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Fashion Diary - The Variety Show After the Shows  

Mr. Hince was seated in the V.I.P. balcony of a club on the Right Bank called the V.I.P. Room, and down the banquette from him were a variety of specially invited guests who, if they were not in fact Very Important, gave every impression of thinking otherwise.

It was an illogically impressive bunch gathered at the end of an illogically impressive season, when the people who make fashion, faced in many cases with their own imminent disappearance, seemed to have concluded that if the ship appears to be sinking, the best thing to do is to ask the band to play louder and dance till the end.

So there on Wednesday was Mr. Hince's girlfriend, Kate Moss, entertaining some of her uncountable admirers as she alternated drags on a bummed Marlboro and sips of Champagne; and the almost girlishly pretty, chain-smoking LVMH scion, Antoine Arnault; and the ruddy Amazonian American model Angela Lindvall. There was Hilary Alexander, the fashion director for The Daily Telegraph in England, puffing on her own cigarette and regaling a listener with tales of a fashion show that preceded the Fendi soiree.

"IT was one of John's best," said Ms. Alexander, referring to the John Galliano show earlier that evening, held at an indoor parking garage not far from the Seine. . . .

The cigarette smoke drifting through the V.I.P. club was so thick, it banked in places like a weather front. Nobody minded in the least. In part their laissez-aller tolerance was attributable to the zinc buckets inset in tables all over the club that each held ice and chilled bottles of Belvedere vodka and Ruinart Brut.

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