For One Night Only, Paris Is Vogue’s (Disney)World

On Sunday evening, in honor of International Olympic Day and just before the couture shows began, Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue and global chief content director of Condé Nast, flexed her muscles.

Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Literally speaking, she shut down Place Vendôme — the gilded center of high jewelry brands in Paris and home of the Ritz hotel — for the third edition of Vogue World, the fashiontainment extravaganza she introduced in 2022 as a cousin to the Met Gala and as a potential path forward (and revenue stream) in the face of glossy magazines’ decline. Imagine P.T. Barnum meeting Florenz Ziegfeld and together they hatch a fashion show, and you’ll get the idea.

Like the Met Gala, Vogue World, which was previously held in New York and London, is a live expression of Vogue’s power and an effort to position the magazine as an arbiter of influence, culture and people. Like the Met’s annual fund-raiser, it involves great eye candy, in terms of both clothes and celebrity. Unlike the Met, however, anyone who can afford a ticket, or wants to watch the livestream from afar, can get inside. Can be part, that is to say, of Vogue’s world. Aspiration is part of the price of admission — if you want to buy in.

This time around, that meant about 800 guests, many of them paying 3,000 euros (or $3,205, including tax) for a second-row seat, and €2,000 for third row, as well as the chance to hob nob (or at least be close to) the first row, which was largely reserved for every French designer under the sun as well as fashion-adjacent friends of Vogue such as Emma Chamberlain, Selma Blair and Russell Westbrook. Ms. Wintour herself was sandwiched between John Galliano — in yet another show of her support for that designer — and Pharrell Williams, the Louis Vuitton men’s wear designer (among many other things).

And it meant celebrating what the program labeled the “100 years of French fashion and sport” between the previous Paris Olympics, in 1924, and today.