Yesterday afternoon, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen debuted their autumn/winter 2024 collection at Paris Fashion Week. But that particular presentation might have eluded you should you also happen to be observing this season’s collections from behind a screen. That is because the designers – shrinking beneath their oversized layers and relative aversions towards the press – prohibited showgoers from capturing or sharing any content on social media from The Row.
Guests were instead provided with an old-fashioned notebook and pencil to jot down ideas and sketch out their designs in real-time. The motivation was thus: to break the content mill and provide editors with a little discretion and a little time to think, which are the rarest of luxuries in today’s content economy. But, in a perhaps deliberate twist of fate, the whole thing ended up causing a social-media spectacle of its own, with just about every guest in attendance rushing to Instagram to declare the Olsens’s decision “So chic!”.
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The show notes could have read: “Look at me!” But also, “Don’t look at me!”, which is something that could also be extended to this image of Jennifer Lawrence – who may or may not have been in attendance at The Row’s presentation – strolling around Paris in face-swamping sunglasses and a slack-lined coat with a long woollen scarf draped around her head. Consider it a sort of tasteful evolution of the “anti-paparazzi” scarf that Paris Hilton used to bedeck herself with in 2016, designed to simultaneously draw in photographers and maintain anonymity. There is a reason why J Law is considered a poster girl for the Olsens’s most exclusive designs.
