Singular Beauties

I don’t understand fashion the way most people seem to. Collections pile up endlessly, color palettes get recycled, models cycle through. I watch the runway presentations and I see something that always looks the same: blank faces, expensive clothes nobody could actually afford, a strange choreography of beauty and emptiness. It’s a con. A machine that runs on itself.

Scarlett Johansson showed up in Carine Roitfeld’s new portfolio.

Roitfeld has spent decades running fashion magazines—French Vogue, then Harper’s Bazaar. For this latest series, she had Karl Lagerfeld photograph celebrities against a black backdrop. Dakota Fanning came. Grimes. Scarlett, the one everyone in Tokyo seems to have feelings about. The images are running in every version of the magazine—29 editions across 45 countries, starting in September.

It made me realize something basic: fashion only becomes interesting when there’s a famous face attached to it. A beautiful dress is just fabric until Scarlett Johansson wears it. Then suddenly it exists. The models themselves disappear. They’re just surfaces for the real commodity, which is recognition, the weight of a familiar face. Maybe that’s how it has to work. Maybe that’s the only way beauty gets seen. But there’s something sad about it—the clothes and the women equally radiant, equally beside the point.