Recently maritally liberated Nicole Kidman is working hard at her chosen profession, and also winning like gangbusters at Paris’ Haute Couture week, pictured top with Tupelo, Mississippi-born artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa at the historic House of Chanel show on January 27. What could be more Parisian than that. The 27 January was in fact a drizzly day in the City of Light, but these two coolsters are just fine in their shades indoors, thank you.
It remains winter in Europe, but many Chanel attendees didn’t bother with the encumbrance of outerwear, including Kidman, whose well-trained arms were excellently bared as having their own inner warmth to combat any sort of chill, indoors or out. No coat out-of-doors in Paris in this January week implies a jet-black, well-heated car purring in some cozy parking spot nearby, with its driver inevitably cursing as he reads L’Equipe dispatches about Paris Saint-Germain’s standings in Ligue 1 while the show rolls inside. Question is, how can he negotiate the traffic to get whomever it is to lunch @ L’Avenue over in the 6th.
Lunch options aside, sensibly, Arthur Jafa layered luxuriously against the brisk 50-degree Fahrenheit outdoor temperature. That magisterial black cardigan of his is about the hippest thing going, and, laudably, that it’s got to be some real fox lining the lapels and collar of that jacket.
What is Margaret Qualley doing next to Vanessa Paradis? That’s the fun of Haute Couture week — it’s all a steaming hot, feathery-light omelette. No coat for Qualley. And, in an age-reverse equation, a really fine windowpane-check overgarment for Paradis. Here, Paradis is immensely comfortable because, first, she’s French, so she can leave her hair any old way and still look polished. It’s in the water over there, nobody else on earth can do it like that, so, don’t bother. With the exception of very few expats who manage it — Jane Birkin, to name the first and best — the French are gonna stay more French than you, period.
The second thing to know about this photograph is that Paradis sat and walked in shows many times per annum she was very young, so, conservatively estimated, she’s been in rooms like this about three million times. She radiates: This is home.
But here we can discern a more subtle fashion faux-pas on the part of Ms. Qualley. She went full-on “nighttime dress” — not forgetting Hollywood shine of sequins — in an attempt to show something “serious.” Whereas, closer inspection reveals a sensible gray tweed on the far left, and black leather overcoat on her left, possibly belonging to Rihanna’s serial baby-daddy A$AP Rocky, but more on him in a moment. Don’t bother with the disco frock at a day event! Chalk it up to youth.
Pictured above left to right, fearless Nicole Kidman doubles down on nighttime sequins with some fine disco shake-a-tail-feather feathers; center, the quietly-tipped-to-win best actress Oscar nominee Fernanda Torres (for the tragedy set in the time of Brazil’s military dictatorship I’m Still Here); and the ever-enigmatic, ever ethereal Tilda Swinton, who may well be wearing a blouse with woven-in, recently cured stalks of hay under that excellently fitted Chanel suit. Together they ratchet up the thespian gravitas level in Chanel’s front row well beyond the abilities of other denizens in the seats around them. Yes, they’re technically not “a couple,” but when are three outsized talents such as these ever going to be crammed into such a small amount of real estate, with Tilda Swinton engaging in mental Tai Chi to prepare for her next role right in her seat?
The reporting on this critical matter remains undone, but if the blouse under Swinton’s Chanel suit turns out to have been woven in part from hay, it will be Scottish. She’s not the daughter of a line of militarily and politically significant Scots tracing their lineage back to the 9th century for nothing. Her father, Major-General John Swinton, commanded the Household Division of the British Army in London in the Seventies and was the laird of the manor of his family’s Kimmerghame house, outside Duns, in the Borders county Berwickshire, until 2018. Just to give the feel for the steel in the lady.
The point? None of the ladies in this trio suffer fools, or small talk, for that matter, so if you happen be assigned to sit next to them, it’s the Queen’s rules, right? Engage only if they engage first. Otherwise, rivet your attention on the show. After all, it’s what they’re all there for.
Pictured above, Dua Lipa and A$AP Rocky are all about the cool bags. Lipa’s cross body is really fleet, like a cheetah running so fast that its feet singe the grass on the savannah in the great arc the cat cuts to separate the straggling gazelle from its herd before the kill. The coordinated blaze-red trim on the bag and jacket telegraph that velocity, along with the camo. A$AP Rocky’s fine supersize alligator tote is ready for a weekend in St. Trop, no other luggage required. Maybe he’s got the car to Le Bourget waiting outside. None of that dirt-bucket public conveyance over at Orly or CDG for Rocky. He’s A$AP, after all. Time is of the essence.
What’s with the huge man-totes all of a sudden? What could they possibly need in Paris other than ten or twenty thousand extra on the credit card? Did Cruz Beckham’s mom’s people ask in advance of A$AP Rocky’s people how big that gator bag of Rocky’s was so that Cruz Beckham’s mom could get him a big XXXL one? Is that how it worked? Never mind, Beckham has a far, far worse problem afoot, and no, it is not his wayward brother Brooklyn’s tiff with their mom and dad. It is the dread Converse shoe. You would think, with mom and dad being — for a fashionable British couple — rather conversant in things American, that either parent or their people could have gently informed Cruz that Jack Purcells are the only — the ONLY — way to go? Feckless youth. When will they ever learn.
Pictured above, as French actor Claude Rains, playing Captain of the Gendaremerie Louis Renault, so elegantly put it in the penultimate scene of Casablanca, “Round up the usual suspects.” The stars of the Chanel front row, from left: Lipa, Paradise, Kidman, and American actress Gracie Abrams in a fine yellow distressed-plaid jacket from the house. Chin-chin, everybody!
Speaking of gravitas, and real couples, Louis Vuitton creative director Pharrell Williams and his wife, Helen Laishchanh, are pictured above en route in to the Dior Haute Couture show. The couple are at home with each other and at home in Paris. Williams’ gator bomber in beige is a fine, unsubtle message for what should be a fairly rough 2026: Develop your bite. Because you’re gonna need it.
