Hi readers,
Marissa Scharlau is helping me out with Back Row, and you’ll start to see her name pop up in the newsletters. I’m thrilled to have her at my side as Back Row grows. She wrote today’s “Loose Threads.”
—Amy
Loose Threads
By Marissa Scharlau
The internet has been gifted images of Dior’s pre-fall 2026 collection, Jonathan Anderson’s second women’s line for the brand. The item that has arguably commanded the most attention was a pair of jeans that Women’s Wear Daily said “nods to Gen Z’s predilection for what the French call ‘elephant leg’ pants.” (“We have established the girl, and now we are expanding the wardrobe,” quoth Anderson.) Your thoughts??
The internet is obsessed with Chanel Métiers D’Art opening model Bhavitha Mandava. (She previously walked for Dior and Bottega Veneta.) Re: working with Matthieu Blazy, she told Dazed, “He never gives us tips on how to walk, or a character to embody, or anything like that… he holds your hands and tells you only to have a good time. There was no pressure and my nerves immediately calmed down.”
Emily in Paris’s fifth season is out today! FENDI has a capsule collection including two Baguettes ($4,950 each) and a Peekaboo ($7,700) with, per the press release, “a dedicated tag” bearing the Emily in Paris logo.
If you’ve ever looked at your fragrances and thought, Not flashy enough: Bond No. 9’s Swarovski collaboration includes a limited edition “Disco Ball” fragrance ($1,300) in a very sparkly bottle.
The trailer for the Melania Trump documentary (which Amazon paid $40 million for) highlights her fashion, including her Herve Pierre inaugural ballgown.
An unexpected side-effect of the rise of Ozempic: apparently barrettes are back, according to The Business of Fashion, since many GLP-1 users (now 1 in 8 American adults) experience hair loss as a side effect.
And now today’s big story…
Gwyneth Paltrow and Apple Martin Play the Long Game
By Amy Odell
Gwyneth Paltrow is on a movie press tour the likes of which we’ve not seen since before she became a “slash” in the aughts. The actress-slash-Goop CEO-slash-influencer stars opposite Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme, which is out next week, and has been slinging looks as she makes talk-show appearances and walks from her car to said talk-show appearances. Does anyone watch talk-show appearances? I don’t know, but people follow the looks and they watch the chatter about the looks, and that’s probably all that matters on the cusp of 2026.
She’s been appearing here and there with her children, Apple and Moses Martin, which has perhaps exponentially driven up impressions for all of this press. Did any outlet not jump on the images of Gwyneth with Apple, who wore the Calvin Klein dress her mom wore to her Emma premiere in 1996, her first in for movie in which she played the lead? (Gwyneth was wearing a black dress by her old standby, Valentino.)
The wildly good engagement on those images on social media shows how Gwyneth, through her apparel choices, is smartly playing up the nostalgia for her acting career. It’s probably a calculated move on her part: She hasn’t done a movie like this — artsy, not Marvel, critically acclaimed — in a long time, and it’s exactly this kind of film that made her America’s sweetheart in the ‘90s. Looking at this media push, you could easily forget she’s a pseudoscience profiteer and Louis Pasteur denialist whose company provided the blueprint for the modern wellness industrial complex. That’s old news, everyone. Look at her and Apple! As a mom to a daughter, it tugged at me emotionally.
Apple can’t exactly retrace her mother’s footsteps, because the world that gave rise to her is gone. When Gwyneth was entering what one might have quaintly termed “the scene” in the pre-internet ‘90s, dating Donovan Leitch and aspiring to movie stardom, she became a Calvin girl. Leitch was modeling for the brand, providing Gwyneth’s entrée. Carolyn Bessette (who had “smart remarks” about Gwyneth and didn’t exactly take to her, per my reporting in Gwyneth: The Biography) was dressing VIPs and would help her and Leitch pick out clothes when they stopped by the Calvin showroom. Gwyneth’s minimalist style made her appeal not just to Klein, but also to the likes of Anna Wintour, who gave her her first Vogue cover story pegged to Emma in 1996.
Her restraint made her a darling of the fashion world. Her more iconic film costumes mirrored this aesthetic in movies like A Perfect Murder and Great Expectations, in which her characters’ wardrobes were similarly pared back yet — crucially — expensive and recognizably designer.
Now, Gwyneth is reminding everyone of that. Leaving a Good Morning America appearance, she wore Pepto Bismol trousers and a matching top from the recent Calvin Klein Collection runway show that people did not like all that much, though it looked nice on her. And, of course, at Tuesday night’s New York Marty Supreme premiere, Apple walked the carpet in that black Calvin Klein number that made everyone think her mom was so fabulous 30 years ago. Here Gwyneth was starring in a movie for the first time, it was a big publicity moment with lots of hype and multiple magazine covers, and she wore a plain dress that one of my sources described as “nothing — but also everything.”
About six years ago, Gwyneth told Harper’s Bazaar she would “literally never” return to acting. When I was reporting Gwyneth, a source close to her told me this movie made her rediscover what she liked about that work. It was well in advance of the launch of Gwyn (the sequel to/rebrand of Goop’s clothing line G Label), but this person also told me that Gwyneth understood that if she was visible in movies, it would help her promote Goop, Gwyn, her availability for fashion campaigns like Saint Laurent, and whatever else she needed to publicize. Unsurprisingly, she’s been wearing Gwyn for prominent recent promotional appearances.
Apple also benefits from this press tour. She has for a while now been positioning herself as a fashion face. She’s done campaigns for Self-Portrait and the Gap (alongside her mom) and has been photographed for Interview. The Marty Supreme premiere probably marks her biggest red-carpet moment to date, and the glowing online coverage positions her perfectly for more fashion work. Even the Vogue newsletter, which loves giving its subject line to Amal Clooney more than any newsletter I know, gave Apple and the Calvin dress the subject line Wednesday.
I don’t know what chances an artsy, non-action, originally scripted movie that is 2.5 hours long has of opening at the box office these days, but the cast is doing its damnedest to make it happen. Timmy meanwhile, is 29 years old, and has no fashion nostalgia play to make (though I suspect no one would be mad if he reprised that red jumpsuit). Instead, he has been orange-ing it the F up from Los Angeles to New York. This has been highly effective marketing! I have watched the trailer exactly once and know based on his red-carpet fashion choices alone that the ping-pong balls in the film are orange, just like all these borrowed press clothes. Gwyneth, meanwhile, has largely avoided the ping-pong ball cosplay. She winsomely wore a bright orange Lacoste jumpsuit for her Seth Meyers appearance and, minimalist icon that she is, was photographed outside looking like she didn’t know what she had just done.
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