Lily on the Beach

There’s BEEN SO MUCH TIME to BE QUIET and SIT STILL THAT I THINK THERE’S GOING TO BE A VERSION of A RENAISSANCE AFTER THIS, WHERE PEOPLE ARE just DYING TO be CREATIVE.

When Lily Collins arrived in Paris over a year and a half ago to start filming Emily in Paris—the unsuspecting Netflix feelgood that became an overnight fame monster—the city was not as she’d expected. Born in Surrey, England but raised in LA, the daughter of Phil Collins has long been a Francophile, but upon returning to the French capital as Emily, an American hopeful trying to infiltrate the world of high fashion, the city’s volume seemed softer. With August’s heat seducing most Parisians to Biarritz or Provence for holiday, Collins and crew found themselves almost in a world of their own—that is until the rest of the world took notice.

Signatured by his oval-shaped frames and unperturbed glee, Alber Elbaz had a similar experience when he first immigrated from New York. “I was like, where is everyone?” recalls Elbaz, who moved across the Atlantic to work under Guy Laroche in the mid ‘90s. The fashion designer, who would later go on to Yves Saint Laurent before forging his legacy by reshaping the house of Lanvin—and contemporary women’s fashion as we know it—was, however, home that summer. Fate in the form of a mutual friend brought Elbaz and Collins together, and the two continued to run into each other in the weeks that the