BoF can exclusively reveal that Cartier has tapped Indian actress Deepika Padukone as its newest brand ambassador.

Padukone, who is one of Bollywood’s biggest stars, has been named twice on Time magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Over the weekend she attended the BoF 500 gala in Paris wearing an Indomptables de Cartier Panther and Zebra necklace — made of yellow gold and black lacquer and set with tsavorite garnet, moonstone and onyx — wrapped around her wrist.

“As an inspiring actress and committed philanthropist, Deepika embodies the Maison’s spirit and values of celebrating creativity, universality and open-mindedness,” Arnaud Carrez, Cartier’s chief marketing officer, said in a statement.

The move signals ambitions for Cartier to broaden its reach among Indian consumers, both domestically and abroad. The size of the the country’s gems and jewellery sector was valued at $79 billion last year, according to the India Brand Equity Foundation, a development trust backed by the Indian government. Meanwhile, the populous country’s aspiring middle class is growing fast.

Cartier is a jewellery behemoth and the star in parent company Richemont’s portfolio. The Swiss group does not break out sales for individual brands, but HSBC analysts estimate that Cartier generated €7.4 billion in revenue in 2021, up 29 percent year-on-year.

Today, as much as 80 percent of global jewellery sales remain unbranded, according to McKinsey — and competition is heating up among brands seeking to capture more of that market. Cartier’s peers are also investing heavily in securing top talent to broaden their reach. Following its acquisition by LVMH, rival Tiffany brought on Beyoncé and Jay-Z in a bid to reposition the brand as more modern and culturally relevant.

Beyond her star power, Cartier said it was drawn to Padukone’s values of philanthropy and female empowerment. In addition to acting and producing, Padukone is the founder of the Live Love Laugh Foundation, an organisation that has sought to raise awareness of and destigmatise mental health issues in India since 2015.

MILAN — When he remodelled the garden of his home in Milan, Giorgio Armani added a pavilion, a wall of bamboo and an imposing pair of Japanese maples, transforming an awkwardly inclined courtyard into the kind of spare, contemplative space you might find at the heart of a ryokan in Kyoto. The ideal spot, in other words, for a fashion samurai, a lion in the winter of his years, to sit back and quietly reflect on his achievements.

But Giorgio Armani isn’t that person. “I need to forget that I’m 88, otherwise it’s over,” he declares. “I need to try as if I started today, and this is a problem because when I wake up in the morning, I’m 88, which is very hard.” Even after all this time, with the global empire, the billions, the awards, he exists in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction. “I’m not satisfied, because I want my current work to be appreciated, not to have an award for what I have done, not to have an attestation for something passed. That’s what wakes me up every morning. I still need to prove myself.” He tells me that he has never dreamed so much in his life, two or three dreams a night. “Sometimes I dream of doing a beautiful fashion show and when I wake up, I’m so angry because it was only a dream.” Even in sleep, he is pursued by dissatisfaction.

We are sitting in a room adjacent to the garden, with his assistant Paul and translator Anoushka. At one point, Armani says he likes my accent (“Australian-British” he calls it, only 1300 miles off). “It makes me really suffer that I can’t speak English. I would have loved to learn it.” But I’ve always been struck by how direct he is in interviews, and I assume that’s because he is able to express himself with complete clarity when he is speaking in his mother tongue. On the wall is a massive work by the Italian artist Silvio Pasotti. It’s a surrealistic melange of fashion history, designers, models, magazine covers collaged with iconic images like the Helmut Newton photograph of Karl Lagerfeld in a black bathing suit. He sprawls insouciantly across the bottom of the painting. That’s not the only time he’ll appear in this story. Next to him, in the left-hand corner, Armani sits looking back over his shoulder at the artist. He’s shirtless, sexy in denim shorts and Pasotti has tattoo-ed a Lacoste crocodile on his shoulder. “Because that was the time of Lacoste,” the designer laughs.

We happen to be talking a week before Armani shows his Spring/Summer 2023 collections for Emporio and his own line. His workload remains unchanged. I ask him how each season starts for him. “With a blank piece of paper, and my hands in my hair,” he says ruefully. “Then I take away what wasn’t good in the past. And I look at what’s happening at the moment. I look at my colleagues’ work. Sometimes I’m positively surprised, many times negatively.” Armani is notoriously judgemental. At the moment, he’s not positively surprised. What does he look for? “Where the novelty is, what exists of the fashion of the time that still can be right for today.”

But when “today” is defined by a war, a pandemic, rampant political and financial instability and, overriding everything else, environmental catastrophe, what exactly is “right”? The war in Ukraine has hit Armani hard. He has his own childhood experience of WWII as a reference. He grew up in Piacenza, a small city to the south-east of Milan, and he has vivid memories of taking refuge in the local movie theatre during Allied bombing raids. When he was nine, he and his friends found a bag of gunpowder. While they were playing with it, it exploded. He spent six weeks in hospital on the brink of death. Legend has it that the skin on one foot still bears the imprint of his shoe buckle.

“When I look at the news and I see the images of suffering, it feels like what I’m doing doesn’t make sense nowadays,” Armani says. “This is where it’s difficult for my job, but I need to beat this feeling, this sort of brake that I have that doesn’t enable me to create. I have an example, the recent women’s show, the one I decided to show without music. It was just a few days after the war had started, I did a press conference in this room. I was asked about fashion and in that moment, I just couldn’t speak about it.” Anoushka interjects, “I was there so I can honestly say, Mr. Armani started crying.”

I doubt Giorgio Armani sheds tears very often. For nearly 50 years, his major motivation has been this: “It’s important to not live off nostalgia, to not be doing anything gratuitous, and, most importantly, to innovate, but always keeping in mind that you need to try and make men and women comfortable, feel good in the clothes. Never forget that’s the prime purpose. I can help better my customers’ lives in this way.” That’s also been his consolation through the most difficult periods of his life.

It is a challenge to appreciate how a proposal which sounds so benign now was so radical at the beginning, Armani recalls, “that not everybody understood, because even then, fashion was trying to do something explosive, not necessarily to be comfortable. But then slowly, people understood that my proposal to make fashion more acceptable was the right thing to do.” It’s almost as if he was more reactionary than revolutionary, taking a stand against the extreme proportions, the extreme hairstyles, the extreme everything of the late 60s and early 70s. And then, ironically, reaction bred revolution.

The Pasotti painting on the wall behind us dates from 1978. Armani’s business was barely three years old at that point, but the artist already saw fit to include him in the fashion pantheon alongside Chanel, Dior, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent and the other immortals. He instantly became part of history when he de-stuffed fashion as radically as his idol Coco Chanel had done half a century earlier. But that same history has a tendency to rub the edges off a revolutionary and seal him in the aspic of his past achievements. Armani says he’s happy I think of him as a radical, even happier that I don’t call him nostalgic. “My big fight is with time,” he says, and when time is the enemy, you don’t want to indulge it.

And yet, he can make it sound like there is something vaguely liberating about time passing. He talks about feeling more detached with age, less anguished, maybe more cynical. “I find certain things absurd. Sometimes I think the designer is just too much in his own world of trying to propose something which has to be on covers or that needs to shock, rather than really thinking of the purpose of his job. When I see fashion trying to be in the news just for novelty, I find myself quite shocked, so I become even more cynical. I don’t believe in it. Even when they talk about my things, when I make something a bit outrageous and they say they sold it, I don’t believe them. You know, there may be one hundred people around the world that like something extravagant, but in normal life, I don’t believe in it.”

What about Armani’s use of the word “novelty.” Does he believe it’s possible for anything to be really new in fashion? “No, but maybe you can find a new way to adapt something that has already existed to today’s context, so you find a new way to propose something.” What he really hates is the determining force of “fashionability.” Again, I wonder if such a thing still exists. “Si, certo,” he says instantly. “You just have to look around you and see how some people dress, and they are all following a certain thing that’s of the moment. They all look the same.”

Armani describes himself as isolated, not social, a slave to his job. “But it’s different to before. Now there’s a real empire behind me that I need to preserve for later when I won’t be here anymore.” This is, of course, the succession plan that drives the fashion industry crazy with speculation, because it is so shrouded in mystery. Not to mention that Armani-branded products generated €4 billion in 2021. Rumoured overtures from Bernard Arnault’s LVMH, the Agnelli family’s Exor and Mayhoola, the Qatari investment fund that owns Valentino, are maybe just that. Rumours. “Forgetting what’s happening in the rest of the world, that’s how I plan,” Armani says cryptically. “That’s why I’ve isolated myself. To know what’s the right thing, not following the road that I don’t like. You know, it is very simple. Say no.” One thing that is telling is how much Armani values his independence. And that’s something he would really like to guarantee.

The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates his personal net worth at $9.5 billion, making him the richest fashion designer in the world, and he has clearly sacrificed for that success. Armani often maintained that if he could live his life over, he would do things differently. “Yes, I would still change certain things,” he says today. “I realised I don’t really have friends, aside from my close family and people in the company. With friends, you need to cultivate them, you need to provoke them.” In other words, he has done neither. Years ago, Armani told me he never wanted kids because he thought he would be “an envious father.” I assumed he meant he’d be over-protective. But I’m wondering if he feels like he missed out. I’m telling him something Karl Lagerfeld said towards the end of his life — how he’d found he could feel real love, for his cat Choupette, for Hudson, the young son of model Brad Kroenig — and Armani suddenly sparks up. “Yes, incredibly for me too. It’s different now, you’re absolutely right. For two years, there’s been a little child running around these offices, the daughter of one of my close collaborators. She has become love, and for the first time I have found a vulnerability. I’ve never had this sort of love. It has made me different. I’ve found my tender side.” In a coincidental twist, Armani is also very attached to his cat.

Giorgio Armani, happy at last. But he learned a long time ago not to trust that feeling. When he started his company, there were two: Armani and his partner Sergio Galeotti. They met at the beach in 1966, when Armani was designing menswear for Nino Cerruti. Galeotti, 11 years younger, had the innate sense of superiority all Tuscans possess (according to other Italians) and it was his drive that pushed his older lover to go solo. He made him sell his Volkswagen for money to seed the fledgling business. Armani remembers those early days, creating something with someone he loved, as “indescribable joy. There was a thrill and an enthusiasm. Sergio was explosive, he was much more courageous than me.” He laughs as he looks back. “Sometimes he forgot his conscience, sometimes he was a little bit too much.” He considered Galeotti his alter ego. That’s how people remember him, ferocious, sardonic, very driven, but also very entertaining. “It was a nice balance between me being more held back and Sergio being more brave. And maybe it happened because we weren’t even really aware of what we were building together.”

In 1984, Galeotti was diagnosed with AIDS. He moved to Paris, to be near the Pasteur Institute, where Luc Montagnier was making early breakthroughs in the understanding of HIV. For 12 months, until Galeotti’s death in August 1985, Armani shuttled between Milan, Paris, New York, and everywhere else their rapidly growing business needed him. “I had to go on with the job, I had to design, but I had to be close to Sergio. It was the worst year, though actually, at the time, it was step by step. I didn’t really think what was going to happen. I definitely didn’t think I could make it by myself.”

And neither did anyone else. It was widely assumed within the industry that Armani would simply retire. But he is a Cancer and “a crab gathers everything to itself,” he says. He found a new self-determination after Galeotti’s death, absorbing his alter ego, moving forward with sole control of the business. When I suggest that the whole Armani edifice is a monument to Galeotti, he agrees. “In a certain sense, yes, because he gave me the strength. Everything really started with Sergio, and if I didn’t have the strength to react as I did, this company wouldn’t exist. So, yes, it’s due to him.” Does he ever wonder how it would have looked if Galeotti hadn’t died? “I think Sergio would maybe have made Armani a little bit more revolutionary, a little more explosive,” he muses. “I’m very practical, he was a dreamer.”

But then, Armani interrupts his chain of thought. He wants to acknowledge another individual, Leo Dell’Orco, who has worked for the company since 1977, and is currently head of the Men’s Style Office. (Armani’s niece Silvana is his counterpart in the Women’s Office.) “After Sergio’s death, he has been the closest person to me,” Armani says. “He gave me an incredible psychological support, practical as well as workwise. Primo Sergio, poi Leo.” Successionists might want to file that name away for future reference.

But his acknowledgment of Dell’Orco also validates that vulnerability Armani was talking about. He seems more open. He looks more relaxed in photos. Remember all those moody monochrome press shots from earlier decades, with Armani idealised as if by George Hurrell in Hollywood’s Golden Age. They actually made sense, because one of his original ambitions was acting. Paul Newman was an inspiration. It’s an irresistible notion that he’s been playing a role all these years: Giorgio Armani, superstar designer. “Yes, a little dose of acting is part of my job as well, isn’t it?,” he agrees. “It’s not that I’m not natural, I stay true to myself. But I have to be a bit more. The people around me expect me to be a certain way, so I do have to act a little.”

Elements of the act have attained a certain notoriety over the years: Armani, the hard taskmaster, so demanding that former employees still wake up years later in a cold sweat thinking they haven’t finished something they were supposed to do. Is it an act or an extension of his own conflicted dissatisfaction? Armani himself insists that he tries not to let himself be seen as “a usurper, someone who takes advantage of people”. He hopes that his reputation is as “a kind man.” But he also once told me that his reputation was like handcuffs. And, professionally at least, his opinion hasn’t changed. “People think of me in a certain way and doing a certain type of fashion.”

Which rather begs the question of how Armani would like to be remembered. He takes a long pause before he answers, “…as a sincere man. I say what I mean.” That seems like a humble response from a man who rules a huge fashion empire. “Unfortunately,” he says with another easy laugh. “I am an emperor who doesn’t feel like one.” It must mean something that the part of his empire that Armani still finds most engaging is his fashion shows. “When what I decided in my head comes out on a model, and it corresponds to what my idea was, it’s very gratifying. No one else exists in that moment. It’s very intimate. It’s not a contract, it’s not signing something.” A few days later, I’m backstage at Emporio, and I witness the astonishing sight of Armani working his way down a lineup of models, minutes before they go onstage, hands on to the very last second as he adjusts the eye makeup on every single young woman to create a scintilla of light.

For years, Armani’s clothes were so identifiable by their neutral tones he became known as the King of Greige. The sobriquet riled him. Then his collections became as distinctive for their evocative shades of blue: sea and sky. More recently, light is the key ingredient. Armani called his last haute couture collection Petillant, “sparkling.” The weightless fabrics of his ready-to-wear collection for Spring/Summer 2023 shimmer with gold and silver, counterpointed by luminous evening shades of blue and purple. It may well be more a reflection of my own needs at the moment, but I’m detecting a spiritual thread in this glimmer of the great beyond. Armani gives this some thought. “With age comes a certain detachment from the materiality of things, but also from the hustle and the bustle of work. I care less about other people’s opinions, and never cared about trends. I keep doing what I do, and I keep purifying the output. Would I call that spiritual? Probably not. Spirituality is something very private, while clothes are objects. But for sure, everything I do now is pure and it has more light. It reflects my condition of existential lightness, which of course hides a certain gravitas.”

That very much sounds to me like the musings of a lion in winter, in light of which my last question is obvious. Does Armani ever think about what happens next, not for the business but for himself? I don’t actually expect him to answer, but he does. “For the time being, I keep thinking about work and life, not fantasising too much about the afterlife. That is something that I keep for the deepest recesses of my thoughts. I am sure that, when it will happen, it will be a surprise.”

Decades ago, Armani bought a house in his hometown Piacenza. It was near a park filled with beautiful trees, and he once told me that he wanted to give a name to every single tree in that park. “And when a tree dies, something in me dies too.” Now that was a surprise. His connection with nature felt so poignant to me that I have to bring it up again, while we’re sitting looking at his beautiful Japanese maples. “No, I don’t remember that,” Armani says. “It’s nice. It could have happened.” I guess anything can happen. And it will always be a surprise when it does.

Giorgio Armani has been a member of the BoF 500 since 2013. Explore the BoF 500 community here.

Paris — Balenciaga’s show took place on the rim of a giant mud installation by artist Santiago Sierra, who has always courted controversy with his close-to-the-bone scenarios. The air in the venue was redolent of the smell of freshly turned earth. Maybe this was the site of a missile strike, maybe a recently exhumed mass grave. Events in Ukraine weigh heavy on designer Demna, given the trauma of his youth in nearby Georgia. When his models arrived, tramping through the mud in hoodies and shorts, they were battered and bruised, like kids dragged off the street to fight Putin’s senseless war. Their desperation was palpable. BFRND’s soundtrack was a relentless rat-a-tat-tat sonic assault.

But Demna’s casting was a democracy of the displaced. It wasn’t only scruffy kids in tatty sportwear, and Kanye West dressed as a security guard. It was women in evening gowns, trailing through the mud, it was tech workers, gym bunnies, tycoons, club kids. War had arrived on their doorstep. They had to leave now so they were taking a dirt track to the border, because the roads were closed. That was when the missile struck. You read it in the paper yesterday.

That’s one way of interpreting the extraordinary scenario Demna offered us on Sunday. Another was the one he gave us post-show. You’re so tired of being put in a box, especially by social media, but the more you try to be yourself, the more you get punched in the face. So you just have to get back on your feet and fight through the bullshit. And you have to dig for the truth, create one huge sucking pit of honesty at all costs.

Balenciaga is a luxury label, and Demna sees luxury being put in a box too. Why should it just be a cashmere sweater, he wondered backstage. Why couldn’t it be a distressed, graffiti-ed track suit that it had taken a dog’s age to besmirch? Balenciaga now has a whole Department of Ageing Things and Making Them Dirty. “It’s much harder to make things dirty,” he insisted.

Some of the models had papooses with (not real but scarily lifelike) babies in them. Demna loved the idea that a dad could be someone with piercings, who wore ballerinas and crazy clothes. He’s now 41. Maybe he’s feeling broody, which would be an investment in optimism. Yes, he’s an optimist, he claimed, but he’s not seeing much to be optimistic about. Even though he skated around the issue of how close the mise-en-scene of his new show was to current events, Demna continued to claim the show was like a personal therapeutic exercise for him. He liked the idea of not knowing where the dirt track led.

He also said that it was the outlet he had with haute couture that allowed him the freedom to create such dystopian fantasias. One was about brand heritage, the other was about himself, (im)pure and unadulterated. But he created such irresistibly current images that you could only think he was being a bit disingenuous. Like the last catwalk pairing: Julia Nobis in a glamorous column of black sequins, trailed by a hunched crone in a dress cobbled together from old leather tote bags. She looked like she wanted to Eat the Rich. And that’s a message which is truly torn from today’s headlines.

In one of those funny synchronicities that fashion excels at, Pierpaolo Piccioli was also thinking about boxes. His theme at Valentino was Unboxing, as in opening Pandora’s box and unleashing a whole platform of possibilities. The show invitation was actually a black plastic box. It was quite hard to dispose of in a hotel room, meaning at least one possibility — the one that involved recycling — became a bit of a chore.

The show manifesto declared “Multitude becomes one.” There was certainly enough of last season’s pink in the audience to induce a headache of homogeneity. On the catwalk, the manifesto translated into another fiesta of head-to-toe monochrome, though this time it was scrupulously matched to the skin tone of the model wearing the look. Ideally, this would pull focus to the face, the individuality of the wearer, but there were unfortunate distractions, not least of which was the problem a number of the models had with their footwear. And — cruel irony — the catwalk was an unusually lengthy and arduous trek, up and down, backwards and forwards, which added to the unendurable length of the show itself. Another own goal was the way some models had their faces stencilled to match the Valentino logo on their outfits to create a completely character-denying effect.

Piccioli has been swirling his couture and ready-to-wear together for a while. Anyone looking for a pair of dungarees in duchesse satin knows where to come next Spring. He’s also expressed a fluid attitude towards gender. Whether it’s marabou, sequins or chiffon, his girls and boys were once again drinking from the same well. But what these swirls and twirls have done is make it difficult to see who Valentino is actually for anymore. Under Mr Valentino himself, there was never a scintilla of doubt, but after a run of seasons where he was fashion’s cock of the walk, it felt here like Piccioli got lost in a grandiose and ultimately confusing statement about…um…unboxing? Maybe it’s best to try that in comfortable shoes.

PARIS – Saturday was Japan Day in Paris: Junya Watanabe first thing, Noir Kei Ninomiya at midday, and Comme des Garçons, the mothership, in late afternoon. Enough breathing space between the three shows to absorb their challenging and uniquely different propositions, but also to reflect on the connective threads of Japanese fashion. The influence of Western dress during the Meiji period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries left a legacy of tailored Victorian and Edwardian formality. The Allied occupation post-WWII injected a whole other style vocabulary — jazz, jeans, leather jackets, youth cults — then came the wave of designers who osmosed all that Western jive with traditional Japanese ideas, like wabi-sabi, the embrace of the imperfect and incomplete. The result has been an enduring avant-garde which, fifty years after Issey Miyake first showed in Paris, continues to deliver intelligent, provocative and often beautiful ripostes to fashion orthodoxy.

Junya Watanabe’s mutations of Western pop culture have been responsible for some of my favourite shows over the years, especially the “Travis Bickle” men’s collection from Winter 2006. For Spring 2023, he imagined London’s New Romantics teleported to now. But if that promised an updated version of Steve Strange’s redictable detour. Eugene Souleiman’s hair for the first look was the clue: a huge, teased, florid red coxcomb that instantly summoned to mind the strange living creature named Martin Degville. Pop completists will recognise him as the creative engine behind Sigue Sigue Sputnik. But it was Junya’s genius that transposed the Flash Gordon camp of Sigue with the similarly exaggerated self-absorption of Goth: two narcissistic youth cults for the price of one.

The message of the collection was felt-tipped into a pair of heavily worked Levi’s:  You  can be whatever you want, particularly if that was Siouxsie Sioux on the cover of The Face in February 1982 or the kids lining up six months later to get into the Batcave, birthplace of Goth.  In fact, Junya made his own club atmosphere, with the same purple strip lighting some of us remember from misspent youths.  At the end of the show, the music was turned off abruptly and the lights went out, telling you it was closing time.  Just like those old clubs.  Funny ha-ha.

Michel Gaubert’s soundtrack whipped up an enthusiastic aural froth of Duran Duran and Japan the band, but Junya’s clothes went darker than that.   Shoulders were sci-fi,  proportions exploded into swirling capes and elongated drapes over leggings, latex, sequined or shredded, like Dracula’s brides gone clubbing. The iconoclasm innate to Japan’s contemporary fashion lexicon owes a profound debt to Vivienne Westwood. (In fact, wherever it exists in the world, fashion iconoclasm usually owes her a royalty). It’s hard to see the plaids, the chains, the rips and zips, even the strings of pearls (Viv loved the Queen) without thinking of her transmutations of British tradition. And so it was here. Junya didn’t miss a trick. Punks, Goths and New Romantics all appreciated speed as a cheap and efficient high. Listed collaborators for this collection included the likes of McLaren, Honda and Komine, a Japanese company which makes gear for motorbike racers. Maybe not exactly what the club kids had in mind, but go-fast just the same.

Noir’s Kai Ninomiya, a former patternmaker at Comme des Garçons, comes from – or rather, goes to – another place. He described his new collection as “a mystical journey through the depth of the noir universe.” If you could imagine a designer researching their latest looks through the lens of the James Webb space telescope, that designer might be Ninomiya. Coils of dark matter sparkled, quarks and fractals glittered, the trajectories of constellations were mapped in a cloud of shivering silver wires. The last look was an astral fairy cloaked in a cascade of evanescent star trails.

But the Noir universe was also grounded in more terrestrial terrain, courtesy of a collaboration with Hunter boots, and ceramic headpieces by the artist Takuro Kuwata. Wabi-sabi is a cornerstone of his work. Here, he contributed objects that were a cross between crude crowns and collapsing cakes. But they imbued Ninoyima’s models with a surreally aristocratic quality, especially when matched with mad-hatter hairstyles that looked like Marie Antoinette dragged backwards through a hedge.

There were elements of that tailored Edwardian formality I mentioned: jackets in houndstooth, britches in Prince of Wales check, high-necked blouses, long skirts. But they were twisted, caged, corseted. At its vexing best, Japanese fashion has an inscrutable alienness, and Ninoyima is an excellent ambassador for the alien.

Though he has nothing on his mentor Rei Kawakubo. The Mistress of the Cryptic has lately taken to elaborating ever so slightly on the clothes she presents and, to a reassuring degree, her proclamations dovetail with her designs. “A lamentation for the sorrow in the world today,” were the words that arrived with her new collection. Followed by “a feeling of wanting to stand together.”

The twin poles of despair and hope were so hopelessly entangled in the actual clothing that it was hard to extract one from the other. Kawakubo has tended to steer clear of the polemic in her designs, allowing them to exist outside social or political comment, but it has been kind of wonderful to see her engage more with the world. A few things instantly stood out in this show. One was that the models wore helmet or crown-like headgear, and it was my extremely erudite colleague Luke Leitch who identified them as virgin’s crowns, or crants, in which maidens were once buried. (Hamlet’s Ophelia was interred in a crant, said Shakespeare.) The other was that the stately soundtrack was by Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou, who scored “Mad Max:Fury Road.” I sat through the show looking at the pretty young models with their streaming white tresses and their outfits composed of lace glossed with black oil slicks and defensive carapaces of fabric and brocade bedspreads folded into skirts and shirts turned upside down so that collars were hems, and I thought that these were women at the end of the world, making the very best of what they had and learning to triumph in the face of hellish adversity. And they would triumph.

So that is what the very best of Japanese design can leave you thinking at the end of what is ultimately just a parade of new clothes to fill the new season’s demands. And nobody does it better.

On Saturday, a group of the world’s most influential figures in fashion and popular culture gathered at the Shangri-La Hotel in Paris to celebrate The BoF 500, the definitive index of the people shaping the global fashion industry, presented by Snapchat.

Since 2013, BoF has gathered together a global community of fashion’s most influential people — based on their leadership, creativity, innovation and impact — across eight categories: Designers, Executives, Media, Retailers, Entrepreneurs, Creative Class, Models & Muses and Catalysts.

This year, attendees who walked the red carpet at the BoF 500 Gala were more international than ever before. From New York and Milan to Mumbai and Kuala Lumpur guests hailed from all over the world. Among them were Kylie Jenner, Diesel’s Glenn Martensi, LVMH executive Alexandre Arnault, Perfect editor-in-chief Bryan Grey Yambao, models Anna Cleveland, Hari Nef, Ashley Graham and Jordan Barrett. Scroll down below to see who else joined them.

On October 1st, 2022, BoF hosted the #BoF500 Gala in Paris in partnership with Snapchat, Arezzo & Co, Shangri-La Hotel and OBO.