Lyas on La Watch Party Fashion Week Events and His Signature Red Lipstick

After the show, I try to find my host, who became social-media famous for his candid comedic videos. In my teens, I’d sometimes charm my way into a VIP area by telling a doorman, “I’m with the DJ.” Today, I try a more contemporary variation: “I’m with Lyas.” A bouncer looks at me, scans the crowd, and says, “So is everyone else.” Right. I’m just happy to have gotten in when 400 other people were turned away because Maxim’s was at capacity.

Finally, I spot Lyas leaning against a bar. He looks like peak-era Michael Jackson—if Michael Jackson had been dressed by Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent. He’s wearing mirrored aviators and his trademark red lipstick. (More on that later.) There’s a queue of people waiting to speak to him, asking for selfies, thanking him for creating a devoted Fashion Week congregation. He’s calm, playful, and attentive. He looks so at home.

Lyas in front of a video screen tricked out to look like an open laptop at a La Watch Party gathering at La Caserne during Paris Fashion Week last September.

When the crowd disperses, Lyas pops open a bottle of champagne to share with the 20 or so people who’ve helped him produce an exhausting run of events. This was the last show of a week that included La Watch Parties where he surprised several hundred guests with tickets to see Willy Chavarria’s show live (“It was pandemonium,” he says) and had to vamp for 90 minutes while his audience waited for Rihanna to show up at the Dior show. (A video of the delay was captioned “was long af.”)

Finally, he turns his attention to me and offers a Budweiser. “You’re an American,” he says with a huge smile. “You love this stuff, right?” He’s not wrong.

Lyas grew up in Rouen, Normandy. He moved to Paris in 2018 to attend film school, with ambitions of becoming a director. The training left its mark. Since graduating into a depressed post-pandemic job market, he has focused on making content that not only explores fashion in a variety of different ways but contextualizes it through his narration. “What I like about fashion is the storytelling behind it,” he tells me. “How the clothes can convey whatever story [the designer] wants to convey.” He has now accrued nearly a million followers across his socials, signed with CAA, and built a roster of brand partners that includes Marc Jacobs and Meta. (It seems like he might also be working on a product launch.)

The Lyas video that first caught my attention featured a series of bottles of alcohol rolling down a staircase and shattering, each crash punctuated by his commentary. A bottle of expensive Italian wine that lasts a long time before smashing? That’s Prada. Cheap booze that breaks on the first step? Well, I’ll let him tell you because he’s better at being critical, as he was when one creative director put his own face on his T-shirts. “You’re doing merch, babe,” Lyas chirps. “You’re not a designer.” Ouch!

At a party to kick off the summer couture shows in 2024, John Galliano recognized Lyas from the bottles video and agreed to be filmed for his TikTok. “I was shaking,” Lyas remembers. “And thinking, ‘Ahhh, he watches my videos!’ ” They talked about the magical lighting of Paris at dusk.

Last May, Madonna invited Lyas to her house in New York; he filmed himself traipsing through her living room and up the stairs to find the Queen of Pop in a white tuxedo, smoking a big, fat cigar. “A closet tour with Madonna. Who the fuck does that?” he says, still amazed.

Lyas poses with guests at Maxim’s.

The first major fashion brand to officially invite Lyas to its show was Saint Laurent in spring 2024. He was emotional in the car on the way to the venue. “I was crying, listening to childhood songs of my youth and feeling like, ‘Fuck. You made it!’ ” he says.

Lyas called his mother, trying to explain the magnitude of the moment. “But she didn’t get it,” he says. “She doesn’t care about fashion.” After Saint Laurent, other brands, like Demna’s Balenciaga and Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe, followed with invites. “Because that’s how it works in fashion,” he says.

What about the red lipstick, now inseparable from his image, which he debuted a few seasons ago? “Stefano Pilati told me to wear it,” he says. “I was looking for a uniform, and he said, ‘Have you ever tried red lipstick?’ ”

It draws attention, of course. But Lyas says there’s a message too. “I felt it was important to take a stand against fascism, which is starting to root in every corner of the world, and this industry as well,” he explains, “and to actually wear your identity, your personality, your queerness on your face.”

The La Watch Party concept was born from less glamorous circumstances. Last June, Lyas was denied a ticket to Anderson’s Dior menswear debut. “I was already invited to a couple of Dior shows. I didn’t get it. I was really frustrated. I was mad,” he says. So he weighed his options: “Do I sneak into the show and make a whole video about it? That’s too risky. What if I just call everyone to join me at a bar I always go to?”

That bar, Le Saint Denis, was up for it, so on show day, Lyas and his older brother, Sami, lugged Lyas’s TV from his apartment and set it up on the venue’s patio. “I thought, ‘I hope it’s not too big for the three people that are going to show up,’ ” Lyas says. When 300 arrived, he realized he was on to something.

In the post-Covid real-world world, we’re all still on our phones. But Lyas says one of the reasons La Watch Party has taken off is that we crave sharing physical space with like-minded people.

“I realized there are other people who have no place to share their passion and actually meet people who love fashion like them,” he says. “You feel like you’re together online—but in the end, you’re really alone. To bring people into spaces where they can actually talk to each other, make new friends, and discuss the Valentino show? This is the best.”

The La Watch Party format is always the same: free for all; first come, first served; free drinks; and you never know what might happen.

For last fall’s historic Paris Fashion Week—no fewer than eight designers, including Anderson at Dior, Pierpaolo Piccioli at Balenciaga, and Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, debuted their women’s collections—Lyas wanted to up the ante. “I built a re-creation of my own MacBook as a plus-size prop so that everyone could watch and feel like they’re at home,” he explains. He introduced spontaneous acts, like runway walk-offs with guests. He even asked a security guard to strut. “I was having to do standup, which was horrible,” he says. “So I was like, ‘Let’s do a catwalk!’ And then the people were like, ‘Yeah! I’ll do it!’ ”

After Blazy’s debut, Lyas invited models Mona Tougaard and Loli Bahia to crash the party straight from the runway. “Mona was shocked!” he remembers. “She arrived at a long corridor, huge doors, and she couldn’t see anything because the MacBook was facing the other way. You just hear the screams. And from the moment they were on the motor taxi coming back, they were live on that screen!”

When the models made their entrace, it was the ultimate convergence of the physical and the digital, the world of high fashion and young people who crave it, even if many of them can’t afford to buy it. “It creates this buzzing energy, which is really palpable,” he says.

There’s a trophy on the bar that Lyas was leaning on. The previous night, he had appeared on France’s influential nightly talk show Quotidien and was named Influencer of the Year. Here’s the gong! He didn’t give an acceptance speech, so I ask him to give one now. “I’m bringing fashion to everyone,” he says, his shades still on. “And that’s the whole point. Voilà!”