boom boom paris

a week of excitement and anxiety in the french capital

I write to you from Paris as the dust from fashion week settles. I came as I often do, uninvited, on a whim. I attended no shows and instead went for long walks, enjoying the unusually warm spring weather, saw a Gregorian choir, inspected the too-bright, newly restored Notre Dame—they really do need to do something about those LED lights: the effect is fluorescent—observed what people were wearing from my perch in cafés, ate lots of beef prepared raw, cooked, and bleu i.e. somewhere in between, and paired it with coffee, wine, or Coca-Cola sans sucre, sometimes all three—to French horror. I chatted with friends new, old, friends of friends. Strangers too: a restaurateur, a motorcycle racer, a tennis pro, among others.

People talked about the shows, obviously. They complained about the ubiquity of Chappell Roan, debated the debut of Haider Ackermann at Tom Ford, and quipped about people skipping Enfants Riches Déprimés because they were afraid to miss Balenciaga. A symptom of the fashion industry’s small-c conservatism, despite its reputation, always wary of the new.

Everywhere I went I saw Saint Laurent’s summer campaign, Michelle Pfeiffer in a power suit peering down from a penthouse into Wall Street below: an allegory for the week. ‘Did you hear the stock market is crashing?’ people asked. Of course, I had. Though I noted:

‘Curiously, the crash has not been trending on X.’

The editor of Interview Magazine, Mel Ottenberg saw the parallels though: “It really is wild how eighties power dressing is all the rage on the runways, in popular culture…and then tonight we had Saint Laurent, which was giving full Yves Saint Laurent 1987…but also the stock market is crashing?” 1987 famously being the year when Black Monday knocked almost two trillion off stock market balance sheets worldwide.

When I first wrote about boom boom, I said: “One ship is flying to the moon. The other is sinking to the bottom of the sea. Everyone is squinting at their boarding pass, crossing their fingers that they are boarding the right vessel.”

Boom. Boom. Explosions can be the rockets that power your craft or the munitions that pierce your hull.

It’s very much an era of creative destruction, to use a phrase popular in the eighties. Old players are being cleared out—NATO, NAFTA, the federal bureaucracy—and new players are entering the stage—tech, nationalists, and who knows who else. It’s that ‘who knows who else’ that has the hairs on the back of everyone’s arms pricked.

People would very much like their side to win as much as they would like to be on the winning side.

Maybe this is why when between industry chatter, discussions of other current events felt more circumspect. People opined about the fires in Los Angeles, the re-election of Trump, the American response to the war in Ukraine, and the possibility of a broader war in Europe with more resignation than I might have expected.

War means something different in Europe.

Just a few days ago, Eurostar service was suspended because an un-exploded bomb from the Second World War was found near Gare du Nord. It’s hard for the American mind to grok. Not so long ago, countries on this side of the Atlantic invaded each other.

Status anxiety here is not just about your personal position in the world, but your nation’s, and in the case of the EU, your supranational polity’s—

Therefore, it’s hard to explain to the French that Americans are much more afraid of each other than they are of Russia. Conflict in the United States is usually an internal convulsion, a civil matter.

War doesn’t really come to America. The last time we were invaded was by the British or more properly, the Canadians, in the War of 1812. Americans seem to think conflict will be more like a video game, digital and economic, DDOS and day-trading. War just means tariffs and more expensive iPhones, JD Vance memes on TikTok.

Maybe this is why there have been an increasing number of attacks against Elon Musk’s business interests. Cyberattacks on X, physical attacks on Cybertrucks, bear raids on Tesla’s stock, a mishmash of legal, illegal, and extralegal strikes on the Trump administration’s soft underbelly, Mr. Musk’s business interest. Maybe the reason we usually ask government officials divest themselves of their holdings isn’t only to prevent corruption and cronyism. Maybe it is in the government official’s interest as well as the public’s. Maybe we need to append Clausewitz’s formulation ‘war is politics by other means.’

Business is now politics by other means, too.

war and business: the themes of paris fashion week

Boom! And boom!

As previously noted, Saint Laurent used shoulder pads to puff-up their fey models to football player proportions. Whether delicate silk dresses, tough leather jackets, or leopard-print plastic, the effect is visual and physical domination. Femininity jutting out below in black hosiery and stilettos. The question of how the masculine codes of suiting might work for women has been answered: androgyny in silhouette and dress.