Having lent its intellectual property to just about every household brand on the shoppable internet – including but not limited to Balmain, Christian Louboutin, Miu Miu, Givenchy, Gucci, Stella McCartney and Coach – Disney has tried through several collaborations to be seen as a fashion-adjacent institution. I wonder if tonight it might have achieved something else: making fashion Disney-adjacent.
Coperni this evening closed the spring/summer 2025 season with a theme park-sized spectacle at Disneyland Paris. It was a strange thing to see establishment editors abandon their hard-won cool for… Mickey Mouse headbands… but a sense of delirium was perhaps to be expected this late in the fashion-month game. To wit: after a delayed soundtrack kicked in and the first batch of models had been dispatched along the enchanted promenade of Le Château De La Belle Au Bois Dormant – aka Sleeping Beauty’s Castle – fashion-favourites Paloma Elsesser, Jill Kortleve, Anok Yai, Lila Moss, Amelia Gray and Irina Shayk played princess and villain in turret-necked minidresses, one-legged trousers, sinister trench coats and balloon-sleeved bodysuits with ice-hewn and “gravity free” Swipe bags.
And then… Kylie Jenner closed in an enormous bouffant gown cut from spandex and crepe. “Every time I go to Paris things just happen,” she told Giles Hattersley during her September cover interview for British Vogue, adding the eerily familiar catchphrase, “It’s a whole new world”. Though this was Jenner’s first time walking at Paris Fashion Week, let it be remembered that it was not her catwalk debut. (She walked for Avril Lavigne’s erstwhile label, Abbey Dawn, in 2011, before returning in 2013 and later treading the runway with sister Kendall for Sherri Hill and The Heart Truth foundation that same season.) Whether Jenner was the villain or heroine of this season’s story is dependent on your own personal fantasies.