PARIS HILTON MEETS NOT-KARL: WHO GETS TO BE REAL?
For Fall-Winter 2026, KARL LAGERFELD brings together two masters of constructed identity: Paris Hilton and someone who does not actually exist. Hilton returns as the face of the Maison for the latest chapter of From Paris With Love, but this time she shares the screen with NOT-KARL, a new digital character introduced into the brand’s universe. Shot by Matt Easton against walls of retro television screens, their encounter feels less interesting as a conventional fashion campaign than as a collision between two different generations of image-making.
Paris Hilton understood the possibility of becoming an image long before everyone had a personal brand. The heiress, reality television star, businesswoman and perpetual pop-cultural reference has spent more than two decades navigating the distance between Paris Hilton the person and “Paris Hilton” the character. The blonde hair, the voice, the catchphrases and the hyper-feminine excess became components of a persona that could be reproduced endlessly across television screens, paparazzi photographs and, eventually, social media. NOT-KARL arrives from the opposite direction. There is no person behind the persona. Created as a digital member of the KARL LAGERFELD universe, the character makes its debut alongside Hilton with the promise of extending beyond a single season. Putting them together makes strange sense. One constructed their identity through the machinery of early-2000s celebrity culture; the other enters the world already constructed. In the campaign, reality and fiction are therefore less opposites than different points on the same spectrum.
The retro televisions surrounding them make that relationship even more explicit. Before TikTok feeds and Instagram grids, television was one of the machines through which celebrity identities were manufactured and repeated. Hilton belonged to that transition: famous through tabloids and reality television before learning how to translate that fame into the internet era. Now those screens become the environment in which the Maison introduces its own digital personality.
There is also the unavoidable question of Karl himself. Few designers understood the power of self-invention as completely as Karl Lagerfeld. The white ponytail, black sunglasses, high collars, gloves and carefully delivered provocations transformed a designer into an instantly recognisable silhouette. Years after his death, the brand carrying his name faces a peculiar challenge: how do you preserve a personality-driven fashion house when that personality is no longer there?
NOT-KARL offers one possible answer, not by recreating Karl, but by turning the idea of the fashion persona into something that can keep evolving. The clothes remain considerably more grounded. FW26 returns to familiar House codes through sharp tailoring, sophisticated outerwear and an overwhelmingly monochromatic palette. An elongated white tuxedo-inspired shirt and the K/Autograph bags make the Lagerfeld vocabulary immediately recognisable. Kit Butler joins Hilton for the menswear side of the campaign, bringing another, decidedly human presence into its increasingly hybrid cast. But the most compelling product being introduced this season might not be a jacket or a bag. It is a personality.
Fashion has always manufactured characters. Designers create mythologies around themselves; models become archetypes; celebrities turn identity into currency. Digital personas simply make that construction impossible to ignore. That is why Paris Hilton might be the ideal person to welcome NOT-KARL into the world. Long before avatars, virtual influencers and AI-generated personalities complicated our understanding of authenticity, she had already demonstrated that being constructed does not necessarily mean being fake. Sometimes the character becomes the reality.
Words by @alraco43