As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t like taking cabs during fashion week: I find the unpredictable traffic unnerving, and often end up getting out anyway and running the last quarter-mile to the venue. (Yes, that was me jogging up to Loewe.) This past week in Paris, I’ve taken dozens of metros, the RER, several buses, and walked tens of thousands of steps each day.
I also don’t particularly like being alone with my thoughts—we’re all aspiring WASPs—so most of that time has been spent listening to The Bear soundtrack (better than the show itself, IMO, we can discuss offline) and podcasts, none of which have anything to do with fashion. Mostly I’ve been listening to people interrogate the apparently budding relationship between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs. (Editor’s note: He actually may be the best tight end in NFL history, but who cares…)
I haven’t really followed a sports team since 1994—the New York Knicks, John Starks, the O.J.-A.C. Bronco Chase in the picture-in-picture—so I wasn’t familiar with Kelce and his brother and their mother and the Super Bowl commercials. (There are a lot of commercials: State Farm, Campbells, a Covid booster, etcetera…) Now I am. My assumption is that about a third of you had heard of Kelce before last week, and the others had not. Here’s where we probably differ: I am almost as clueless about Swift as I am about football. She’s a little harder to avoid but let’s just say I’m not an active participant in the discourse.
