Since, in the 90s, in the golden age of top models, George Michael gathered in his video clips ‘Freedom! ’90’ and ‘Too Funky’ to some of the most famous supermodels of the moment, the catwalk consolidated itself in the audiovisual imagination as a space for social and political commentary, a symbolic stage where discourses about fame, power, consumption or feminism could be projected.
The controversial music video ‘American Life’ by Madonna and Jonas Åkerlund, conceived as a furious political satire, and the hilarious film ‘Zoolander’ by Ben Stiller, in the form of a parody, were some of the most notable milestones in that evolution.
In the clip ‘SS26’, Charli XCX recovers the fashion catwalk as a semantic field (SS26 is the acronym for Spring/Summer 2026). The singer recreates the hustle and bustle of Parisian fashion weeks, the aesthetics of the shows, the backstage, the photographers, the makeup artists and the front rows occupied by industry celebrities, to satirize a culture obsessed with fame and visibility.
The presence of Carine Roitfeld, Anthony Vaccarello and Michel Gaubert is very significant because they are not simple celebrity cameos. They represent three fundamental pillars of the fashion system: the specialized press (Roitfeld, former director of Vogue), the large luxury houses (Vaccarello, creative director of Saint Laurent) and the aesthetic construction of the shows (Gaubert, music designer).
The catwalk thus becomes the perfect metaphor for a society that, as the song suggests, joyfully parades along a “catwalk that goes straight to hell.”
