Paris Fashion Week: The Row Goes Off Grid

The Row brand asks attendees to put down the phones at a time when other designers lean into social media.

Even if you’ve never attended a fashion show in your life, you know the way it works: Photographers crowd inside and out, snapping pictures of celebrities trotting into the venue and preening in the front row. The clothes come out, and everyone, whether they’re seated in the centre of the action or the hinterlands, takes pictures and videos. They share them on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter or X or whatever. Their followers ooh and ahh (or ew and ack). If a fashion fan is really dedicated, they watch the multi-hour live stream.

Every showgoer and social media addict plays their part, and every brand relies on this little performance — a democratisation of fashion that has largely replaced the pre-Y2K runway culture of exclusivity and the need to be in the room to have something to say.

But it’s a script that The Row, the American brand started by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen nearly two decades ago, is increasingly refusing to perform.

Last season, The Row, which puts on shows in Paris, caused a fracas when its publicity team instructed guests not to record. This season, a missive arrived with similar instructions. When guests arrived at The Row’s right-bank mansion, a small Japanese notebook and very fine pencil were on our seats, as they were last season, suggesting we draw or journal what we see.

Wednesday’s show began and ended without fanfare. Several editors dutifully doodled in their notepads. The Instagram account Stylenotcom shared hand-drawn notes.

It’s not unheard of for designers to restrict outside photographers and release their own set of runway images, but The Row took it a step beyond by not releasing any photographs of its apparitional show, save for a series of posed images that resemble an opulent magazine spread. Vogue Runway usually has runway images on its site within an hour or two of a show’s finale — but the fashion press was not given imagery from The Row until Monday morning, which is why you are reading this review so many days after.

Several outlets grouched about all this earlier this year. Elle questioned whether The Row was “amplifying fashion’s elitism problem”. Highsnobiety wrote that “inadvertently, The Row also revived one of the least appealing elements of pre-Y2K fashion shows: the haves-vs-have-nots dynamic”. And X was chock-full of debate over whether The Row was moving fashion culture forward or pulling it back to a quieter, more intellectual period that excluded the countless people who don’t have the resources to attend Paris Fashion Week. After all, it is these masses of digital fans and everyday consumers who have helped turn many fashion brands into corporate behemoths over the past two decades. (The Row itself, which the owners of Chanel and L’Oreal just invested in, is now valued at about US$1 billion - NZ$1.59b.)

The debate seems like hooey to me. The intention seems to be not to restrict the world from seeing their clothes but to better serve the people in the room. (Not a cellphone in sight, just fashion insiders living in the moment!) It was easier to focus on the clothes, probably.

The textures I saw on Wednesday’s runway — a slub-knit sweater T-shirt, a frisky fur flat, a shower slide, sculpted tops worn with Carhartt-style carpenter pants and a series of so-blah-they’re-fabulous Cristobal Balenciaga-ish black dresses — stuck in my mind, even though this was not one of the label’s more outrageous collections.

For all the time we spend looking at our phones, and specifically looking at photographs and images, we are really terrible at reading visual culture.

Ironically, The Row is one of the most beloved brands on TikTok, and its products, especially its shoes, are endless fodder for the dull parasite called dupe culture, in which cheap knockoffs are gleefully consumed and reviewed, with earlier eras’ trepidations about copying and cheapness thrown to the wind.

It’s a frequent defence among fast-fashion buyers: that everyone should be able to have nice things. This is certainly not to say that those who can’t afford The Row shouldn’t have access to nice clothes; in fact, for most of American history, the middle class has dressed better than the wealthy, because we had department store brands and union-made American goods that ensured wool coats, trousers and well-constructed dresses were widely available. (Now that clothes are mostly made elsewhere and fast fashion has swallowed nearly every part of the clothing business, such clothes are impossible to find.)

But this is not a luxury brand’s problem to solve — and really, we need to rethink why and how we look at luxury brands to tell us how to dress. The Row seems much more inspired by small, off-the-grid names like Dosa, Marco Zanini and the now-defunct Zoran than it is by the mainstream giants it’s mistakenly grouped with, like Khaite or Loro Piana. You can find a lot of the designers they are in conversation with on secondhand sites for very reasonable prices.

What The Row is doing is asking fashion to think smaller. Of course a business that sells $890 jelly shoes is exclusive. Not every fashion company needs to speak to every consumer. Really, a live-streamed fashion show is just entertainment, and if a brand doesn’t want to speak to the whole world, why do it? Knockoff the sensibility, not the products.

Contrast that with a show like Dior. A performance art-archer, SAGG Napoli, shot arrows down the middle of the long, long, looong runway. Designer Maria Grazia Chiuri’s sporty track pants and motorcycle jackets were actually a lot of fun, even though they were pretty nutty. (They had a sort of collectible hypebeast quality I found delightfully off-piste.)

I have no idea where Chiuri came up with the idea to show these clothes, which had little to do with her previous collections or the spirit of Dior, but the imagery of the archer shooting bull’s-eyes as women in lace-up knee-high sneakers stalked by was fabulous.

The archer was a spectacle, and everyone took picture after picture and video after video. A Hollywood set’s worth of camera equipment documented every moment and blasted them out to the world.

It couldn’t be more different from The Row’s approach — except that you have women deciding that, regardless of the scale of the task at hand, they’ll do exactly what they please.

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