I didn’t watch that Chanel runway the way I watch most fashion shows.

Most of the time, a show is a faraway planet: a black box of lighting cues, music like a heartbeat, silhouettes that pass too quickly to hold. I admire the craftsmanship, I file away the references, and then I return to my own life where I’m wearing the same coat for the third winter in a row and telling myself it’s “classic.”

But the day I first saw the Grand Palais turned into a supermarket, something in me stopped floating and touched the ground.

The set was almost offensively familiar: aisles, shelves, labels, check-out counters. The kind of architecture built for decisions you make while hungry, tired, or in a hurry. Except everything was branded, polished, curated into a joke with perfect timing. There were tins and jars and bottles that looked like they belonged in someone’s pantry, but their very existence was the punchline: luxury dressed up as everyday necessity.

And then the models came out, and they didn’t glide like swans across a mythic lake. They walked like people who have places to be. Some of them pushed shopping carts down the runway aisles as if they were doing an errand, as if the most dramatic part of the day was choosing between two nearly identical options.

It’s funny how quickly the mind adjusts.

At first you laugh—because of course it’s ridiculous, of course it’s theatre, of course it’s Karl Lagerfeld building a world where even the pickles have a double-C. But the longer you look, the less the joke feels like a joke. It starts to feel like a mirror.

Because this is what the best fashion shows do when they’re at their sharpest: they don’t just sell beauty. They diagnose desire.

I’ve always thought the supermarket is the true runway of adulthood.

Not because it’s glamorous, but because it’s relentless. It asks you, again and again: Who are you today? The person who buys the careful ingredients for a week of home-cooked dinners, or the person who grabs something quick and salty and hopes tomorrow will be different? The person who reads labels and compares prices, or the person who tosses things in the basket because the packaging promises a better self? The person who comes with a list, or the person who comes to be seduced?

A fashion show—when it’s honest—asks the same questions, just louder.

In that Chanel supermarket, the clothes played with the idea of comfort as status. There were sneakers that insisted you could be practical without surrendering taste. There were tweeds in bright, almost edible colors, like the product displays you always notice but never buy. There were metallics that flashed like the foil on something processed and irresistible. And there were accessories that made the metaphor explicit: baskets and bags that looked like they had been engineered for shopping, as if the most luxurious thing you could carry was proof that you could afford to carry anything.

I remember noticing how the set made room for impulse.

In a normal show, the runway is a single statement: a line you follow without deviation. In a supermarket, the whole point is deviation. You go in for one thing and come out with six. The aisles are designed to interrupt your intentions with suggestions. Your willpower is treated like a minor obstacle, not a meaningful boundary.

That’s where the genius of the set landed for me: it wasn’t just about consumerism in the abstract. It was about the daily mechanics of wanting.

Wanting is rarely grand. It is usually fluorescent.

Wanting sounds like a small thought: I deserve a treat. Wanting is a hand reaching out while the mind is elsewhere. Wanting is the quiet faith that if you buy the right thing, you will become the right person.

When I was younger, I thought wanting was embarrassing unless it was “serious.” You could want love. You could want purpose. You could want a life that mattered.

But you couldn’t want a coat just because you wanted it.

Now I think that’s backwards.

Our small wants are where we practice our values. They’re where we rehearse our relationship with scarcity, with control, with reward, with identity. The supermarket is where you learn what you do when no one is watching—and what you do when everyone is.

A runway is supposedly the opposite: everyone watching, and yet nothing is at stake for you personally. You can admire, judge, forget. But when the runway becomes an aisle, the distance collapses. Suddenly you can picture yourself inside the scene. Suddenly you can feel the texture of your own habits.

There’s a detail from that show that stays with me more than any hemline: the check-out.

At the end of the journey through choices, there is always a moment of reckoning. The items on the conveyor belt become a kind of autobiography. Not the one you tell, but the one you live.

And that’s where fashion gets complicated.

We like to pretend we buy clothes for utility: warmth, coverage, appropriateness. But most of us, if we’re honest, buy clothes the way we buy groceries: partly for nourishment, partly for fantasy. We want to feel prepared. We want to feel attractive. We want to feel like we belong to the version of life we imagine.

Sometimes that’s harmless. Sometimes it’s even beautiful. A well-made coat can be a promise you keep to your future self: I will not abandon you to cheapness. I will wrap you in something that lasts.

But sometimes the fantasy eats the nourishment.

I’ve stood in my own closet—my personal pantry—and felt the strange shame of having too much and still feeling like I have nothing. It’s the same feeling you get when you open a fridge full of condiments and realize there’s nothing to eat.

That’s the trap: abundance without intention.

The Chanel supermarket made that trap look chic, and that was the point. It forced a question that’s uncomfortable precisely because it’s so ordinary:

When does “choice” become noise?

I don’t think the answer is to reject fashion shows or to moralize consumption until we’re numb with virtue. I don’t even think the answer is minimalism as a performance. The answer, if there is one, lives in attention.

Attention is what separates a costume from a wardrobe.

Attention is what separates buying from choosing.

Attention is what turns a runway into more than spectacle—into a story you can actually use.

There’s a moment in that show where the editors—people trained to be cool, to be discerning, to treat desire like a professional tool—were reportedly giddy about the set’s products and props. They wanted to take things. They wanted souvenirs from the joke. They wanted proof that they had been inside the world.

I understand that impulse intimately.

We all want a token that says: this happened to me. I was there. I touched the glossy surface of something bigger than my routine.

But here’s the thought that won’t leave me: what if the token doesn’t have to be an object?

What if the most valuable thing you can take from a fashion show is a recalibrated eye?

Because the next time you go to the actual supermarket—your local one, with imperfect lighting and slightly bruised fruit—you can bring that eye with you. You can notice how color is arranged to guide you. You can notice how packaging speaks in the language of aspiration. You can notice your own internal weather: Am I buying from calm, or from craving? Am I buying from care, or from panic? Am I nourishing myself, or trying to edit myself?

And the next time you get dressed, you can ask a similarly quiet set of questions:

Is this outfit a decision, or a default?

Am I wearing this because it expresses me, or because it hides me?

Am I reaching for this piece the way I reach for a snack—quickly, automatically, hoping it will fix a feeling?

The older I get, the more I think style is not a talent. It’s a practice.

It’s the practice of being specific.

Specific about what you love.

Specific about what you actually use.

Specific about what makes you feel like yourself instead of like an advertisement for yourself.

A fashion show can be an extreme form of that specificity—an exaggerated sentence written in fabric and light. But the sentence only matters if it changes how you read your own life.

That Chanel supermarket show didn’t make me want to buy a cart-shaped bag or a shrink-wrapped purse or a branded jar of anything.

It made me want to walk through my days with a sharper kind of gentleness.

To write a list before I enter the aisles—literal or metaphorical.

To remember that “treat yourself” is sweetest when it’s not a reflex.

To accept that wanting isn’t wrong, but unexamined wanting is expensive in ways money can’t measure.

And to believe, stubbornly, that the most stylish thing a person can carry is not a logo, but a clear mind.

Maybe that’s what I took from the show: not a souvenir, but a question that fits in my pocket.

When you step up to the check-out of your own life—when the day is done, when the choices are made—what do you want on the belt?

Not what looks impressive.

Not what proves you were there.

What actually feeds you.