Being a Regular Person During Paris Fashion Week

Photo by Isabel Su

Everyone I know in Paris with a passing interest in fashion and not enough followers to merit an invitation anywhere counts their Paris Fashion Week involvement by the numbers: one cool afterparty, two celebrity sightings, three beers with a model who walked the Jean Paul Gaultier show, so on and so forth. Fashion Week takes over the entire city, but in a peripheral way — you’re still going to class and still doing your homework, but your walk home is blocked by paparazzi barricades and black vans. 

That’s because Paris itself is part of the show. Nowhere was that more evident than at the Saint Laurent show, which kicked off the entire week. Held at the Trocadéro Fountain, luminous Eiffel Tower in the background, the show was classic Saint Laurent — provocatively feminine — which both contrasted and, in some ways, foreshadowed the rest of the week, which saw dozens of debuts. 

A number of new artistic directors revealed their first collections at Paris Fashion Week, including Jonathan Anderson at Dior and Matthieu Blazy at Chanel. Mugler, Loewe and Balenciaga were among the other houses with new creative direction. Most of them paid homage to their roots — Anderson even kicked his show off with a horror film of the House of Dior haunted by designers past. Anderson’s debut womenswear is decades of Dior, made anew: think doll-sized bar jackets, huge bows, playful basket-weave skirts. Blazy had a similar approach — breathing new life into those staid Chanel tweed suits.

Thanks to fashion commentator and influencer Lyas’ ‘La Watch Party,’ these shows were also more accessible than ever. Upwards of a thousand people filled La Caserne — a courtyard/factory combo venue in the 10th arrondissement — every day to watch livestreamed shows on a much-larger-than-life Macbook screen. The free events, advertised on Instagram and TikTok,  brought together students, fashion enthusiasts and supermodel Loli Bahia, who seemed to be everywhere this fashion week (she walked 27 shows). 

I didn’t go — I feared the line — which wrapped around multiple blocks, at least three people deep at every turn. My friend Fiona, who lives nearby, checked out the watch party for the Ann Demeulemeester show. 

“I didn’t really know the brand,” she said. “But everyone there was chic enough to make up for it.” 

It was raining when she went, but that only added to the atmosphere. Just regular people, coming together to revel in the democratization of high fashion. Thank you, TikTok!

Though I missed out on La Watch Party, I did see a show, though not one of those officially recognized by the Fédération de la Haute Couture. The Shuting Qiu Spring 2026 ready-to-wear show was taking place  right across from my apartment, in the colonnade of the Théatre de l’Odéon, and thus sort of open to the public, in the sense that everyone walking by could take a peek. The best parts of seeing the show were undoubtedly getting to tell people I saw a show, and the thrilling detective work my roommate and I did afterward to try to figure out what it was, exactly, that we saw. 

If not sneaking into shows, though, where was everyone? I may be biased, but it seemed to be Café La Perle, a wine-and-pizza bar in the Marais where the main action is on the sidewalk outside (la terrasse, if you will) and the main activity is people-watching. At La Perle, if you can fight your way through the crowd to the bar, you can get a carafe of wine for 16 euros and they’ll give you paper coffee cups for you to drink your hard-won wine on the street. We went on Thursday, and fashion icon Wisdom Kaye stormed through the crowd at one point. We also met two British magazine editors, a magician, a Bulgarian model and an entire jazz band, among many others. 

As a regular person, the beauty of Paris Fashion Week isn’t the shows or the celebrities; it’s the atmosphere. An already lively city becoming a little more lively, the well-dressed a little more well-dressed, crowded clubs a little more crowded. You can follow the goings-on of high fashion from anywhere, but Paris lets regular people get a taste for themselves.