March 11, 2025

Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images, Courtesy of Balenciaga

Valentino set its fall ready-to-wear show in a specially built tent on the grounds of the Arab World Institute, a cultural complex near the Seine River. Passing through its narrow entrance, you went from bright sunshine to a clubby red glow. For light reading, creative director Alessandro Michele provided his thoughts on the meaning of intimacy, citing Ludwig Wittgenstein and Hannah Arendt among other great thinkers. In the lull before the models appeared, Chappell Roan arrived with an escort of bodyguards and helpers, her couture dress so enormous she couldn’t reach her seat alone. God knows how she sat.

Then the red lights dimmed to darkness and a thunderous blast of sound went up. A jet taking off?

No, wait: We were seated in a red, faux-tiled restroom at a scale worthy of a stadium john, with stalls on four sides, and the sound was a toilet bowl flushing. And you knew what was coming next: pairs of legs at the base of each stall door; people doing their business. I have the feeling, um, that some clever art director in the ’80s made an ad campaign of the same image of forced human intimacies in public spaces. Except then, it was shocking or funny or both.

Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Getty Images

By Madame Clairevoyant

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A biweekly newsletter interrogating modern family life, written by Kathryn Jezer-Morton.