Diane Pernet has long known that I’m a night owl. Fashion Week after-dark has always been where I thrive. This season, however, Paris decided to test everyone’s commitment with temperatures that made the Sahara feel aspirational, and Mercury oddly plausible. Every event began the same way: turning up with my Lime bike looking like I’d mistaken Paris for the Dakar Rally, on a quest for the nearest bottle of water before even attempting eye contact. Socializing became a luxury. Hydration became the priority.
The evening started at Sheriff Gallery, where The Frankie Shop marked its tenth anniversary with an exhibition of photographs by British photographer Chris Rhodes. Rather than treating the brand’s milestone as another polished retrospective, Rhodes approached it like an observer quietly drifting through a room. His images lingered on conversations caught mid-sentence, familiar faces dissolving into crowds, fleeting gestures, and the peculiar intimacy only existing at fashion parties, once everyone gets loose. Not your alter-ego in charge of the creative direction at 2am.
The exhibition revisits the celebration held earlier this year at Le Saint Gervais, transforming one evening into something closer to a collective portrait. Instead of focusing on celebrity or spectacle, the photographs celebrate the ecosystem around the brand—the friends, collaborators, editors, creatives, and regular fixtures that have shaped The Frankie Shop over the past decade. A limited-edition photo book accompanied the exhibition, extending that sense of documentation beyond the gallery walls.
Next stop: Wanderlust for the Off-White™ x Undercover free party. Getting in quickly turned into an episode of Survivor. Complete strangers formed instant strategic alliances, all of us studying the venue like we were reading an ancient treasure map. “Maybe it’s this way?” “No, definitely over there.” We kept zigzagging left and right as the Scooby-Doo gang chasing ghosts through different doors, only to end up back where we started. Eventually, someone cracked the code, and the whole tribe followed.
The party celebrated Off-White™’s 10×10: Icons Reimagined, a project that invites ten creatives—including ASAP Nast, Veneda Carter, Renell Medrano, and Stéphane Ashpool—to reinterpret ten of the brand’s iconic archive pieces, carrying forward Virgil Abloh’s collaborative spirit. Inside, there was only one place anyone wanted to be: in front of the giant industrial fan. It instantly became Fashion Week’s unofficial emotional support camp. Nobody cared who you were. If you had access to the breeze, you had status. I won’t drop names, but editors, models, and photographers stood shoulder to shoulder in silent solidarity, patiently rotating in and out of the breeze in formation.
