NOT-KARL on Every Screen: Paris Hilton’s Pink Night Inside Karl Lagerfeld’s Saint-Germain Store

One year to the day after Palais de Tokyo, Karl Lagerfeld brought Paris Hilton back to fashion week, this time inside its own Left Bank boutique.

The white shirts went up before the pink did. On Thursday, October 1, midway through Paris Fashion Week, Karl Lagerfeld turned its store at 194 Boulevard Saint-Germain into a party set and dressed it in crisp white shirts, the garment its founder wore with a high starched collar for most of his public life. Then came the screens. Monitors and stacked television sets filled the space, and most of them carried the same white-haired figure in dark glasses, a character who looks a great deal like Karl, sounds a little like Karl, and is billed, with a perfectly straight face, as NOT-KARL. The night celebrated the Fall/Winter 2026 chapter of the house’s From Paris With Love campaign, and its co-host was Paris Hilton, now three seasons into the role.

Signal. What happened: Karl Lagerfeld celebrated its Fall/Winter 2026 From Paris With Love campaign with Paris Hilton inside its Saint-Germain store on the evening of October 1, 2026, during Paris Fashion Week, then kept the installation running for two more days. Exact object: the FW26 campaign photographed by Matt Easton, which introduces the digital character NOT-KARL alongside Hilton and model Kit Butler, the new face of menswear, across the Karl Lagerfeld, Karl Lagerfeld Jeans and Karl Lagerfeld Paris lines. When and where: the party took place at 194 Boulevard Saint-Germain, 75007 Paris, followed by the NOT-KARL Playground at the same address on October 2 and 3, with entry by reservation. Source: Karl Lagerfeld’s September 1 campaign announcement and its own Playground registration page, plus Driftzine’s attendance on the night. Why it matters: after staging last year’s celebration in a nightclub, the house moved this one into its own boutique and built it around a character it says it will keep developing well beyond a single season.

stir

The character went public on September 1, when the house confirmed that Hilton would stay on as its face through Fall/Winter 2026 and Spring/Summer 2027. Matt Easton, photographing her for the brand for the first time, set Hilton beside banks of retro televisions, each one broadcasting NOT-KARL in a dark suit, a tie and a high-collared white shirt. The view cues are not subtle: white hair, a ponytail, sunglasses, and English delivered in a German accent. The centerpiece of the rollout is a short black-and-white film in which the two spar. Hilton tells him he sounds like Karl, and he answers that he likes to reinvent himself.

Karl Lagerfeld chief executive Pier Paolo Righi has been careful about where the line sits. “We are not trying to recreate Karl,” he told WWD when the campaign was unveiled, describing the character as a forward-looking way to bring some of the founder’s spirit back into the conversation. The house’s own NOT-KARL page frames him as a figure who lives inside a TV screen, and stresses that he is a new presence rather than a reincarnation.

“Continuing the relationship feels incredibly special,” Hilton said in the house’s September 1 announcement, which also named Kit Butler as the face of menswear and pointed to the long friendship between the two as the source of their ease on camera. The same release promised two surprise cameos within the campaign. The clothes stay close to house codes: monochrome tailoring and outerwear, a long white shirt modeled on tuxedo dressing, and the K/Autograph bag range built on Lagerfeld’s early hand-drawn initials.

The two-hander format has a precedent. Hilton’s first season for the house, Fall/Winter 2025, reworked the brand’s old Karl Interviews Karl videos, in which the designer once questioned himself on camera. NOT-KARL turns that private joke into a standing second voice, and the house has said his story will continue past this campaign.

in

The evening’s center of gravity was a control room assembled from a single monitor and a cluster of televisions. Guests could chat there with Paris, with NOT-KARL, and with NOT-CHOUPETTE, the on-screen counterpart to Choupette, the white cat who lived with Lagerfeld from 2011 until his death in 2019 and became a fashion celebrity in her own right, complete with personal maids and a book of her own. The triangle mirrored the campaign almost exactly: a real woman, a digital Karl, and a digital version of the pet who once ate at his table.

A few steps away, a game called Hot or Not let guests virtually try on looks from the FW26 collection, its name a wink at “that’s hot,” the catchphrase Hilton made her own two decades ago. A photo booth handled the souvenirs, turning out keepsakes for anyone who wanted proof they had been in the room.

What the setup did, in practice, was move NOT-KARL off the billboard and into conversation. Campaign characters usually live on posters, feeds and out-of-home placements, which is exactly where this one launched on September 1. On Boulevard Saint-Germain he became something guests could address directly, inside the house’s own shop, a few feet from the clothes he was created to introduce.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by KARL LAGERFELD (@karllagerfeld)

flow

Arrivals began on a pink carpet, set against a backdrop printed with NOT-KARL and Karl Lagerfeld graphics. Heidi Klum came in a black Karl Lagerfeld strapless minidress with detached sheer sleeves. Nicky Hilton turned out for her sister, as she had a year earlier, and Kit Butler, Hilton’s campaign co-star, joined the friends of the house working their way inside. Hilton herself wore a shimmering charcoal top with a black skirt and a cropped black fur jacket, according to Hello! Magazine’s coverage of her fashion week run, and later summed up the evening on Instagram as “an iconic night in the City of Lights.”

Inside, the pink did not let up. It ran through the decor in every direction, and against it most guests had dressed in strict black and white, which gave the room the look of one of the house’s monochrome campaign images dropped into a sugar-coated set. The contrast was the point of the whole partnership in miniature: Lagerfeld’s graphic restraint on one side, Hilton’s unapologetic pink on the other.

The bar menu split the difference between the two vocabularies. Loves It and Paris Pink came from Hilton’s side of the ledger. Black Tie belonged to Lagerfeld’s monochrome codes, and Ikonik borrowed its spelling from the house’s long-running line of Karl caricature pieces. Cotton candy perched on the rims of the glasses. DJ Marina Trench, who also opened last year’s party, kept the music moving through the night.

show

The date matched last year’s to the day. On October 1, 2025, the house launched Hilton’s first campaign with a late-night party at YOYO, the club inside Palais de Tokyo, where Hilton took a turn on the decks while Marina Trench opened the dance floor and Jodie Harsh closed it. That guest list ran to Heidi Klum, Nicky Hilton, Rita Ora, Cara Delevingne and Jon Kortajarena, who was then the face of menswear.

The campaign has moved in steady increments since. Chris Colls photographed that first season in black and white, then returned for Spring/Summer 2026, shooting Hilton and model Sean O’Pry at the house’s headquarters at 21 Rue Saint-Guillaume, a short walk from the Saint-Germain store. Fall/Winter 2026 changes the photographer, changes the menswear face and adds a digital co-star, while the Hilton half of the equation stays fixed.

Righi has been open about why Hilton was cast in the first place, telling WWD that she was deliberately not an obvious choice and that the surprise of the pairing, the way it made people stop and look, was itself in keeping with Karl’s instincts.

The venue shift is the clearest change of all. A nightclub party sells a mood. A party inside the shop puts that mood next to the merchandise and lets the guest list try on the collection, even if only on a screen. Some things carried over intact: Klum and Nicky Hilton were present both years, and Trench was behind the decks both times.

The exterior of a Karl Lagerfeld boutique on a city street, featuring a black facade, large display windows with mannequins, and a white upper level with branded awnings.

two

The install outlived the party. On October 2 and 3, the same address hosted the NOT-KARL Playground, which the house’s registration page pitched as an immersive weekend with customizations, prizes, coffee and treats from Copains, the organic, gluten-free Paris bakery chain, plus a draw for a VIP trip for two to The Karl Lagerfeld Hotel in Macau. Entry was billed as by invitation, with visitors reserving a slot online rather than walking in off the boulevard.

The address carries its own history. The house opened its first Paris concept store there in March 2013, two floors of clothing, books and collaboration pieces on one of the Left Bank’s busiest shopping stretches. Screens were part of the plan even then: the original shop placed tablets throughout, where shoppers could browse runway footage and send the designer a message, which makes a wall of televisions playing NOT-KARL feel less like a gimmick than a return to form. In September 2019, seven months after Lagerfeld’s death, it reopened as The World of Karl, a 215-square-meter space modeled on his apartment in the 7th arrondissement, his photo studio, his 7L bookshop and his office. Righi told FashionNetwork at the time that Lagerfeld used to pass the shop on his walk home.

The white shirts on the walls this week have their own lineage. That same autumn of 2019, the house released Tribute to Karl, a set of white shirts reinterpreted by friends of the designer including Carine Roitfeld and Diane Kruger, with 77 pieces per design at €777 each and the proceeds going to medical research. The idea has since become a product line. The brand’s site now lists a Limited Edition NOT-KARL Shirt among its white-shirt classics, priced at $369.95 in the US and €279.95 in Europe.

The Playground closed on Saturday, October 3. Hilton remains the face of the house through Spring/Summer 2027, and Karl Lagerfeld has said that NOT-KARL’s story will continue beyond this campaign.