Paris, France – June 18: (Editorial use only – for non-editorial use please obtain approval from…) [+] Pharrell Williams walks the runway during the Louis Vuitton Menswear Spring/Summer 2025 show as part of Paris Fashion Week in Paris, France on June 18, 2024. (Photo by Stefan Cardinale – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)
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As the Paris Menswear Spring/Summer 2025 collections come to a close, it’s clear that the city’s alpha wolf has been and always will be Louis Vuitton’s Creative Director, Pharrell Williams. He brought a bold fashion forward attitude to the runway and his palette, as seen at the Louis Vuitton show earlier this week. Bell-bottoms and bootcuts are everywhere, and skinny-leg jeans are long gone! This is just a part of Pharrell’s fun and provocative message.
There’s still a whiff of Pharrell’s “Wild West” cowboy vibe from yesteryear, but it’s now been turned around. That’s why, in Pharrell’s sure hands, the bell-bottoms look like bootcut calf-roping jeans. But paired with a sleek, versatile Louis Vuitton top like Pharrell’s, it becomes the kind of calf-roping that’s ready to land a new contract in the office or recording studio. Hanging from the left belt loop is a stylish Louis Vuitton multi-tool, ready to be used to rake horse hooves or remove calves hidden in the undergrowth in the backyard. Dressy for the runway. Evocative of a meeting. Imagine sitting across the table from a recording executive wearing that sleek, businesslike Louis Vuitton top. They’ll be quick to accept anything you want.
More than a year after stepping off the runway, new dad, fashionista, and fluent French-speaking enthusiast Bradley Cooper has rocked a bell-bottom suit at major awards ceremonies, including last year’s Oscars. The otherwise sharp actor is perfect for a ’70s Studio 54 Yves Saint Laurent vibe. All Cooper is missing are the giant Coke-bottle-bottom glasses favored by Yves Saint Laurent himself. We’ve long hoped the actor would put the brakes on the silhouette and reach for something different. Could Lady Gaga, baby mama Irina Shayk, or another close, fashion-savvy girlfriend or ex-lover make a tasteful intervention?
What Pharrell is trying to say in Cooper’s fake hometown, in a nutshell, is that no, bell-bottom legs are great. They’re here. And I’m a man, so I’m not going to let them leave the fold. Embrace it.
PARIS, FRANCE – JUNE 19: Kanye West and Bianca Sensali attend the Prototype Menswear Spring/Summer Collection… [+] The 2025 show took place as part of Paris Fashion Week on June 19, 2024 in Paris, France. (Photo by Peter White/Getty Images)
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Menswear remains important to Kanye West. Last summer, while knitting in Italy and nurturing the wounds of his own volcanic eruption that led to the collapse of his shoe empire and the loss of most of his endorsement deals, he took time to attend events in Milan. He studiously avoided Paris. Instead, in the summer of 2023, Italy served as a soft opening, a friendlier minor-league training ground to stretch some of the shriveled front-row social muscles that every Parisian front row needs.
Ye returned to Paris this week, a little unexpected, if not necessarily jarring, to see him back in the fashion capital of the world, though his appearance at a menswear show is not. The conundrum can be interpreted in terms of rehabilitation. First, while he seems to be burning through funds rapidly, as if he still has sponsors, he still has a lot of money, and Europe can be a lenient operating zone for men of all levels serving 40-day sentences in the desert for various wrongdoings. In West’s case, he still needs to be seen as working, or at least a minimally functioning member of the fashion world, however haphazardly he does so.
What’s notable in the photo above is his shift in personal styling, from the basic black ninja outfit he wore during his lengthy stay in Italy in 2023 to a more messianic white ninja outfit. The shift to white can be interpreted as an expression of desire. There are no apologies for anything, and in Ye’s universe, there seem to be no apologies. But his personal donning of white signals that his time in exile is over. He’s gotten over it. This is the fruit of a post-apocalyptic world.
By making this statement with his costume and coming to Paris to make that statement, West adds another layer of Delphic thought. He wants to return to his people, but the notion of a messiah is never far from West’s own apocalyptic vision. So is the messiah coming or going? That’s why it’s Delphic! The ninja suit leaves it up to the audience to solve its cosmic mystery.
West has been playing around with different ways of wearing masks in public for the past few years, the conscious decision to cover his face with a (white) mesh technical fabric at his front row debut in Paris this week not so much as a reference to masculine contours, but rather a direct reference to conservative medieval women’s clothing, specifically the burqa, or what is known as the chadari or chaadar in Pakistan and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. West has a habit of wearing his all-consuming inner dialogue in public, and as an expression of this, his recent chaadar/hood seems like an unconscious yet precise physical representation of the larger prison he has constructed for himself.
In that prison, he has a tinge of revenge on his mind. In menswear over the past few years, the Yeezy brand has favored simple skatewear-inspired designs like hoodies and plain T-shirts. One T-shirt in particular features a strange, almost imperceptible inscription high on the wearer’s collarbone: a stencil of a common English verb for intercourse, but the verb is spelled out in Cyrillic rather than English. Down the center of the T-shirt’s chest is the obscene subject, Aдидас, written in Cyrillic.
That’s “Adidas,” of course. Currently, the T-shirt is being sold on Yeezy’s website for the discounted price of $20, a price tag that goes against big brands but, in theory, should help spur business among millennials and contrarians. The price has dropped recently; just a few months ago, the T-shirt was selling for many times that price.
PARIS, FRANCE – JUNE 20: Lou Doillon attends AMI – Alexandre Mattiussi Menswear Spring/Summer… [+] The 2025 show as part of Paris Fashion Week in Paris, France on June 20, 2024. (Photo by Jacopo Raule/Getty Images)
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On the brighter side, it’s a given that any kind of Paris Fashion Week will feature a Birkin. No, not a bag, although there will be plenty of them. Pictured heading into the Alexandre Mattiussi show, French-British actress, singer, and occasional model Lou Doillon, daughter of French director Jacques Doillon and eternal Paris It-girl Jane Birkin, has brought the Birkin family’s down-to-earth style DNA to the masses and to fashion week.
Wait! Didn’t you know that Jane Birkin started a second family with another cool French film director after marrying Serge Gainsbourg? Come on, snob! Study up on the world’s hipsters and French history at least so you can bow and curtsy to the Birkins next fashion week.
PARIS, FRANCE – JUNE 21: Kate Moss and Nikolai von Bismarck attend the Dior Homme menswear show… [+] The Spring/Summer 2025 collection show as part of Paris Fashion Week in Paris, France on June 21, 2024. (Photo by Stephane Cardinale – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)
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Just as the Birkin—in this case, both the bag and the real thing—makes an appearance at every Paris Fashion Week, it can be expressed with considerable relief that British fashion icon Kate Moss made an appearance at Dior Homme. As the helmsman of her own modeling agency, she is now an increasingly influential figure in the fashion industry. To her left, pursing her lips and looking chafed at her somewhat constrained, if not actually boxed-in, front-row position, is her longtime lover, the British-German Count Nikolai von Bismarck-Schönhausen. He is the great-great-grandson of the famous German Chancellor Otto. We completely sympathize with Count Nikolai. Who doesn’t feel trapped, even or especially with Kate Moss right there in the middle of the front row? It can get pretty stressful.
That’s not to say that Count Nikolai had no fashion talent. A descendant of British Baron Monson on his mother’s side, he attended the prestigious British public school, Harrow, but instead of running a university, he devoted himself to work as an assistant to fashion and portrait photographer Mario Testino, and then became a photographer himself. During Moss’s time as a runway regular, Testino shot a fair number of her images for magazines like Vogue.
In other words, it was fate! The lovebirds met by chance and have been together for the past eight years, which in the fashion industry is the equivalent of 40 to 50 years of marriage for most couples. The challenges of the fashion industry are volatile, so Moss and Bismarck may not look all that happy at big industry events, but deep down they must be.
