titled ClairObscur, framed as a big collaboration with Euphoria creator Sam Levinson. He designed the immersive set and video installations, projecting snippets from the upcoming Season 3, featuring Chloe Cherry, Alexa Demie, and new cast like Danielle Deadwyler, mixed with moody landscapes and that signature neon-gritty vibe. Piccioli talked it up as capturing “human fragilities and strengths” through Levinson’s lens. Some deep artistic fusion, apparently.

The collection itself was…not great. But what I really want to talk about is the part meant to hook young online Euphoria fans with discretionary income: a capsule drop right after the show, with limited pieces immediately available at Paris flagships featuring prints pulled directly from the series.

Nobody asked for this crossover. Online reception has been mostly panned, eye-rolls about how it looks, confusion over the connection, and a general “who thought this was a good idea?” Especially because it’s tied to Levinson, who’s been catching heat for years over accusations of misogyny in his work and on set. There’s also the whole thing with photographer Petra Collins, who has said publicly since 2023 that he essentially lifted the entire aesthetic of Euphoria from her, she was originally tapped to direct, built out the visual world and casting, got dropped last-minute for being “too young,” then watched as the show launched looking exactly like her photographs.

This feels like Pierpaolo desperately grasping for cultural credibility he doesn’t quite have. One thing about him: he loves being a celebrity, especially the Hollywood kind. He’s played himself on screen twice, Zoolander 2 and The Morning Show, and those staged pap walks outside Gucci stores back in the day were all part of building that mythos, like Karl or Marc Jacobs. But he’s not Demna. Demna had a cult following where people would buy a literal garbage bag because it was part of his irreverent world. His tribe followed him to Gucci. Pierpaolo wants that gravitas so bad, and attaching himself to a fading cultural peak like Euphoria, a show people have largely moved on from after years of delays, doesn’t build a tribe. It just looks desperate.

That said, the Rosalía print pieces might actually move. Her star power is real, separate from the show drama.

And circling back: amid rumors that HBO is disappointed with Season 3’s marketing, stagnant buzz, whispers of an “emergency plan” to juice engagement before the April drop, this whole thing reads like a clumsy attempt to engineer a viral moment. Pierpaolo assigning deeper meaning to middling clothes by attaching himself to a cultural moment he doesn’t fully understand, with a collaborator most people side-eye hard. It’s a mismatch on every level: fashion house chasing relevance, showrunner with baggage, audience that’s largely over it.

And finally…and maybe I’m being dramatic, but there was something genuinely dark-sided about this fashion month, specifically in who was platformed on the runways: Clavicular at Elena Velez’s NYFW show and Bryan Johnson at Matières Fécales.

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