Venice, Fashion Week and a Secret Brad Pitt Screening: The September Diary

September is the month the calendar stops being polite about it. The 83rd Venice Film Festival opened with the first wave of awards contenders, New York Fashion Week began, and the Emmys and Toronto were still to come. Everybody who works in this business was on a plane.

At Venice, the early arrivals included George Clooney, Laura Dern, Kate Mara and Claire Foy, with Maggie Gyllenhaal presiding as jury president. Taika Waititi turned up at the Place to Be photocall on September 9 and appeared to be enjoying himself considerably. Pamela Anderson arrived at the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido ahead of the same film's screening, in Carolina Herrera by Wes Gordon, and it was the photograph of the festival's first week.

Los Angeles kept its own schedule

Hollywood declined to empty out. Mark Wahlberg premiered By Any Means at the Paramount Theatre. Ryan Reynolds did the same for Mayday, the Apple TV buddy comedy he made with Kenneth Branagh.

The most interesting booking of the month was the quietest. On September 8, Brad Pitt spoke at a secret screening of Heart of the Beast at Paramount Pictures Studios, staged for a social video audience rather than a press one. A closed room, an invited crowd, no carpet. That is a studio testing whether the old premiere apparatus is still the most efficient way to start a conversation about a film, and quietly concluding that it might not be.

The day after the Los Angeles premieres, Jason Momoa and Noah Centineo flew to Tokyo to open the promotional tour for Street Fighter, the third live-action feature drawn from the game series.

A closed room, an invited crowd and no carpet, which is a studio checking whether it still needs one

New York, where fashion and everything else collided

Fashion week produced the month's densest cluster of rooms.

Paris Hilton went backstage at the Alice and Olivia Spring/Summer 2027 presentation on September 10, where her skincare line PARIVIE was the show's exclusive skincare partner, which is a neat description of how a celebrity brand now buys its way onto a schedule. Becky G appeared on the blue carpet at the US Open on September 8, then joined the designer Willy Chavarria the following night at Ray's for the launch of his UGG collaboration.

Karl Schmid hosted HIV Unwrapped at Sony Hall on September 9 as part of the week, with Peppermint among those attending. Paul Anthony Kelly and Jamie Campbell Bower turned out for Montblanc's hundred years of leather on the 8th.

The party that got the picture

Bvlgari took the month. On September 10 the house unveiled an installation called auruBOROS, subtitled Urban Memory and Collective Dream, at a Serpenti Infinito party in New York, and assembled a guest list most brands would take a season to build: Dua Lipa, Anne Hathaway and Lisa in the same frame, with Joey King and Hudson Williams also in the room.

Elsewhere the causes and the anniversaries did well. Natasha Lyonne and Tiffany Haddish marked twenty years of the RED campaign at Electric Lady Studios on September 9. Lucy Hale and Sofia Vergara presented at the Daytime Beauty Awards at Grand Venue in Los Angeles the same night. Sheryl Lee Ralph, Marco Calvani and a freshly minted Emmy winner, Ernest Harden Jr., went to a producers' evening at the White Rabbit Sky Lounge on the 8th.

Martha Stewart attended the unveiling of RH Estates on Greenwich Avenue on September 9, the North American debut of the concept and the first freestanding gallery of its kind anywhere.

What the month is telling you

Two patterns are visible in a fortnight of photographs.

The first is that the luxury houses have taken over the social calendar. The best-attended rooms of early September were a jewellery installation and a leather anniversary, not film premieres. A brand can now assemble a stronger guest list than a studio, because it is not asking anyone to promote anything.

The second is that the studios have noticed. A secret screening for a social audience and a Tokyo tour launch on consecutive days are the actions of an industry that has worked out where the attention actually is, and has stopped assuming a carpet is the way to reach it.