During fashion week, all the horrible stuff happening in the world seems worse because it’s playing out against an expensive backdrop of pomp and plentitude. Once upon a time, runway shows used to serve a business purpose, of course, but now they’re largely relegated to marketing and theatrics. Clothes can make you feel something, but usually they don’t, and when vanity smoke bombs start detonating at the Rick Owens show when there’s 11 minutes left before the Titanic submersible runs out of oxygen, it makes you wonder: What am I doing here?

I arrived in Paris on Thursday morning, and yet in the four days that I’ve been in town, the people in the sub lost their souls; Turner Classic Movies was gutted (the designers were sad, many fancy themselves future directors); the coup in Russia started and, to my understanding, also ended (sign up for my partner Julia Ioffe’s private email to learn what will happen next); and there was a bobcat spotted in my driveway (we live on a hill in Southern California). Meanwhile, there I was trailing Carine Roitfeld en route to the Givenchy show on the courtyard balcony of Napoleon’s barracks as she took drags on a cigarette wearing a black Tom Ford dress and a tiny anorak.