Dear Shaded Viewers,
After a whirlwind Fashion Week, it is worth pausing on the figures who are quietly rewriting its rules. Elias Mendini, known as Lyas, is one of them. Nonchalant by nature, radical by instinct, he spent a full week at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Nearly three screenings a day, eight days in a row and the room has not quite recovered.
Like many aficionados, Lyas spent his formative years sneaking into runways. The turning point came last spring: frustrated at being excluded from the Dior show, he organized his own viewing party in a bar in the 10th arrondissement. The gesture was spontaneous. It landed like a grenade. What followed was a season of escalation : Folies Bergère, Maxim’s, packed rooms, Julia Fox in the crowd, designers offering live commentary. The audience kept multiplying. Paris noticed. Paris approved.
Last week, he took the Théâtre du Châtelet: a 19th-century house where the capital’s most storied productions have played. Across three evenings, he averaged 2,036 viewers per night, cumulatively more than a Bercy concert. The numbers are almost beside the point. What matters is the audacity of the gesture: the Don Quixote curtain by Gérard Garouste rises, and out runs Lyas, surrounded by his archive of runway looks, suspended mid-air, arranged with a precision that made set designers in the audience quietly gasp.
The most interesting thing Lyas has built is not a platform but an atmosphere. Young people arrive dressed, present, visibly emboldened. He carves out space for them to speak. At a moment in their lives shaped by self-doubt, he lead through games, collective laughter, and genuine debate about the clothes themselves. Fashion criticism, democratized without being dumbed down.
The reactions are an extra and a link. Reactions were particularly charged around Balenciaga’s curvy casting, which drew sustained, vocal praise from a room that sincérité appreciated it.
He opened the week with the gleefully energy of the Zomer runway. A Nice évent for a tuesday morning full of lighthearted outfit. He closed it with something far more charged: a live transmission of the Uniform collection. The purist aesthetic gave no clue of the location. Then, the crowd erupted, because the runway was on stage !. The Diamond Gospel Choir closed the evening with a rendition of We Are Young, closing a vivid week full of spontaneity restrained for so long. Lyas has taken theater codes and handed them to everyone. Fashion is no longer an uptight conversation : it is a society question, and he has made clear that anyone can have something to say .
Later
Mael Heinz
