Conde Nast and Vogue top editor Anna Wintour closed Paris’ Spring/Summer 2025 menswear fashion week with the biggest bang imaginable, by taking over the city’s entire Place Vendôme, erecting a 38,000-square-foot backstage, installing a full orchestra and presenting a rollicking, over-the-top tribute to a century of Paris fashion and sport in the form of a runway show on the evening of June 23. The 2024 summer Olympics kick off at the end of next month, so there was an inbuilt storyline of athletics and athleticism in the tribute.

Courtesy of Vogue London, the stats are daunting: The outdoor-runway “walk” required nearly 700 looks, the orchestra was 42 strong and among the 130-plus models and the hundred-odd dancers were models Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner, who entered riding a couple of well-schooled ponies liveried out in Hermès scarves draped from their saddles. The flowing silk accessories gave an understated bit of medieval flash to the horses’ otherwise restrained walk, at least.

The producers, which is to say, Wintour, forgot no one in their history of fashion. In addition to putting three 1924 Chanel evening dresses on the runway, also walking in the show was a battalion of Paris’ tailors and seamstresses, the backbone of the global industry, resplendent above in their working-day whites as they entered behind a banner for their turn at the Place Vendôme. That was a goose-bump moment. Pictured below, once dismounted, Ms. Jenner changed out of her riding habit to appear in a gauzy, nude-colored gown.

Bringing up the runway wattage in homage to athletics was Serena Williams, pictured below, who, thematically surrounded by dancers in tennis whites, wore a tight, stretch, graphically flared, full-length gown from the late Virgil Abloh’s brilliant Off-White label, with the label cheekily emblazoned in gold across her chest, soccer-player-style. As ever, Ms. Williams’ self-assured champion’s stage presence brought a boost of sovereignty to the Place Vendôme. She owned it.

British model, actress and Vogue fixture Cara Delevingne wore a John Galliano number in pale gold, with the top quoting the pointed Galliano-designed bodice that Madonna profiled back in the day. Delevingne did double duty on the evening by helping Vogue out with the commentary.

No matter how many editions there are of Vogue globally, there is only one Vogue, issued pretty much as the monthly bible from Conde Nast New York, and there’s only one top editrix for the brand on this planet, and that is Anna Wintour, magazine-maker and fashion-world titan. She’s also an experienced progenitor and hostess of the world’s splashiest parties, beginning with her chairmanship of the Metropolitan Museum’s benefit for its Costume Institute, aka the Met Gala, every spring in New York, which Wintour has chaired every year since 1997, an unbroken run of fabulous benefit-hosting yet to be matched by any other publishing or entertainment figure, corporate titan or politician, save arguably for Queen Elizabeth II.

Under the Wintour aegis, the “Vogue World” parties, hinged to fashion weeks worldwide, debuted appropriately in New York in 2022, with an epic afterparty at the city’s infamously raucous Standard Hotel, attended by a cuvée of global hipsterdom. In 2023, after one of London’s endless fashion weeks, Wintour took over the city’s theatre district and held the Vogue World event at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane.

As in New York and London, there was an epic everybody-who’s-anybody afterparty in Paris staged—where else—at Maxim’s. As at the Met Gala and its several afterparties, some demonstration of fashion muscle was required. Some of the guests came to the Place Vendôme show in their evening looks, but some of the runway habitues changed into equally spectacular and occasionally daring afterparty frocks. Above, en route into Maxim’s, famous high-heeled ladies-shoe designer Christian Louboutin demonstrates that he can definitely color-coordinate his highway-worker Hi-Viz trousers-and-shirt with a stylish man’s spectator.

Pictured above, also well-dismounted from her riding habit, model Gigi Hadid sports a shiny blue top with a painted-on decolletage en route into the Maxim’s afterparty. Perhaps that fact bears repeating in a different way: According to every available report, the top is not see-through, nor are the faux-denim folds of the Levi’s-inspired faux-denim hoop skirt actually there, either. It’s all colored on.

Unbothered by the evening chill, or possibly just not wanting to bother tracking any sort of a wrap inside the Maxim’s tumble, it-thespians Diane Kruger and Norman Reedus demonstrate how even the non-French can, also, effect a stylish entrance at the Vogue afterparty.