'Emily in Paris' Enters Its Good-Bad Era

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Thank you all from the bottom of my heart for your support and being invested enough in what Back Row does to send me your ideas. Now, let’s get through Emily in Paris together.

Emily in Paris released five new episodes last week and, reader, I’ve watched them all. This is the show’s FOURTH season. Sit with that a moment. Almost nothing runs that long on television. Succession got four seasons. The Other Two, which was that rare combination of frothy and brilliant, got three. Steven Spielberg could direct the first-ever Oscar-winning, Emmy-winning, Tony-winning television show and I bet you Apple TV+ would give him, like, two and a half. At best.

And Just Like That is yet to release its third season, and who knows how long that will last? Max could drag it into three-and-a-half or four, but if I know one thing about embarrassingly addictive, outfit-forward television, it’s that And Just Like That’s audience scores are not Emily in Paris’s:

Perhaps we have reached a shared understanding that Emily in Paris is not ever going to be anything it’s not. Which may be why the Emily in Paris discourse may have taken a turn this season. Even the takedowns have dampened! The Guardian may have called season four “a black hole devoid of plot, charisma and intrigue“ in its one-star review, but the Daily Beast went with “absurdly, adorably idiotic.” Maybe we’ve mostly stopped caring that this is a fluff show with lewks instead of character development. Maybe we’ve accepted that you can’t fit a ruffled Emily Cooper into a stealth wealth hole. That this is a show where dollar-store dialogue brushes only occasionally against masstige quips, like, “Just because he’s hot doesn’t mean you can’t date him for his money. Multitask, bitch!” 

By this fourth season, the media has nearly exhausted the whole “Parisians think this show is tacky” narrative. The Daily Mail ran a story headlined, “Emily in Paris fans who recreate the show's outfits in the capital admit they're 'embarrassed' after a backlash from locals who say 'French people don't dress like this.'“ But this seemed published nearly in isolation. By now, everyone knows that the show buffoons French culture for our entertainment. I imagine it would be like if the French made a show like Camille in Los Angeles and everyone she encountered drove pickups bearing giant American flags and ate boiled hot dogs for breakfast.

In another Guardian story, costume designer Marilyn Fitoussi said she has no interest in creating a show that will please the French.

I’m with her. Ahead, a character-by-character breakdown of the clothes in the first half of season four.

Note: should you consider this show one that can be spoiled, yes, light spoilers lie ahead.

Emily

One day, writers across the internet will publish earnest takes about how Emily Cooper was, like the Manolo addict who walked so she could run, a bad friend. Today is not that day. Not because I don’t believe that she is a bad friend (I do) but because her most saliently defining characteristic is her wardrobe, which leaves me with endless questions. Like: Is the gal from Chicago who wears the cobalt blue suit and cowboy boots the same one who wears a green romper and pink shrug that make her look like a banquette at an Instagram hotel?

But this season, Emily Cooper’s story is not pantsuits. It is also not two attractive men prepared to beat each other with baguettes for the chance to call her theirs. Hers is a story of TOPS. Not going out tops, not Zoom tops, just TOPS. Tops that scream at you. Tops that are so unmissable they could act as a flare gun.

I can’t remember if they always do this to her (see: tweet at the top of this post) but this season I found myself fixated on strange ruffles, high necks, and bold prints all in one top or in one layering of tops. Perhaps this was meant to embody the push-pull deep within Emily’s soul: Is she the girl who does it on a Parisian rooftop with her hot chef boyfriend who’s fathering her (alleged) friend’s baby? Or is she the square American whose passion must remain confined to the bedroom, unless she’s applying it to her first love — corporate branding — in the boardroom?

The look that’s getting the most attention this season is the Nina Ricci number by Harris Reed, which Emily wears to a masquerade ball thrown on behalf of perfume. I love how, in Emily in Paris, whenever they throw cheesy parties to promote something inane, everyone who goes treats it like they’re attending a royal wedding. No one shows up in jeans or Skims as a sign of protest, annoyed at having to go to something like this, which is what would actually happen (I don’t think jaded journalists are quite yet a fully extinct breed, even if no one on this show aside from Sylvie reads the newspaper). Everyone within 30 feet of an Emily in Paris venue acts like there is no higher calling than gathering influencers in one place to party on behalf of a product launch.

The striped look was inspired by Truman Capote’s 1966 black-and-white ball, where socialite Babe Paley’s daughter Amanda Carter Burden wore a striped dress that reportedly appeared on-stage in a Broadway production of My Fair Lady. Audrey Hepburn in that movie was another source of inspiration. I enjoy watching Lily Collins in this show and appreciate her like I never did before now that I have seen her midcentury house. But come on, internet: she looks like she’s on her way to go steal some hamburgers.

Mindy

Of all the characters on this show, I enjoy watching Mindy most of all. Mindy has never taken her outfit from day to night because she has never dressed for anything but night. She goes for breakfast wearing a ballgown where even La Cooper might wear her (dorky) athleisure. She goes to her Eurovision business meeting dressed like an influencer at a Jeremy Scott show. In her world, novelty hats are as basic as lip balm.

One plot line this season involves Mindy’s boyfriend’s dad, a buffoonish version of Bernard Arnault (a Fauxnault), slut-shaming her over her clothes. The boyfriend, Nicolas, then gets her a pink couture dress with white trim to wear to the French Open in his presence, leading to Mindy’s best line of these five episodes: “I can’t believe how cheap I feel in a dress this expensive.”

She then goes to pawn the dress at vintage reseller Vestiaire Collective, which got a whole Business of Fashion article out of the placement that reported: “…[W]hen Netflix approached Vestiaire Collective with a storyline and an offer for a paid product placement last year, the resale platform jumped at the opportunity.” Little is more Emily in Paris than having brands pay for placement in a show about brands paying for placement. If you’re an Augustinus Baider fan and wondered where the $300 you spent for each bottle of the Rich Cream was going, now you know that at least some of it went to Netflix.

Camille

Did the costume team have it out for Camille this season? Are her outfits supposed to make us think poorly of her because we have to all be forced onto Team Emily? I don’t know, but the oversized after-dinner mint she wore as a top to one of the parties (and no, I can’t remember which one because they’re all the same and I watch this show at 60 percent attention) was one of the best things she got this season.

At the beginning of the season, having left Gabriel at the altar, she’s missing because she went to Monet’s house to sit in a boat and be alone. Here, the writers may as well be slapping us across the face with berets: If French people were making the Camille in Los Angeles show, I feel like this would be the equivalent of sending her to Mount Rushmore or Nascar. Something REAL AMERICAN.

When she’s in the boat she wears longish jorts and the Emily in Paris version of a Puffy Shirt. It was an odd outfit, but not as odd as both of these:

I love Sofia’s tousled hair — it is what I wish my hair would do in humidity — but I was perplexed by this quilted set. Where do you even buy a quilted skirt and jacket set? I don’t know that I’ve ever beheld one. She makes look as good as it probably can. If Hogwarts had a vintage resale site, this is the sort of thing I imagine it would sell.

Sylvie

Sylvie is supposed to be the chic one, the style sage who might impart her good taste to the Gen Zs and Milennials she keeps around to pay attention to social media for her. She is this show’s platonic ideal of French fashion, who reaches for Anthony Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent when everyone else is wearing clickbait. This season she wore one of her flashiest looks to date, if I recall correctly (and given that this is one of my 60-percent-attention shows, I very well may not). She wore a spring 2023 look by Maison Rabih Kayrouz to the masquerade ball when she was thinking about bringing down the Fauxnault character in Le Monde. As the show later explains, this is not a very French thing to do, so maybe Sylvie is absorbing some of Emily Cooper’s American ways.

The Men, Briefly

I had always thought of the guys on Emily in Paris as the fashion-forward kind who would switch to swishy trousers as soon as they hit Matches. Like, years before the average man switched to looser bottoms. That said, Gabriel has been wearing the most boring clothes imaginable. Just look at him compared to the extras (!) at the masked ball:

He doesn’t get a ruff? Emily basically wears a ruff to the office every day!

Showrunner Darren Starr said we’ll see more of Alfie in the next batch of episodes, so he could step up the menswear, but for now the costume department has reserved all the fun clothes for Julian and Luc, who could totally book an Aldo ad, real or imagined.

A Quick Word on the Penis Pants

Mindy’s boyfriend Nicolas, the nepo baby Fauxnault, gets mad at fashion designer Grégory Duprée’s idea to present a collection of pants with penises sticking out of them for Pierre Cadault, which is part of their JVMA conglomerate. Duprée tells the son that he got the idea for the collection from his dad, whom Sylvie exposed for sexually assaulting women in the fashion closet, and who couldn’t keep his penis in his pants. Business Insider put the penis pants on the listicle of “18 of the worst moments on season 4 of 'Emily in Paris,' so far” but I disagree. I thought this was, for a show about Paris for Americans, that sends a forlorn girl to Monet’s literal water lilies, rather clever. And I could, frankly, see a non-ficticious designer doing this.

Are you watching Emily in Paris? What do you think of the new season?