mise en place

the oldest cabaret in paris, and the night madonna took the turntables: club confessions

The genius of Madonna's whole Confessions II rollout is that she keeps refusing to do the normal thing, and the Paris stop was the purest version yet: take the most exclusive front row of menswear week, and then, instead of letting everyone disperse to their separate dinners, announce that the night is just getting started and herd the entire room across the Seine into a cabaret.

And not just any cabaret, the Paradis Latin, which is the oldest in Paris, a room with over a century of history, the kind of gilded velvet music hall that Yves Saint Laurent himself is imagined to have frequented in his day. There's something perfect about that. For a hundred-plus years this stage held the classic Parisian cabaret spectacle, the feathers, the plumes, the Zizi Jeanmaire of it all. And that night, on that same stage, there was no showgirl. There was Madonna, behind the turntables with Stuart Price and Charli XCX, turning the oldest cabaret in the city into a Confessions listening party. The past and the present of "Paris nightlife as spectacle," shaking hands.

Into that room: a guest list that read like the show's front row had stood up and walked there together, Kate Moss, Rami Malek, Austin Butler, Arca, Robbie GK, and Connor, who eighteen months ago was waiting tables and is now in a 19th-century cabaret while Madonna yells at the crowd to take their shirts off.

The thing that makes this more than a party, though, is what actually got played. This wasn't a celebrity standing near a DJ booth. Arca premiered an unreleased Confessions II track - "The Test," which Madonna co-wrote with her daughter Lola Leon and sings with her, the first time they've shared a song. Price and Madonna dropped a never-heard remix of "Music" and played "Danceteria" in full for the first time anywhere. So everyone in that room - Connor Storrie included - was standing inside a genuine piece of pop history: hearing songs the rest of the world won't get until July 3rd, in the oldest cabaret in Paris, from the woman who made them, ten days early. That's not a step-and-repeat. That's a thing you tell people about for the rest of your life.

And there's the rhyme again, because this rollout can't stop rhyming. Earlier in the day Connor had been the kid keeping his composure next to the icon. By night he's in a century-old cabaret while she premieres a mother-daughter duet for the first time - the same arc compressed into a single Tuesday. Server to front row to I was there when Madonna played "Danceteria" early at the Paradis Latin. Some Tuesdays do more work than others. This one did about a decade's worth.

The smartest decision Anthony Vaccarello made this season was to not fully trust the clothes, and instead hire the weather. The fog at the Saint Laurent menswear show wasn't a smoke machine and it wasn't a vibe - it was Cloud #07156, an installation by Fujiko Nakaya, who is 92 years old and has been sculpting actual fog since 1970. Not theatrical haze. Real water vapor, pumped through a custom array of high-pressure nozzles, behaving like real fog does: pooling low, drifting where the air currents take it, refusing to hold a shape for longer than a breath. She's done this at the Guggenheim Bilbao, at Expo '70 in Osaka, over a Pittsburgh river. She makes weather you can walk into. And for one June afternoon she made it pool around the ankles of the front row at the Bourse de Commerce.

Here's why it works as more than a gimmick. A fashion show is, structurally, a thing about control - every hem and seam and sightline engineered to the millimeter, the whole apparatus designed to make chaos look like intention. And Nakaya's fog is the one element in the room that nobody fully controls. It does what the air tells it. So you get this gorgeous tension: a collection obsessed with precision, presented inside a medium that is constitutionally incapable of staying put. The clothes say we decided every detail. The fog says and yet. That's a real idea, not just a pretty one.

It also did something sneaky to the front row. Everyone - Madonna, Kate Moss, Charli XCX, Connor Storrie in his translucent raincoat, the whole impossible lineup - got photographed surfacing out of the same white nothing, half-dissolved at the waist. It flattened the hierarchy for a second. The fog doesn't know who's A-list. It pooled around an icon and an ingénue at exactly the same height. There's something almost democratic about it, which is a funny thing to say about the most exclusive seats in Paris, but the image earns it: a row of faces, ascending out of weather, briefly equal in the haze.

on connor storrie, madonna, and the geometry of a front row

Here is the thing about that Saint Laurent show: the fog did most of the work, and it wasn't even trying. It was an actual installation - Cloud #07156, by Fujiko Nakaya, water vapor sculpted into a low hanging haze - and it turned the Bourse de Commerce front row into a row of half-submerged faces, everyone surfacing out of the same white nothing. Into which: Madonna, lowered between Charli XCX and Connor Storrie like punctuation. You could not have staged it more deliberately if you tried, and somebody clearly did try.

What gets me isn't the seat. It's the symmetry of it, the way the universe occasionally rhymes. Five months ago Connor was a clip - a behind-the-scenes Interview shoot, dancing to "Like a Prayer," mouthing every word with the total unselfconscious sincerity of someone who has loved a song since before he understood it. The kind of video where you can see the teenager inside the 26-year-old. And then here he is, knee-to-knee with the woman who made the song, in a translucent raincoat and latex boots, doing the hardest thing a fan can do in the presence of the real article, which is to act normal. "He's so at ease," someone said, and that's the trick of it - the ease is the performance. Nobody is at ease next to Madonna. You decide to look at ease and then you white-knuckle it through the runway.

That's the part I find almost unbearably sweet, and the part the fashion writeups keep flattening into "Storrie sat front row with Madonna," as if it's a seating chart and not a small completed circuit. The look will date - the boots are very 2026, the raincoat is a press cycle. But the rhyme stays: kid sings into a mirror, kid ends up next to the source. Madonna, for her part, lit a cigarette and let Charli join her, supremely uninterested in any of it, which is its own kind of gift. The icon's job is to be unbothered. The fan's job is to keep it together. Everybody did their job.

The movie is called Transaction Planet, which sounds either like a cryptocurrency scam, an abandoned Adult Swim pilot, or the name of a semi-legal nightclub in Berlin. An alien consciousness hears that Earth is “the place with the cars,” gets sent down by the universe, wakes up in a 25-year-old man’s body, and spends the next hour and a half being spiritually mugged by human experience. This is not the obvious move after a breakout role. The obvious move is a grooming deal, a Luca Guadagnino meeting, a Chanel party, a tasteful sad-boy A24 audition. Connor did all of that too. He also made a tiny private cosmology with his friends, no real money, an iphone, and the energy of someone daring the work to fail in public. To me at least, that’s what makes him more interesting that most. I hope there's more news on this soon.

The movie is called Transaction Planet, which sounds either like a cryptocurrency scam, an abandoned Adult Swim pilot, or the name of a semi-legal nightclub in Berlin. An alien consciousness hears that Earth is “the place with the cars,” gets sent down by the universe, wakes up in a 25-year-old man’s body, and spends the next hour and a half being spiritually mugged by human experience. This is not the obvious move after a breakout role. The obvious move is a grooming deal, a Luca Guadagnino meeting, a Chanel party, a tasteful sad-boy A24 audition. Connor did all of that too. He also made a tiny private cosmology with his friends, no real money, an iphone, and the energy of someone daring the work to fail in public. To me at least, that’s what makes him more interesting that most. I hope there's more news on this soon.