This tale is inspired by the latest Saint Laurent spring-summer 2027 collection
Drip drip drop…
A drop of gold falls and makes a sound. Oh, how we should wish nostalgia wrapped in aureate sheets, parcelled up like the gift of some happy past to be unwrapped at celebrations we have ceased to love. The golden drop falls to seal our contracts, the noblest of metals upon the softest of promises: we know already that we shall break them, though the savour of ceremony proves ever too strong to resist the temptation of a small untruth. The lights today are all alike, the pallor of a flame that gives no warmth, yet in Paris gold endures, stretching rays from the street lamps like the fingers of Midas, and were we even to be turned to statuary it would be a just price for having been touched by the grace of a broken darkness. And were the city empty, company would hardly be wanting. The shadow at one’s heels would hold no terror, being one’s own, the footfalls behind the echo of a heel against the asphalt, the heel with the red stone at its centre, the golden chains that clasp its throat, jewel within jewel of a purchase most assuredly deserved. And every golden age leans out from the balcony, all curlicues and arabesques and laurel leaves, for the past is ever triumphal since its worst, after all, has already come to pass.
Faint is the yellow of gold: it is the heart of the chestnut emerging from its spines (what are roses to us when there is food to be had?), it is the maple fading midway between two seasons, it is the starless night, that intoxication of lamps which doubles the sight, the glass spheres and within them their electrophorous bulbs like crystal balls that hold yesterday, and never tomorrow. A fair lock falls from the Eos of a fresco; dawn and dusk are no longer distinguishable in the gilded stain she leaves upon my jacket. And why not, I might let her do it. And behold, the Golden Fleece lies across my shoulders, Jason is drowned and the pasture is at peace. Gold, gold, gold, only gold, always gold. Always and only, alone and always, the beatitude of being precious.
The pole star of Paris is that tower shaped like my initial, and try as I might I cannot ignore the certainty of being upon the right road. La Ville Lumière, and not without reason, an open-air jewellery house where brocade is the filigree of palaces stitched together into the raiment of a perfect age. The beacon turns and the light shatters: the chandeliers at my ears are vast candelabra upon which the music sways before entering them and becoming a dream; it kindles the garments I wear and competition follows at once, for in the realm there is always one more beautiful, and après moi no deluge whatever, the crown being somewhat cumbersome, an accessory long out of fashion.
The heart of the chestnut is dark, as is its husk. I tear out my
heart so as not to spoil my clothes, yet one trump remains to me.
The witch at night arrays herself in black, not in
order to conceal herself, but in order not to be looked upon. What
a difference! Silk organza is the enchantment of
my invisibility, and while gold goes on dancing in the
Apellean deliriums of glory and of sun, I choose
the night and its honesty, for the day is a
deceiver and transmutes the colour of the sky. Leave me the truth
of an eternal and darkened
firmament. 
