Fashion Photography – The theme is fun. Parisians want it. Everybody wants it, of course, but the French seem to want it more. And these days they are doing a pretty good job of providing themselves with reasons to be cheerful, before and after dark.

In what way is this place different from other fashion cities? In New York, Fashion Week can seem like an endless loop of business transactions. And about the last time anyone had a blast during Milan’s Fashion Week (now shriveled to about half that time) was during Tom Ford’s salad days at Gucci.

In just the last 72 hours here, however, a determined partygoer might have dropped in on the following: a party staged for Gareth Pugh by the people from PonyStep, the successor to the London nightclub BoomBox, and held at Le Baron, a formerly seedy bottles-and-models boîte; a private wingding for Nicolas Ghesquiere of Balenciaga at Le Montana, another nightclub whose inspiration is all things 1980s; and a genteel cocktail gathering for Peter Copping of Nina Ricci, held in the grandmotherly Salon d’Été at the Ritz.

Or, a temporary Fashion Week pop-up bar at the Hôtel de Crillon instigated by Carine Roitfeld, the editor of French Vogue, to provide all the random beauties floating around town a proper excuse to strap on their stilettos and their gilded Balmain rags.

That same partygoer might have joined in the fun at the nutty party at Le Meurice hosted by Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, the Dutch designers with a marked taste for the surreal. To celebrate the fifth anniversary of their popular Viktor & Rolf perfume, Flowerbomb, the designers crammed 1,000 or so of their closest friends into the hotel ballroom for a private concert by Grace Jones.

By diva standards, Ms. Jones was relatively punctual. For a set scheduled to start at 10, the singer, who had spent much of the day divagating about what to wear onstage, appeared around midnight. She wore a flattop haircut, a Domino mask, a dress with sleeves resembling turbines; and she concluded a brief greatest-hits performance by serenading an oversize box of Flowerbomb with “Happy Birthday.”

It was that kind of night.

“Sometimes, you look around a room and you ask yourself, ‘How did I get here?’ ” the Tunisian-born model and television actress Afef Jnifen Tronchetti Provera remarked as she sipped cranberry juice and awaited Ms. Jones’s appearance. She meant this in the most approving way. “It must be fate,” she added, referring to the fact of being in that room at that particular instant. A born optimist, Ms. Tronchetti Provera likes to nudge her happy destiny along by piling jeweled cloverleafs and lucky amulets on her arms.

“You hope for the best, but you never know,” Mr. Horsting said, by which he meant the success enjoyed by Flowerbomb, consistently ranked among the world’s top-selling fragrances. A bit later, Mr. Snoeren added, “You hope, and if the stars are aligned, it works,” his unwitting echo of Mr. Horsting’s point underlining one of the themes of this Paris season: optimism. Read more »