There are men whom Providence, in its infinite and occasionally questionable wisdom, seems to reserve for great destinies. And so here is “Pascal Morand,” disguised as a merry Pascal, offering us, from the doorstep of a house whose modesty is almost aggressive, as if to remind us that humility, if not quite a virtue, can at least serve as scenery, a video clearly intended for immortality.

Not the immortality of great books, nor that of great paintings, but the infinitely more democratic immortality of Instagram, that Parthenon of contemporary vanity.

He sings. Yes. He sings…

Well, he tries. And this is the President of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, that cathedral of absolute refinement, that temple where hems are measured to the microsecond and where the word mousseline is pronounced with the reverence others reserve for prayer. He sings about immortality, no less.

One could search the annals of French elegance for a very long time before finding such a combination of vocal audacity and metaphysical ambition. Caesar, after all, crossed the Rubicon. Napoleon crossed the Alps. Pascal, courageously, crosses the boundaries of ridicule. The effort deserves recognition.

Is it a message addressed to the Lord of Arnault? one wonders with delight. A subtle supplication in C major? A resignation disguised as a vocal flourish? Or simply the expression of a soul that years of analysing fashion’s balance sheets have rendered slightly… whimsical?

For Pascal is, it must be remembered, the finest economist in fashion. He may not have said so outright, but he has certainly allowed it to be understood, with that discretion peculiar to people who know perfectly well what they are worth and would rather you knew it too. The finest economist in fashion singing in front of a small house: there is a coherence there that only psychoanalysis could hope to unravel.

What is particularly quaint, and this is where the shoe pinches, is that Pascal does not receive young designers in his office. Those enfant terribles of couture are the very people who dress the French music scene with the effortless ease of those for whom art is not ceremonial costume but a second skin. They might have helped him with the lyrics, corrected the pitch, taught him that delicate art of staging oneself without placing oneself in peril, with something more convincing than the orange jacket of a motorway maintenance worker.

But no.

Pascal sings alone.

In front of his little house.

On Instagram.

About immortality.

Oscar Wilde wrote that the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Pascal has clearly read Wilde. He yielded to the temptation of vocal glory with a spontaneity one might generously describe as authentic, worthy of the daughters of The Man in Blue and the King himself. May his soul rest in peace.

While the President plays the comedian, the world of couture holds its breath somewhere between hilarity and bewilderment, that narrow territory where the finest things in fashion have always found refuge.

For in France, ridicule does not kill. One makes a living from it.

FM