New York Fashion Week: Is Brad Pitt Starting A BeeGees Tribute Band?

Fresh out of the Venice Film Festival, where he premiered his Tim Cook caper vehicle with his longtime best friend George Clooney, Brad Pitt and his elegant better half, Ines de Ramon, arrived in New York with a bright yellow splash, just in time to surf atop the choppy waters of New York’s edgy Fashion Week. Lots and lots of very different sorts of people pile into town for this, and we’ll be meeting them in the next days, but in general the September shows are New York’s social back-to-school moment.

Pitt chose this outing to execute a peacock strut of the highest order, in character as that full-bore but heretofore-unknown fourth Gibb brother, perhaps the one who assisted Robert Stigwood in channeling the boys to do “Stayin’ Alive” for Saturday Night Fever in 1977. Doesn’t Pitt even look a little like the Gibb that didn’t sing but instead played rugby? Maybe we need to get him on that celebrity-DNA-test show where they tell you stuff about your family that you don’t know.

Because! If there were ever a lost-Gibb-sibling swimming back upstream toward the bell-bottomed-leisure-suit homeland, Pitt is rocking that narrative, down to the contrasting dark external stitching on the hems of this playsuit. In fact, we could venture that he’s got to be careful on a strut like this. Dial back the volume a bit, perhaps? Move away from those shiny beige slip-ons? Little bit too close for comfort to the sartorial profile of the vacationing greaseball-arms-dealer on the Cote-d’Azur? Who knew Pitt could even go in that direction?

What we’re talking about is the effect it’s all having on his new girlfriend, who is, in both the entrance and the exit paparazzi shots above, seeming giddy and made more than a little shy about the whole Brothers Gibb parade she’s suddenly found herself towing through New York. In a word, her last, best hope is that we’re seeing the giant yellow leisure kit and the giant bell-bottoms as “irono-Brothers Gibb,” but she’s not entirely sure we’re all going to be that generous.

What happened to the whole French vineyard-owning, jeans-and-boots dude she started out with just a few months back? Poof! Gone! Just like that!

By definition, as seen in the shot above, there are no off-duty models. In their own peculiar profession, they’re like emergency-room physicians in the sense that they cannot switch their professional instincts off. Hence Kendall Jenner’s spot-on back-to-school black-loafers-with-white-socks move, above, as she enters the white-hot Azzedine Alaia show at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on September 6. A more pointed, grown-up-schoolgirl than that is hard to do.

Super-proper yet trailblazing Ghanaian-born British gentleman editor Edward Kobina Enninful, OBE, former editor of British Vogue, is working on…something very damn big, but he’s keeping mum about that at the moment as he does the obligatory rounds. This is to say, his next act has yet to be written, but in the meantime, if there is a gathering — in fashion, the plastic arts, music, theatre and/or sport of a certain gravitas — we can fairly expect Enninful to make a classic appearance: The clean, clear silhouette of the dark, extremely well-cut suit offset by the blaze-white shirt. Very much appreciating the bespoke shoulderheads on those suits. Good to see a man of discretion and taste upholding the standards.

Speaking of well-dressed British gentlemen: The seismic news hit Europe just a few months back that, after 12 years with Mercedes, Formula 1’s 7-time champion driver Sir Lewis Carl Davidson Hamilton would be moving to Ferrari for the 2025 season. There’s plenty of the 2024 season left, but the rule with front-row denizen Sir Lewis is, if there’s a fashion week within a continent or two of wherever he’s racing now — in a very short three days, team prep for qualifying will start in the authoritarian pro-Russian oil satrapy of Azerbaijan, and, rain or shine, Sir Lewis will be cornering his Mercedes around the challenging hairpins in Baku. Just to say: Some fashion week front-row denizens have very demanding day jobs.

By now, many years in, it is clear that Rihanna can do no wrong, and by that we mean in business, in fashion, in the choice of sandal, in see-through cloaks with trains, in bling, in the choice of digits or letters of the alphabet to have inked on the leg, in any venture she would like to imagine.

Like we said, no such entity as an off-duty model. So, it’s entirely to be expected that Vittoria Ceretti would be keeping it clean, businesslike and minimal en route into the Alaia show. Zero complications here. Good business-casual black punctuation mark up top in the black vest to those striking red pants, and a refreshing light September-evening sea breeze can also work its way through those almost-ballet flats with the big-mesh uppers. In New York, in that shoe, you might want to be careful where you step running in and out of the afterparties down on the Lower East Side, but that sort of thing can be managed as long as you remain light on your feet, as we assume Ms. Ceretti, or anybody who dates or has dated Leonardo DiCaprio, very much can.