LV. 2026. PARIS.

This was June 24th, when the air tasted of sandalwood and something else: the peculiar sweetness of cultures fermenting in the belly of luxury. The birds fled. First one, then dozens, then the entire congregation of pigeons that normally held court at the Centre Pompidou scattered into the Parisian dusk as drums began their colonial heartbeat. This was how it began, yesterday's fever dream, when fashion rolled dice the size of children's coffins and called it culture, called it couture.

Mumbai-based architect Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai created the centerpiece - a 2,700-square-meter recreation of Snakes and Ladders (originally the 2nd-century Indian game Moksha Patam) rendered in timber, local marble, and colored stone. Five serpents wound through a clay-hued checkerboard, with Jain describing his vision as "like a mandala, set in the idea of a game where everybody has to ascend." The game's original moral teachings about virtues (ladders) and vices (snakes) became Williams' metaphor for fashion's ascent: "the perfect metaphor for life: the climbs, the falls, the lessons."

Beyoncé wore denim like a second skin, like America wears its innocence, tight and blue and expensive. Her foot would later tap to Punjabi rhythms, and the internet would call this understanding. She sat beside her husband, who was busy counting something in his head. We all count something in our heads. He sat next to Bernard Arnault. Bernard counted loudest, his proximity to power so dense it created its own gravitational field, pulling celebrities into orbit like designer debris around a dying star. Each proximity a multiplication of influence, a mathematics of access where the only common denominator was uncommon wealth.

Pharrell Williams, preserved in the amber of his own becoming, raised hands that had forgotten the weight of things that weren't worth their weight. His smile contained multitudes: slave ships reimagined as cruise lines, plantations reborn as playgrounds, the Middle Passage translated into French and sold back to us as sophistication.

I'm personally a global citizen, he would later say, the way cancer cells are personally tourists. From Marc Jacobs' museum of beautiful violations came the Darjeeling Limited patterns: elephants marching toward extinction across handbags, tigers frozen mid-roar on scarves that would strangle the memory of wildness. These prints had been sleeping since 2007, waiting for the statute of limitations on nostalgia to expire. Now they rose like zombies, like repressed memories, like everything fashion had swallowed and couldn't quite digest.

Music began. A.R. Rahman's blessing fell like rain on a crime scene: beautiful, useless, washing away evidence. "Yaara Punjabi" played while the audience swayed in that particular way bodies sway when they're worth more than the ground they stand on. Tyler and Doechii sampled M.I.A., that Tamil daughter who had escaped one war only to soundtrack another. 

First came the bandhgala jackets, those colonial collaborations reborn in ultralight wool that whispered of maharajas choking on treaties. The cut was precise: history tailored to forget its own bleeding. Micro-beads traced meridians of power across lapels, each crystal a small cataract on memory's eye. Turmeric yellow drained across Prince of Wales suits until the pattern dissolved into what Williams called "lived-in elegance" but what looked like jaundice contracted from proximity to gold. The yellow had been disciplined. Made palatable for palates that confused curry with culture.

The Speedy bag appeared in ostrich leather the color of flightlessness. Each piece was a small coffin for something that had once been alive: an animal, a tradition, a way of being in the world that didn't require authentication by a luxury conglomerate. A trunk rolled past. Inside, everything had been crystallized: conscience, context, the ability to distinguish between appreciation and appetite.

J-Hope bounced in his seat, kinetic energy seeking ground. Fresh from learning how nations were made from men, he sat learning how brands were made from nations. His presence was algebra: add enough diversity to the front row and the equation balanced. The scattered Indian actors served as human receipts. Proof of purchase. Proof of permission.

The math was simple. The violence was complex. Everyone pretended not to know the difference. Williams spoke of gratitude the way colonizers speak of discovery: as if the thing hadn't existed until he'd found it, as if existence began with his acknowledgment. His research trips to Delhi, Mumbai, Jodhpur became color stories the way autopsies become anatomy lessons: educational if you could forget the dying. He moved in reverence, he said, though reverence for what remained as vague as the provenance of inspiration that looked suspiciously like inventory. 

Applause rose like property values in a gentrified neighborhood. Everyone clapped for their own reflection in the mirrored surface of merchandise. The plaza emptied except for the ghosts of everything that had been sacrificed for this spectacle: dignity, context, the radical idea that beauty shouldn't require suffering, just different suffering, just suffering with better lighting.

This is all satire, whether I’m referring to this post or the show itself is up to you.

Metta.