Paris Hilton Kept The Job And Met Someone Who Is Not Karl

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KARL LAGERFELD FW26. Hilton through SS27. Kit Butler on menswear. NOT-KARL on stacked TVs. Matt Easton. 1 September.

KARL LAGERFELD put Paris Hilton back in front of the house for Fall-Winter 2026 and booked her through Spring-Summer 2027. The campaign title stays From Paris With Love. Photographer Matt Easton shoots her for the house for the first time. Kit Butler takes menswear. A new digital figure named NOT-KARL appears on stacks of retro televisions: white hair, ponytail, dark glasses, German-accented English, high white collar. The house is careful with the name. Not Karl. A fictional character inspired by the world Karl made, rewritten for a feed that prefers a character to a ghost.

The film and stills broke 1 September across digital, print, social, and outdoor. Three labels sit under one story: KARL LAGERFELD, KARL LAGERFELD JEANS, KARL LAGERFELD PARIS. Two unannounced cameos hide in the frames. A Chihuahua appears in the behind-the-scenes, because a Hilton set without a small dog would look unfinished.

 

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CEO Pier Paolo Righi said Hilton brought energy and individuality for two seasons and that adding NOT-KARL lets the house play with format without leaving Karl’s point of view. Hilton said the digital figure on set felt unexpected. The scripted beat is short. She tells the screen he sounds like Karl and looks a little different. He says he likes to reinvent himself. Reinvention was the founder’s public verb. Giving it to a figure who is legally not the founder is the joke and the legal shield.

Signal. What happened: the house extended Hilton and introduced NOT-KARL for FW26. Exact product / event: From Paris With Love FW26 campaign, Hilton, Butler, NOT-KARL, shot by Matt Easton, live 1 September 2026. When and where: global digital, print, social, out-of-home. Price: campaign, not one SKU. Shop examples on the US campaign page include a zip-detail tailored blazer at $579.95, barrel-leg zip pants at $469.95, and a KL Studio long faux fur coat at $1,199.95. Source: KARL LAGERFELD campaign page and 1 September house release. Why it matters: a living celebrity and a digital almost-Karl now share the same stack of TVs. Earlier DRIFT: none on this season.

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Hilton’s first Karl season was Fall-Winter 2025. Spring-Summer 2026 followed, Chris Colls on the camera, Paris as city and as first name. The line she gave that chapter was useful: Paris is not the city of love, it is the city of me. FW26 keeps the title and changes the photographer. Easton inherits a relationship that already sold clothes. Booking her through SS27 is the news under the television gag. Two more seasons is a contract. A contract is how a house admits the face worked.

Butler is twenty-eight and British. Models.com called him 2025 Model of the Year in that circuit’s language. The house calls him a friend of Hilton’s and the face of menswear. Chemistry is the word in the release. Clean tailoring, monochrome, the men’s codes the campaign page already shops: considered, sleek, unmistakably KARL. He is the human counterweight so the film is not only a woman talking to a monitor. Friendship on a call sheet is also a production fact. They already know how to stand next to each other.

The house after Karl Lagerfeld’s death in 2019 has been an image problem as much as a design one. Choupette the cat did some of the memory work. Caricature patches did more. Hilton does the living work. She is famous in the way he was famous: the person is the medium. Putting her next to a digital almost-him is either witty or risky. The house chose the word irreverence and is already promising NOT-KARL a life after this season. That promise is how you know they spent money on the character, not only on a filter.

Two mystery cameos are flagged and not named. That is a second-week story if anyone finds them. Until then they are a sentence in the release. The dog in the BTS is not a mystery. Hilton’s Chihuahuas have been part of her public furniture for twenty years. Karl had a cat. The campaign lets both animals haunt the edges without making either the product.

From Paris With Love was always a pun. City, woman, house. FW26 adds a fourth term that refuses the founder’s name while wearing his hair. The pun is getting crowded. Crowded is how these stories stay in the feed past the first Monday.

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NOT-KARL is not a deepfake of the dead designer with his name attached. The house wrote the negation into the title. White hair and sunglasses do the recognition. The high collar does the rest. People reach for Max Headroom because the bust lives in a CRT stack. Retro multiscreen is a 1980s memory palace. Karl lived in that decade as hard as he lived in the 2000s. A wall of sets is a set decoration and a thesis: the founder now arrives as broadcast.

Dialogue is short on purpose. You sound like Karl. You look a little different. I like to reinvent myself. That exchange is the whole sketch. Longer and the joke dies. Shorter and there is no character. Hilton on set called the energy magical. That is celebrity copy. What the stills show is simpler: a woman in house clothes standing next to furniture that talks.

Fashion campaigns have used screens for decades. This one uses a screen that answers back in a German accent. Karl interviewed Karl in old in-house films, a tongue-in-cheek series where he split himself. The new figure is a cousin of that habit, built for a platform that prefers a mascot to an archive clip. If the house keeps the character after Hilton’s seasons, the test is whether anyone talks to the screen when she is not in the room.

There is a tenderness problem in any digital Karl. The man is gone. The hair is not. Calling the figure NOT-KARL is how the lawyers and the brand team sleep. Calling him a new member of the brand world is how the marketing team books the next format. Both sentences can sit on the same release. Only one of them is funny.

The campaign page is a shop. Zip-detail tailored blazer, $579.95. Barrel-leg zip pants, $469.95. K/Autograph twist color-block crossbody. KL Studio long faux fur coat, $1,199.95. Signed by the house, worn by Paris, is the women’s banner. Instant icon status is the bag chapter. Styled for the spotlight is the men’s chapter. Introducing NOT-KARL is the character chapter. Three collections, one narrative, one checkout.

K/Autograph is the initial motif that has been moving through recent seasons, a hand-drawn K used as hardware language. Leather and zippers do the commercial work while the televisions do the press work. Faux fur at twelve hundred is the winter object that photographs. Jeans keep the third line in the same film so denim is not a separate shoot with a separate celebrity. KARL LAGERFELD PARIS remains the US-facing line that already used Hilton. Folding it into the same story stops the customer from thinking there are two houses.

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Hilton’s job is to make those SKUs look like a world. Karl’s job, when he was alive, was the same. The brief that said both understood fashion as a world you create around clothes is the softest true sentence in the file. The harder sentence is that the house now creates that world with a living celebrity, a model friend, a Chihuahua, and a digital figure who is contractually not the founder.

Free shipping over $220 is on the US site banner. Tariffs may change duties. Those lines are not romance. They are the cart under the campaign. A $580 blazer is the price of standing next to a screen that says chic, no.

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SS27 is already booked. NOT-KARL is already promised more episodes. The 1 September drop is the first stack of screens. What comes next is whether the character can sell a bag without Hilton in the frame, and either Butler’s menswear still reads when the joke moves to another format. Until then the file is three people (one of them not a person) and a house that needs a world around the zip