Smart Watch
Lyas, creator of Paris Fashion Week's La Watch Party, explains how his Paris fashion show viewing fetes have swiftly grown into a cultural phenomenon.
Last summer, French fashion journalist and influencer Elias Medini, aka Lyas, had an idea: Why not have watch parties for fashion shows like sports fans do for games? The first was in a café in Paris during the menswear shows last June, and was such a big success, La Watch Party has blown up into a huge event for 2,000 at the Théâtre du Châtelet, with drinks, food, live fashion shows, Q&As, and deejays. The whole thing is free, without tickets. Just show up and have fun. This season’s run of La Watch Party concludes tonight with Chanel. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
But wouldn’t you know it: La Watch Party was such a good idea, Vogue decided to stage its own at the very-short-lived Vogue Café pop-up, for the Balmain show. Miffed, Lyas took to social media to blast the fashion glossy for stealing his idea. Difference was: Vogue’s was invitation only, i.e. exclusive. Lyas’s is open to the public, i.e. inclusive. Not really the same thing.
Nevertheless, Lyras is onto something. For all fashion executives’ talk about democratizing the luxury business—the subject of my first book, Deluxe, and actually, my third one, Fashionopolis, too—in the end, Fashion Week, be it in New York, London, Milan, or Paris, is wholly, and proudly, exclusionary. Sure, smaller, local fashion weeks in third-tier cities, like Minneapolis and Atlanta, are often open to the public.
But the only major one I know that welcomes the hoi polloi is the Melbourne Fashion Festival in Melbourne, Australia. I’ve been a couple of times, and it has such a joyous vibe—local fashion fans are genuinely thrilled to be able to buy tickets to see the shows, attend cocktails and parties, and mix the designers and retailers. It is truly festive.
Inviting the public to fashion shows certainly makes sense, since these are the people who actually go shopping and spend money on fashion—unlike glossy magazine editors and influencers who acquire much of their wardrobes through brand “gifting.”
To know more about La Watch Party and how it came about, I rang up Lyas. Excerpts:
First, tell me about you.
Well, I’m 27. I’m from Normandy, from Rouen. I’m half French, half Algerian.
And you’ve always loved fashion?
Actually, I first had a love for cinema, and it transformed into a love for fashion. That’s why I came to Paris: to study film direction at ESRA – École supérieure de réalisation audiovisuelle, a French private film school.
Have you directed anything yet? Besides the Watch Parties?
Not yet. After La Watch Party can stand on its own, then I’ll move into cinema.
How did you come up the idea to do fashion show watch parties?
It came from the fact that I was not invited to Jonathan Anderson’s first Dior show—the menswear show—last summer. I was the fashion correspondent for Interview magazine, and I was doing content creation on Instagram and TikTok, and I’d been to Dior’s three previous shows, so I thought I’d get an invitation. I really wanted to witness what I thought was going to be fashion history and I was mad that I couldn’t see it in real life. I thought: ‘I don’t want to stay at home and watch it on my phone. Let’s just go to the bar I always go to—Le Saint Denis—bring the TV from my place, screen the show and invite everyone to come and watch it like they would watch a football match.’ And about 250, 300 people showed up.
