By Anna Zhila

The circus leaves town. Another Paris Fashion Week is done. And we’re left with the after-images. Thousands of them. A digital blizzard of perfectly lit, perfectly posed, perfectly edited pictures of clothes walking down a runway. That’s the official story.

But what if that’s not the story at all?

What if the most interesting things are happening just outside the frame? Backstage, on the street, in the faces of the people watching. The moments that get edited out. The stuff that’s a bit messy, a bit… real.

At first, you think a fashion show is a simple thing. A designer has some ideas, puts them on some models, and sends them down a catwalk so that people can see them, and hopefully, buy them. But it’s not that anymore, is it? Not really.

The show on the runway is now just one tiny part of a much bigger, much stranger performance.

I’ve been going to these things for decades. I remember a time when it was just a handful of editors in a salon, quietly taking notes. Now, it’s a global media event. And the most important action isn't always on the catwalk.

Look at the pictures from the street. The crowds outside the venue. It’s a whole ecosystem. Photographers swarming around anyone who looks remotely famous or just plain odd. Spectators who have no ticket, no hope of getting in, but who turn up anyway, dressed to the nines, just to be part of the atmosphere. They’re not there to see the clothes. They are the clothes. They are part of the spectacle. Are they the audience? Or are they the unpaid extras in the background of a thousand Instagram posts?

And the front row. It used to be for the powerful editors, the big department store buyers. The people who actually mattered to the business. Now? It’s a performance in itself. You see a shot of Robin Wright at Stella McCartney, or FKA Twigs at Thom Browne. They’re not just watching a show. They are the show. Their presence is a carefully calibrated PR move, a signal to the world that this is an important place to be. The clothes they wear, the expression on their face… it’s all part of the theatre.

The whole thing feels a bit like one of those old-fashioned three-ring circuses. In the main ring, you have the models and the clothes doing their thing. That’s the official main event. But over in the other rings, you’ve got the celebrity acrobats on the front row, and the street-style clowns performing for the cameras outside. And honestly? Sometimes the side shows are more interesting.

Then there’s backstage.

Backstage used to be a place of pure, functional chaos. Hair, makeup, terrified models getting dressed. Now, it’s just another stage. It’s a performance of a performance. You see these beautiful, candid-looking black and white photos of models getting ready at Yohji Yamamoto. A moment of quiet contemplation. A smudge of makeup being applied. It all looks so artful, so… real.

But is it? Or is it just a different kind of theatre, carefully managed for the backstage photographers? The ‘authentic’ moment has been monetised, turned into its own aesthetic. The illusion of seeing behind the curtain has become part of the illusion itself.

Actually, scrap that. The interesting thing isn't the performance, it's the contrast. The jarring shift between the different realities all crammed into one event.

You look at a picture of the finale at Valentino. All the models lined up, this grand, powerful statement. It’s pure, controlled theatre. And then you see a shot of Lana Del Rey and her sister just… being sisters, having a chat. And for a second, a little crack of reality appears in the polished surface of the whole event.

Or you see a photo of the lineup at Thom Browne. The models looking like strange, beautiful, identical dolls. A perfect, surreal vision. And then you see a close-up backstage, a single face, a moment of individual humanity before the mask goes on. It’s in those gaps, between the artifice and the real, that you find the story.

So what is a fashion show in 2025? Is it about selling clothes? Or is it about creating a universe of images, a storm of content, where the clothes themselves are almost incidental?

It makes you wonder who it’s all for. Is it for the woman who might one day buy that Hermès coat? Or is it for the millions of people who will never buy it, but who will consume the thousands of images it generates online?

The show on the runway lasts for about 12 minutes. But the other show, the one on our screens, the one on the street, the one backstage… that one never really ends. It just keeps feeding on itself, a beautiful, exhausting, endless performance. And we’re all part of the audience now, whether we have a ticket or not.