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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Tomorrow I’m going to the Lanvin show. The house is dressing me. And before you congratulate me, let me tell you what it actually means to be dressed by a fashion house when you are built like me, because nobody talks about this, and I have been through enough showroom trauma to fill a memoir.

I’m big (for the moment). Not in a self-deprecating fishing-for-compliments way, just as a descriptor, the way you’d say tall or brunette. I am thick, beefy, built like someone who has really committed to the relationship stage of life and also to antidepressants and also to no longer doing drugs, which, and I cannot stress this enough, is doing wonders for my mental health and catastrophic things for my waistline. I have thighs. I have an ass that precedes me into rooms. I have hips that European fashion did not anticipate and has never recovered from.

Getting invited to be dressed by a brand is supposed to be a milestone moment. They want to be associated with you. They want you seen in their clothes at the show, photographed, in the front row, building the relationship. What they do not put in the email is: assuming anything fits, which, based on our sample sizes, lol.

The first time a brand dressed me for Paris fashion week was Coperni. I was hosting the live stream for the drive-in show, huge Meta partnership, very major, I was very stressed and also very committed to a look. Non-binary era, full send, neoprene zip-up dress that I had absolutely corseted myself into like I was preparing for battle. A few hours before showtime, shooting content outside, the corset just — quit. Resigned. Gave its notice effective immediately. And then the dress, taking inspiration from the corset’s energy, tore straight up the side.

The specific panic I felt in that moment is not something I can fully translate into text. The Coperni designers are going to murder me. Lucien Pagès is going to dismember me. This runway sample that costs more than my rent, is now ventilated. I found the nearest alterations place, walked in speaking the broken French of someone having a medical event, and threw money at them until they agreed to fix it immediately. They did. I made it to the show. But I stood outside that venue afterwards thinking this is my life now, isn’t it. Ripping samples at Paris fashion week. A legacy.

Alas it would not be the last time.

April 2022, Mugler invites me to a gala dinner with with the designer Casey Cadwallader. They want to dress me. I stomp into the showroom in my Rick Owens boots genuinely excited, full of hope, and I am greeted by a rack of womenswear that had clearly been pulled by someone operating entirely on vibes with zero working knowledge of my body. Mesh bodysuits. Wall to wall mesh bodysuits, as if that was going to go well for anyone involved. They also wanted me in the Jimmy Choo x Mugler collab heels, which had these long mesh stockings built into the shoe, gorgeous, in theory. I sat down in front of the full team to try them on, started pulling them up over my calves, and the sound that came out of that mesh was biblical. A rip so loud and so decisive it deserved its own moment of silence. I watched the team’s faces do that specific thing where everyone goes intensely professional all at once, which is somehow more humiliating than if they’d just reacted. Then I tried the bodysuit. The bodysuit also ripped. At that point I looked at everyone, everyone looked at me, and I said I’d just take the men’s jeans and a top from the men’s line, because we had clearly reached the end of the road and I still had to eat dinner with these people.

Male fashion samples in Europe are cut for a body that does not have my hips, my thighs, my ass, my anything below the waist basically. There is a very specific physical type that dominates this space , lean, narrow, built like a very elegant coat hanger, and I am not currently it and have not been it for a while and at this point have made a kind of peace with that. The anxiety it used to give me though. Being invited to pull looks for a show or an event and knowing before I even got there that I was about to spend an hour in a showroom having a quiet internal breakdown while someone pretended a jacket was “just slightly fitted” on me. ( remind me to tell you guys one day the story of how I got fat shamed at Courreges so bad the head of communications took me personally shopping with a 30% discount ).

Anyways I have a policy now. I flag it upfront, every time. Tell me what the biggest size is, let me know if the silhouettes are forgiving, and if the honest answer is that nothing is going to work, let’s just skip the part where we both pretend otherwise in a dressing room. I am too old and too tired to perform optimism about a leather trouser with a 28-inch waist.

Which is why tomorrow is kinda a big deal. The Lanvin stylist pulled pants with elastic waistbands. He thought about my body before I arrived. He made sure there were options that would actually work, not options he hoped might work if I held my breath and we believed hard enough. It is such a low bar and he cleared it with such grace that I am sitting here genuinely moved, hungover in my Paris apartment, but feeling seen by a waistband.

Nobody tells you that this is part of the job when you’re not a sample size and you work in fashion. The math of wanting to be in these spaces, wanting these relationships with these houses, wanting to sit front row in something beautiful and also knowing that the industry’s infrastructure was not built with your body in the blueprint. You figure out which battles are worth having and which showrooms are worth entering and you develop a very thick skin, which, given everything, feels like the most on-the-nose possible outcome.

Anyway. Lanvin show tomorrow. Elastic waistband. Bonne soirée from Paris and wish the samples luck because honestly they’re going to need it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

So let me tell you about that fever dream.

I moved to Paris right as the pandemic was starting, which meant I had no city, no friends, no life, just a lot of time to be online. My career exploded during lockdown. When everything opened back up in 2021 I kind of emerged from my apartment as someone the city had decided was an It Boy, which is a very specific and very temporary condition that I did not handle with anything resembling grace. Lucien Pages was calling. Vogue France wanted me to work for them. I was getting cast as an “activist” for Zalando campaigns and spending the checks on designer clothes I previously couldn’t afford. It was fabulous.

The crowd I was ushered into was THE crowd, Karla Otto PRs, stylists, the Antidote and Vogue France editors, people who could get you anywhere and also made sure everyone knew you were there. We ran around Paris like we owned it. Hôtel Amour, Café Charlot, Saint-Gervais, apartment parties that had no real end time. Very no sleep, bus, club, another club, another club, plane, next place. We’d just gotten out of the house after eighteen months and we were feral with it, all of us, the whole city, but our particular group was doing it with a chemical assist that I initially clocked as a quirk of the scene and then very gradually stopped clocking at all.

I came from more of an alcohol background ( one tends to develop alcoholism in the Navy) , some wine, tequila, give me a nasty Jack Daniels. But these evenings had a rhythm to them and the rhythm involved bathroom trips every 15 or so minutes and after those trips everyone got sharper and louder and more handsy and more “omggggg I looooooove you” and suddenly there were four more hours in the night. You follow the shape of the evening, especially when you’re new and the people setting the pace are the people whose approval you want more than basically anything.

And I wanted their approval so badly it’s embarrassing to look back on. Like bitch what the fuck. My career was going well, I was hanging out with famous connected people who treated me like one of them, my name was on every guest list, you feel unstoppable in that, not just happy, unstoppable, which is a different thing and a more dangerous one. The collective delusion that you are the coolest people in the room becomes so total and so mutual that you stop questioning it. A year and a half of running around town completely fucked up, just living to go out.

Occasionally through the high I’d have these little windows of clarity at dinner at Maison Caviar or La Belle Epoque, usually, looking around the table thinking what is the point of this, who are these people, what am I doing and then someone would say something funny or order another bottle and the window would close. I kept going because stopping felt like a social problem as much as anything else. If I didn’t have a bag of 3-MMC when a PR that had teased the possibility of inviting me to a show needed a bump, would these people still want to hang out with me? What would we even have in common other than out of control drug addiction?

The things that finally got through and I’ll write the full version of this story separately at some point because it needs its own space were a complete psychotic meltdown induced by cocaine in the lobby of Hôtel le Meurice, in front of Bravo TV cameras. And then very well-connected fashion people whispering in my ear insider information, telling me to post things, telling me I was such a star journalist, and in that state I thought: these are my people, they’d never do something to hurt me. I was wrong. Not catastrophically wrong, but wrong in the way that still has consequences for my career in 2026, which is its own specific flavor of wrong that I’m still metabolizing.

And then I got too messy and the crowd was gone. POOF. People who had been thrilled to see me in dimly lit corners of luxury hotels suddenly didn’t see me at all. Unfollowed, silent at parties, not a word. I found myself friendless and sober-ish and dealing with an addiction I’d developed inside a social world that had now closed its doors. The drugs that had felt like a VIP pass to something glamorous were now just drugs, alone, in an apartment. Substantially less fun. Much harder to dress up as a personality trait.

That was 2022. It is now 2026 and I have been sober from drugs for a year and a half. Some of that is wanting to be known for being smart again and not just a party boy. Some of it is being in a relationship that is safe and genuinely supportive in a way that means I don’t need to chemically manage my anxiety before walking into a room. A lot of that is no longer hanging out with a certain social circle. I also don’t need that validation the way I used to, which is probably the most honest sentence I can write.

But then Demna dropped his new collection and someone on Twitter said it was for people who see the sunrise and not in a good way, and I looked at those looks and felt THAT in my chest.

Demna, love him or hate him, fucking nailed it, the energy of those nights, the archetypes of the people you’ll meet in a vip area, the aggression and the glamour and the barely-held-togetherness of a certain kind of evening one has when they’re living in a cultural and cosmopolitan center of the world. And I got nostalgic. The tight little outfits, being bundled down boots, endless afters, the dolls in their naked dresses, purses in the crook of their elbows , all of us stumbling and laughing and completely sure we were having the best night of anyone anywhere. That feeling of being in the room where it’s happening and knowing everybody and everybody knowing you. Demna makes clothes that make you feel like you’re in a tribe, like you belong to something, and I did belong to something, chaotic and toxic and ultimately hollow as it was, it was mine, and I miss it sometimes in a way that doesn’t fully respond to reason.

Fashion is very good at selling you that feeling and stopping the story right before the part where you’re alone in your apartment at 3pm on a Tuesday staring at the ceiling hearing voices. The fantasy is the product. The come-down is not included. Bravo to Demna for capturing it so precisely that it almost made me want to go back. Bravo to me for knowing that I won’t.

Increasingly lately, I find myself wrestling with the previously unthinkable thought: What if I move back to America after 16 years in Europe? I know you’re probably thinking, “What the fuck is wrong with you, and why would you even entertain that in this climate?” But I don’t know……it’s like an invisible string tugging at me to return to the motherland.

I guess I have my boyfriend to blame for all of this. For the first time in many years, I’ve been integrated into a family unit, his family unit. I would say that we were raised pretty similarly. We had nice houses, nice cars, nice boats, nice schools. But I will say that his family is definitely on a whole other level.

His family is conservative, and by conservative I mean conservative in the old-money, manners-first way, not the red-hat variety my parents are currently deeply embedded in. When I met them, I arrived to dinner with a septum ring, piercings all up my ears, and a bright green Puma hoodie. That was roughly a year ago. Now, when I show up to dinner at the family mansion, pardon, hôtel particulier as they say, in the 16th arrondissement or the weekends away at the country house in Deauville, I’m in a gray or beige quarter-zip, Ralph Lauren rugby shirts, a pair of loafers. My septum ring has disappeared, and somehow the piercings in my ears have too. I look at myself and think I look how I did in high school when I won Best Dressed: clean, preppy, and most importantly, I feel good.

I’ve been on a buying spree on Vinted for vintage Ralph Lauren and nice, lived-in sweaters and a Barbour jacket to replace the one I had in college because one cursed afternoon I opened my wardrobe and it was a war crime: random PR gifts from every aesthetic imaginable, clothes that only made sense on Instagram or in a strobe-lit bathroom at 4 a.m. Sixteen years of mini-mes, all costumes, none of them actually me.

I know I need to do a continuation of my “How I Ran Away from the Navy to Work in Fashion” series that would provide more clarity on how and why I guess I lost myself. But I think it boils down to me being a Gemini and adaptable in any environment.

After I got kicked out of university (as I detailed in part one of my ongoing series—we’ll see; I’m currently doing a book proposal for it), I ended up with an ultimatum from my father: join the military. I ended up in the Navy. I went to boot camp in Chicago, partied my way through IT school in Pensacola, Florida, and then got stationed in Gaeta, Italy.

I remember so vividly asking my mother to go into my closet with an itemized list and ship my wonderful rainbow world of Ralph Lauren that I had acquired over many years to me in Italy. She sent the big suitcase with my endless colors of Sperry Top-Siders, my Brooks Brothers pants, my Polo chambray shirts, and my Nantucket reds.

Two weeks into southern Italy I realized the fits just didn’t fit. Not on the USS Mount Whitney where I was stationed and not in the streets of Naples & Rome where me and my shipmates would run off to on the weekends for pub crawls. 2010 energy demanded I commit to the bit. So I bought the trashiest hot-pink big-pony polo I could find, a purple scarf, popped the collar to the sky, and grabbed massive Diesel sunglasses, the Euro-trash specials. If I was going to live this life, I was going full steam ahead. Because in that context, stinky boat shoes didn’t denote belonging to a stratified socioeconomic class, they screamed probably lives under a bridge.

So just like that, years of meticulously curating the perfectly preppy wardrobe, of following the most asinine rules, were gone. Rules like: When you walk into a room, you turn your sunglasses on their Croakies (that little neoprene holder) and flip them around so they hang off the back of your neck. The only acceptable sports sneaker is a gray New Balance, and specifically the USA edition. Never wear a big pony polo. Never wear shorts below your knees.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but I spent most of my life in private schools on the East Coast. I was also raised by a man from an established Cape Cod/Boston family. The Official Preppy Handbook by Lisa Birnbach was the Bible to me, even if my father had defected from its gospel many moons ago.

When I was in second grade, I was diagnosed with ADD & ADHD, which provided medical validation for my parents on why I struggled with things that didn’t have clear structure and rules. I guess that’s why I excelled in a specific subset of fashion that came with its own unofficial handbook. One of my first real personal successes in life was being nominated and winning Best Dressed in my senior class, even over classmates who had spent most of their lives in the most elite and far-flung boarding schools on the planet. I followed the rules, and I won.

When I arrived in Europe, I had no rule book. I winged it based on external cues. It’s funny because every time I get dogpiled on Twitter, people use pictures of outfits I’ve allowed myself to be photographed in over the years to bully me. The outfits are horrible. The criticism is justified because how the fuck did I go from Best Dressed to A MESS?

After I ran away from the Navy and moved to Milan and started working in PR & nightlife, I was in my full club-kid fantasy because in that environment, that is how I needed to dress to get into the rooms I wanted to be in. I became the face and door bitch of the popular mid 2010’s fashion party in Milan, Punks Wear Prada installed by a extremely talented but wholey demonic nepo baby turned PR woman who used to blackmail her employees ( including me ) with their precarious visa situations. Thats a story for another time.

My value was in bringing color to events, a particular skill set that took me far. One of my proudest moments was casting the unique Milanese nightlife personalities for Riccardo Tisci’s massive Milan party for Givenchy.

Anyway, I’m going off topic. When sportswear exploded onto the scene in Milan with the New Guards group, I pivoted as well and broke my cardinal rule of never wearing any sneaker other than a gray New Balance USA edition and bought a pair of Off-White X Nike shoes. When Hedi brought grunge to YSL, I started wearing a flannel tied around my waist daily. When I moved to Paris in the midst of COVID, I went through my non-binary phase, which unfortunately coincided with me becoming a “public figure” thanks to social media, so my ill-fitting dresses, bad makeup, and cheap wigs are immortalized forever online, in a Harpers Bazaar piece, in Getty Images and made fun of in Reddit and FashionSpot forums.

After two public scandals, one involving a BravoTV show I was supposed to be on and an ex best friend sabotaging me for a storyline that never aired, and another involving some celebrity gossip I shouldn’t have posted, which saw me effectively excommunicated from French fashion’s most exclusive institutions, I cut off my pink hair and reduced my wardrobe to mostly black minimalism and the kind of Rick Owens that, in my previous life, if I saw it I would have thought was a pile of rags to clean the boat with.

In 2022, I started dating an alt-communist, and my style evolved to aesthetically align with his. And that’s what I looked like until I met my current boyfriend.

So Brad Pitt-coded of me, huh?

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that since I arrived on the shores of this continent, I feel like I’ve been cycling through a series of costumes. Functional costumes, but wholly unnatural.

So here I am, scrolling through TikToks of summers on Cape Cod that remind me of my childhood, searching for the best places to source vintage Ralph Lauren from the ’90s, and listening to how Sperry Top-Siders are having a big trendy resurgence and wondering after 16 years of being whoever my environment demanded I be, if it’s time to finally grow up and go home to my roots.

This escalation came after he twice failed to show up for summons from French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, first over reposted U.S. State Department and embassy comments framing the beating death of far-right activist Quentin Deranque in Lyon as evidence of “violent radical leftism” and “terrorism” on the rise in France (comments the French government rejected as politicizing a domestic tragedy). Kushner sent deputies instead, citing “personal commitments,” which Barrot called an “apparent failure to grasp the basic requirements of the ambassadorial mission” and a disregard for diplomatic protocol. Now, until he personally explains himself, no direct meetings with French officials. Skipping a diplomatic summons twice is definitely one way to make the “ugly American” trope literal and at a time when U.S.-Europe ties are already strained.

I wrote about how I think the U.S. government is attempting to influence French politics with these unprecedented reactionary posts here. The House Foreign Affairs Committee Democrats have suggested that if Kushner continues to undermine the U.S.-France alliance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio should put forward someone who can actually do the job. Hopefully sooner rather than later…..s’il vous plaît!

But for those who don’t know the background: Kushner served two years in prison for tax evasion and retaliating against a federal witness—his brother-in-law. In 2003, he devised a bizarre blackmail plot for revenge: He hired a sex worker to sleep with his brother-in-law, secretly videotaped the encounter, then mailed the tape to his own sister. The plan backfired when they turned it over to prosecutors. Kushner pleaded guilty to 16 counts of tax evasion, one count of retaliating against a federal witness, and lying to the Federal Election Commission. Trump pardoned him in 2020, and he was appointed U.S. Ambassador to France last year. Consistency in poor judgment seems to be his MO. Just another shining example of the stellar lineup the Trump administration has on display to the world.

The second news alert I got this morning was from Glitz, reminding me of the rumored possible acquisition of Condé Nast by Jeff Bezos, possibly as a lavish wedding gift to Lauren Sánchez (or at least that’s what the whispers say, tied to her Vogue cover and the couple’s lead sponsorship/honorary chair roles at the 2026 Met Gala, and Anna Wintour’s public support ). But as sources point out, the reality is that Condé Nast has already integrated deeply with Amazon without a full buyout. Since February 2025, its U.S. titles feed into Alexa’s AI for fashion and lifestyle queries, and since July 2025, multi-year licensing deals let Rufus, Amazon’s generative AI-powered expert shopping app, draw on Vogue, GQ, and other archives to shape shopping recommendations. They don’t need to buy the magazines outright to begin with if they own the cultural machinery that tells people what to want, then sells it right back via AI. Very sneaky stuff.

Speaking of more signs of the fash-apocalypse: Almost every luxury house has been dipping into AI-generated content for social media to cut costs, but Gucci’s approach under Demna is especially egregious with some extremely horrendous AI-generated... excuse me, “created” images for their Gucci Primavera show. One image shows a wealthy older woman (a sciura Milanese, as they say) in a restaurant with men staring at her.

Surely they could have shot that in real life with the vast amount of resources available to them. Another shows a man and a woman leaning on a car in a style reminiscent of Grand Theft Auto, with a Gucci neon light behind them. To be quite blunt and unprofessional: these look like ass.

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This wasn’t just a local affair, far-right groups from France and beyond had mobilized, heeding calls for “revenge” after Deranque’s killing. Among the notable figures in attendance were some of the movement’s more infamous faces. Aliette Espieux, the anti-abortion activist who organized the rally, and a former candidate for Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) party in 2020, led the procession. She’s married to Eliot Bertin, a prominent neo-Nazi deeply embedded in Lyon’s radical circles, known for his ties to violent factions. Alice Cordier, president of the xenophobic women’s collective Némésis, which Deranque had been “protecting” at the time of the incident, was also there, her group infamous for provocative stunts against immigrants and leftists. Prominent neo-Nazis like Marc de Cacqueray-Valménier, the founder of the dissolved violent group Zouaves Paris who has been recently convicted for violence and reportedly guided parts of the march, and Yvan Benedetti, former leader of the banned Pétainist organization L’Œuvre Française, were also spotted in the crowd, underscoring the event’s draw for Europe’s hardcore extremists. These aren’t fringe players, they’re the architects of a resurgent far-right scene that’s been clashing with antifascists in Lyon for years, a city long plagued by neo-fascist attacks on left-wing spaces, bookstores, and protests.

To understand the march’s fervor, we have to rewind to Deranque’s death. On February 12, amid a pro-Palestinian conference at the Lyon Institute of Political Studies featuring LFI MEP Rima Hassan, tensions boiled over. Deranque, a recent Catholic convert and pro-life advocate, was part of a far-right contingent shielding Némésis protesters outside. What started as a confrontation escalated into a savage brawl, captured on shaky phone footage: Deranque isolated, kicked, and punched until he suffered fatal brain injuries. He died two days later, on February 14. Eleven suspects, allegedly linked to hard-left militants, face charges, but the investigation is ongoing.

Deranque’s background complicates the narrative his supporters push. Far from the “peaceful activist” eulogized at the march, he had deep ties to hate groups: the royalist Action Française and the neo-fascist Allobroges Bourgoin. He’d marched in neo-Nazi rallies in Paris last spring, masked and militant, shocking the city with their brazen displays. Yet, in the aftermath, his story has been sanitized, weaponized as a symbol of “left-wing terrorism”, a trope that’s now crossing the Atlantic.

Which brings me to the most insidious layer: how the United States is leveraging this tragedy to meddle in French affairs.

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The Platforming of Extremes

Over the weekend, a figure known online as Clavicular closed Elena Velez’s Fall/Winter 2026 show at New York Fashion Week. If the terms “looksmaxxer” and “clavicular” mean nothing to you, consider yourself fortunate.

Clavicular, real name Braden Peters, is a central personality in looksmaxxing, the hyper-online subculture, largely among young men in incel-adjacent spaces, devoted to extreme, frequently hazardous efforts to maximize facial and bodily aesthetics for what participants call “sexual market value.” The regimen includes jaw surgeries, “bone-smashing” (striking the face to supposedly encourage growth), heavy anabolic steroid use, fillers, mewing, and, in some cases, crystal meth to maintain leanness and curb appetite. Peters, fixated on clavicle proportions and other hyper-specific metrics, has cultivated a following through this self-destructive quest, even earning a New York Times profile on his “ascension.”

Velez, ever the provocateur, leaned into her signature shock tactics: models in dental restraints, corsets, facial bandages—imagery drawn from body-modification horror that underscores the brutal pursuit of idealized beauty. Casting Clavicular as the finale was plainly edgelord provocation, ostensibly a commentary on commodified self-harm and unattainable standards. Yet it crossed into legitimizing a figure whose online orbit reeks of racism and far-right affiliations.

This was not abstract performance art. Velez has long thrived controversy from mud-wrestling finales, Gone with the Wind–themed presentations that romanticized Antebellum imagery with racial stereotypes, ties to reactionary downtown scenes (Red Scare, Dimes Square), Peter Thiel funding, and affiliations with groups like the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, often criticized as anti-“woke” vehicles opposing DEI and antiracism initiatives.

She’s captioned images of herself in her own designs with lines like, “The ICE agents who escort you to your crystal hereticon apocalypse ball,” and attended the New York Young Republicans Gala while publicly aligning with figures such as Dasha Nekrasova of the Red Scare podcast. Observers view her “post-woke” stance as ironic edginess that launders intolerance, even as the industry rewards her with CFDA awards and LVMH recognition. Platforming Clavicular was not clever critique; it conferred fashion legitimacy on someone whose content and associations traffic in overt racism.

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Of course I chimed in because… are these people ok???? It’s hilarious (in the worst way) when Black people like the post authors push these takes, since the inclusivity they’re shitting on literally opened doors for Black models to get mainstreamed after the “Prada effect” in the 2010s. People act like that era was some artistic peak, but let’s not rewrite history beloved !!! Instead I’ll educate you!

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Reader, I liked it. I think I’m in love with it. Which kinda terrifies me, a bonafide hater, a little.

It’s not your grandmother’s Wuthering Heights. Hell, it’s not even the edgiest version your old Tumblr mutuals would dream up. Fennell’s take is feverish and maximalist, deliberately unfaithful, like she grabbed the book and used it as a launchpad for the wildest TikTok edits imaginable. If you walk in clutching your dog-eared Penguin Classics like a security blanket, you’re gonna be pissed. But if you exhale, loosen up, and let it be its own feral thing… you might walk out buzzing the way I did. Equal parts exhilarated and a little unsettled.

The costumes, courtesy of Jacqueline Durran (who clearly had the time of her life after Barbie), are the film’s sharpest weapon and one of its most controversial aspects . They are not “period accurate.” They are period weaponized. Fennell and Durran aren’t trying to recreate 18th- or 19th-century Yorkshire so much as they’re conjuring a gothic fantasia where time is as slippery and unreliable as Heathcliff’s morals.

Take the infamous shiny red dress, the one we all thought was straight-up latex, but Durran’s been patiently explaining it’s actually this high-gloss synthetic fabric that just looks illegal. The way it shows up the exact second Heathcliff comes back is diabolical. Margot Robbie’s Catherine, I’m still meh on the casting, honestly, has spent years sanding down all her rough edges to fit into Linton world, piling on louder and louder outfits like armor. Then Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff (also miscast, fight me) walks in and suddenly she’s squeezed into this glossy second skin that’s basically screaming “look at me” and “I can’t breathe” at the same time. It’s suffocatingly perfect. The dress echoing her new life’s constriction. In my opinion Durran and Fennell are telling us these people have access to materials and excess that should not exist in their world, because their emotions already don’t. Dare I say it’s emotional realism in drag.

The rest of the wardrobe does the same thing, just with extra vicious glee. At Thrushcross Grange everything is garish and ridiculous and over-the-top, pure performative wealth. Catherine, this moor-bred girl who started out so simple-hearted, trades pieces of her real self for all that glitter. The clothes aren’t flattering her as much as they’re exposing her. She’s playing dress-up in enemy territory and you feel how alienated she is. Meanwhile back at the Heights everything is dark, almost monastic and stripped down. The contrast hits you in the bones.

There’s this one line where her father tells her she has nothing better to do than make herself ridiculous. It lands like a gut punch because it’s true. With Heathcliff gone, her life empties out and she fills the hole the only way the Lintons know how, with bigger jewels, louder fabrics, more elaborate performances of “I’ve got it all.” It’s tragic and pathetic and honestly feels painfully modern. How many of us have doom-scrolled straight into retail therapy or random hookups when the real problem was just loneliness?

Then comes the turning-point dress. Severe, stark, almost punitive after all that sparkle and frippery. No more play. Just cold hard lines that say the mask has cracked and the darkness is pouring in. It’s such good visual storytelling and Fennell uses the costumes to foreshadow everything without needing a single line of dialogue to explain it.

Look, the purists are already seething and I get it. “This isn’t Wuthering Heights!” But Fennell isn’t interested in your reverence. She wants the book’s rotting, obsessive, horny heart, the part that still feels dangerous two hundred years later. Making the surface so deliberately fake is actually a way of dragging all that buried truth into the light.

Is the movie shallow in places? Yeah. Indulgent? Absolutely. A little camp, a little cruel, and a whole lot extra? Guilty as charged. But it’s also alive in a way most fancy literary adaptations aren’t.

I left the theater dizzy, not because it was perfect (it definitely wasn’t) but because it felt dangerous. It reminded me that the best adaptations aren’t the most faithful ones. They’re the ones that make the source material feel newly illicit.

If you need your classics mummified in perfect authenticity, skip it. But if you’re willing to take the shackles off for two hours and let a story about feral love and class warfare wear plasticized synthetic like armor… you might walk out a little dizzy too.

Seeing it for the third time tomorrow!

Currently writing this newsletter while my train is stuck in Marseille as I head back to Paris after a very unproductive week of “writing” by the sea. (Air quotes because staring at the Mediterranean while scrolling TikTok doesn’t count as productivity.)

Anyway, today we’re talking sports! Well, more specifically, the fashion-related drama around last night’s Super Bowl that I watched on someone’s TikTok Live. Thank you, random person, for that. I’m sorry your account got banned. (RIP to the hero we didn’t deserve.)

So last night the Patriots lost to the Seattle Seahawks, but that wasn’t the only embarrassment for the team.

The day before the Super Bowl, Jordon Hudson, who’s gained massive public attention for dating NFL legend Bill Belichick (73) (yes, that 50-year age gap), made headlines again. She’s known for sending messages through stunts, like refunding Hall of Fame merch after Belichick’s 2026 Pro Football Hall of Fame snub (not first-ballot despite six Super Bowls as Patriots coach) and planning a big alternative bash on induction day.

She was spotted at the UNC-Duke men’s basketball game in Chapel Hill wearing a T-shirt from Orchids of Asia Day Spa.

If that spa doesn’t ring a bell, it’s the exact Florida massage parlor where, in January 2019, current New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft was caught in a prostitution sting in

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