The most coveted accessory at Paris Fashion Week was an ice pack

The most coveted accessory at the Paris Fashion Week shows this week was not a bag, a sneaker or a watch. It was an ice pack. As a historic heat wave gripped the French capital, fashion houses fought to keep guests cool with mist machines, chilled towels, parasols and iced Evian on silver platters. It wasn’t enough. Historic venues sweltered, guests were packed in tight, air conditioning was absent or inadequate and water ran short — at one house, organizers weighed serving none at all, having found only plastic bottles to hand out. That mattered because Paris Fashion Week is not a minor cultural event. It is one of France’s most visible export machines: six fashion seasons a year, global luxury houses, celebrities, editors, buyers and clients moving through an industry worth billions, often inside aging venues built for a cooler age. This week raised a harder question: whether Paris should keep staging menswear and haute couture in the height of summer at all if climate change keeps bringing more frequent and intense heat waves. “I honestly thought I was going to pass out,” said Ben Freeman, a London-based fashion critic from Australia. Paris neared 41 degrees Celsius (106 Fahrenheit) during a heat wave that pushed France into emergency mode. Large parts of the country were under red alert, and hospitals were told to prepare for more heat-related cases. Like the dusty Louvre, which cut hours and said its historic building “remains vulnerable and is not sufficiently adapted to climate change,” fashion week exposed a Paris problem as much as a fashion one: how to keep prestige institutions running when the weather no longer fits the building, the calendar or the crowd. “Paris Fashion Week is the canary in the mine,” Freeman said. The deeper contradiction was on the runway. At a Paris Fashion Week Men’s where the industry paid to imagine next summer could barely survive this one, houses cooled the people watching the shows, then dressed their models in unseasonable le