In an abstract sense, I understood that the Paris Olympics would be a little different than editions held in years past. Paris would host the first summer games post-pandemic, to start—the fact that Tokyo 2020, delayed until 2021, was, for obvious reasons, a more-muted affair contributed to a sense of pent-up enthusiasm (among fans, but especially among athletes) in the months and weeks leading to the opening ceremonies in France last week.
There was the Paris of it all, too. The city first hosted the Olympics in 1900 (the first modern Games held outside Greece), and then again in 1924. But it had been fully a century since one of the world’s most iconic cities had played host.
These Games further promised an unprecedented collision of sports and high-end luxury fashion thanks primarily to the French conglomerate LVMH’s sponsorship of the event. Nearly every detail would receive a coat of high-end polish. Chaumet, the jeweler, would design and produce the medals. Berluti would dress the French delegation. And Louis Vuitton would design everything from the case that carries the Olympic torch to the trays on which those medals would be presented to victorious athletes. “Never,” Tom Lamont wrote in a recent issue of GQ, “has the collision between coveted luxury goods and enviable athletic talent been so pronounced.”
It followed, then, that these Olympics would also be a huge draw for folks famous outside of sports. Indeed, the likes of Zendaya, Steven Spielberg, and Pharrell (himself an LVMH employee of note) congregated for a party at (where else?) the Fondation Louis Vuitton the night before the Games opened.
I knew all of this, at least intellectually, before I got to Paris for a whirlwind 48-hour visit hosted by Louis Vuitton. This would be a different sort of Games—faster, higher, stronger, per the Olympic motto, but also bigger, brighter, shinier than ever before.
And yet it didn’t really sink in until I was boarding my flight in New York and heard a voice that made me do a double take. I’m a relatively late-to-the-game Sex and the City fan, but even I recognized Sarah Jessica Parker offering a fluttery merci beaucoup to a flight attendant. Paris was dead set on captivating the globe’s attention in July and August for two weeks of athletic excellence. Why wouldn’t Carrie Bradshaw be there, too?
As the opening ceremonies approached on Friday night, the event’s organizers and the weather appeared to be in a tense but fraying standoff. It had been unseasonably mild in Paris all summer (“It’s been like fall,” a Parisian friend mentioned), and the sky was gray and threatening.
The opening ceremonies were themselves unique: rather than hold the traditional theatrics-then-parade of nations in a stadium, the organizers designed an event that took place on the Seine itself, beginning at the Pont d’Austerlitz in the east and terminating at the Trocadéro, the plaza across the river from the Eiffel Tower. Things would get wet.
