At Louis Vuitton, Michael Jackson Forever

PARIS — When Chris Brown and Gunna fired up spliffs in the front row at the Yohji Yamamoto show on Thursday, it was a sure signal that fashion had crossed into new territory.

The outlines of the landscape we’ve now entered are starkly unlike the one that came before in ways that are as much attitudinal as demographic. Fashion can’t afford anymore to be precious or exclusionary. Instagram unlatched the gate to a once largely closed realm and the world rushed in.

“There’s that incense again,” Ben Cobb, editor in chief of Another Man magazine said as he settled into a front-row seat earlier that afternoon for Virgil Abloh’s sophomore show as artistic director of men’s wear for Louis Vuitton. He was referring to the skunky odor of vaped weed.

“I’m so high right now,” Mr. Cobb added. He meant contact high, to be clear.

The whole industry seems a bit buzzed right now, with designers as disparate as Mr. Abloh at Vuitton men’s and Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino seeming to quote from the same cheat sheet during backstage interviews, spouting a gospel of an inclusivity that has been too long in coming. And then there was Demna Gvasalia, frankly referencing in his new Vetements collection the sinister aspects of the dark web.