So much for celebrity-spotting: the venue for the Saint Laurent show at Paris Fashion Week was so murky, you practically had to feel your way to your seat.
A halo of camera flashes lit up the section where Blackpink’s Rosé sat. Kate Moss endeavored to introduce her to Charlotte Rampling. “You walk around with quite an entourage,” the veteran British actress told the K-pop star admiringly.
Diane Kruger was back among the guests after walking in the Ami show last month. The German-born actress started out as a model, but prefers to watch from the sidelines these days.
“Better for my ego, too,” she quipped. “Everybody is about a head and a half taller than you, and probably half your age. It was daunting.”
Turns out her latest project was also quite dark. She will star in David Cronenberg’s “The Shrouds,” the story of a grieving widower who builds a device to connect with the dead inside a burial shroud.
“The movie is based on his personal life, the loss of his wife,” said Kruger, who plays three roles: the protagonist’s wife, the wife’s sister and a third character who’s an avatar. The movie is hotly tipped for the Cannes Film Festival in May.
“It was a little intimidating to me because I obviously knew how much it meant to him, so just interacting with him, I wasn’t quite sure how much I should ask or not ask,” she recalled. “He’s a director who’s very introverted anyways, you know, he’s not the most outgoing of personalities.”
Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu basked in the light of an anteroom where VIP guests — including her fellow “Emily in Paris” star Lily Collins, Zoë Kravitz, Yara Shahidi and Linda Evangelista — posed on a leather couch before plunging into the gloom.
With shooting delayed by the writers’ and actors’ strikes, season four of “Emily in Paris” only recently resumed filming. As a result, it will be set in wintertime, and the French capital has been serving rain in spades.
“It was even more interesting to work on winter fashion,” declared Leroy-Beaulieu, who plays the arch-Parisienne Sylvie Grateau. “So we’re OK with the gray weather and the rain.”
She was cinched into an ankle-grazing brown leather coat designed by Saint Laurent creative director Anthony Vaccarello. “It makes us feel, I guess, strong and at the same time a bit ‘encombrant,’ as we say in French — taking up space,” she said of her bulky shoulder pads.
The French actress paid tribute to Claude Montana, another king of power dressing, who died last week at the age of 76. “Claude Montana was a friend of my mother and I was really deeply saddened by his passing. He was incredible for women, he contributed so much for women’s liberation,” she enthused.
Vaccarello’s fall collection will offer a little less protection: the filmy looks on the runway left nothing to the imagination. Front-row guests fell into two camps: those who embraced the sheer styles, camera flashes be damned, and those who covered up. The sight of Olivia Wilde posing outdoors in her sheer black backless vest top suggested that cold is just a mindset.
