Ah, Paris Haute Couture Week. The time of year when fashion descends into full-blown theatre, feathers fly (sometimes literally), and celebrities parade through the city like lost characters from a Tim Burton fever dream. This season? Let’s just say, non, cherie, it wasn’t business as usual.

Let’s start with La Kardashian. Fresh from a high profile opulent wedding in Venice we are still talking about , Kim K floated into Paris and onto the couture runway for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo. Whether she strutted or shuffled remains unclear, but what is clear is that couture has gone full Kardashian. One can only assume Balenciaga provided a high-fashion GPS sat-nav to guide her along the catwalk.

Meanwhile, Dior took an eyebrow-raising half-season break. The menswear show? Glorious, I loved it !  But apparently exhausting—so much so that the brand decided to take a lie-down instead of presenting their couture collection. We sympathise. Who among us hasn’t needed a cat nap  after a beautifully -executed herringbone trouser moment?

Over at Chanel, things took a rather melancholic turn. The house bid adieu to its internal design team headed by Virginie Viard  with a show that might generously be described as “tasteful” and less generously as “as thrillingly conservative! Still, it had all the classics: tweed, puffed sleeves, and the lingering ghost of Gabrielle Chanel side-eyeing us from a tartan mist.

And then there was Cardi B. The woman, the myth, the raven. Yes, she arrived at Schiaparelli’s show with a live crow perched on her gloved hand, looking like an avant-garde Snow White crossed with a Victorian fortune teller. The collection? Dark, surreal, and only slightly terrifying. There were eyeball-embroidered dresses, corsets that looked like they’d crush your internal organs into origami, and a pulsing red heart on someone’s back. Because nothing says couturelike mild existential dread.

So, what have we learned from this week of fashion mayhem? Couture is in flux, a sign of the times . It’s saying goodbye, saying hello, occasionally screaming into the void via taxidermy and velvet. One thing’s for certain: if fashion is the circus, then Paris just sent in the clowns—bejewelled, bedazzled, and probably carrying a handbag shaped like a pigeon.

Bravo, Paris. Bravo.