Probably the most beautiful thing about Paris shouldn’t be the Louvre or the Notre Dame or the moment just after they turn on the lamps on the Pont Alexandre III, but any of the capital’s 73 McDonald’s restaurants. With its Golden Arches more famous than the Christian Cross, the fast food chain is an avatar of egalitarian dining, able to straddling vast geographic and social borders. But its presence in culture is probably closer defined by opposition: McDonald’s can also be a temple of greed (corporate and private) that has sat on the fault lines of a public health crisis because the Eighties. Its 99p burgers are as much a guilty pleasure as they’re a dartboard for all of the anxieties that fester around class, fatness, and mass consumption.

Inelegant and down-market, McDonald’s is the antithesis of Le Cordon Bleu. It’s also one among the last venues you may anticipate finding magazine editors during Paris Fashion Week, but season after season these people feel compelled to broadcast their McDonald’s meals to a web based audience. How unexpected! And quite transgressive? If it’s not a miserable-looking tray strewn in off-putting bits of pale lettuce and discarded burger boxes, then it’s a well-disguised OOTD post captured on the restaurant’s CCTV screens. These uploads jar against the normal taste values (artisanal, handmade) offered up at fashion week and are almost at all times captioned with something anodyne like “fashion week essential” or “refuelling” or “needs must!”

Where high-end design boasts of silk charmeuse and chiffon, McDonald’s is healthier known for chicken beak and bum. “I have not seen it but it surely sounds very Carrie Bradshaw, le filet de fish,” says Interview Magazine’s Taylore Scarabelli, referencing a scene in Sex And The City where Bradshaw gives Mr Big a Big Mac within the hopes he might need to take her to Paris. He says no and she or he lobs a burger in his direction, however the image of SJP clasping her McDonald’s bag is now kryptonite for individuals who run nostalgic mood-board accounts. And it’s a simple (if not low-hanging) double tap: if American culture is popular culture then McDonald’s should be its spiritual heartland. Posting from a Subway or an Itsu wouldn’t be as Instagrammable. “McDonald’s is the good social connector – who isn’t lovin’ it?” Hannah Tindle, fashion features director of ES says. “Except possibly Gwyneth Paltrow.” 

But it surely’s also very Rishi Sunak posing with a self-service machine at McDonald’s weeks after someone found footage of him admitting to not having socialised with working-class people. He, like Bradshaw, is willing to stomach the proletariat slop as a way to burnish his status as being by some means relatable and low-maintenance. In turn, it creates a halo effect; if Sunak is selecting to eat at a McDonald’s then perhaps he’s not the out-of-touch billionaire that woke leftists on Twitter are positioning him as. Right? There’s a glib comparison to be drawn between the PM and image-conscious fashion editors: each have found it glamorous to cross the tracks, but that may only ever go in a single direction. The liberty to glide between the front row (or the front bench) and a McDonald’s booth is a one-way exchange reserved for individuals who are accustomed to fancier alternatives. 

Perhaps that’s an ungenerous reading of well-heeled people on the hunt for energy-dense stodge. “These pictures are designed to point out that we’re all still human beings with an innate desire for salt, fat, and sugar,” Tindle says. “Irrespective of which ridiculous people we occur to be rubbing shoulders with during fashion week.” Because people are inclined to crave McDonald’s in times of desperation (being drunk or hungover or broke or too exhausted to go elsewhere) these posts often reiterate the self-sacrifice that comes with fashion week. The expectations to work and show face are legitimately gruelling but tray posting may also be an exercise in public martyrdom: fashion week stole my smile, etc. “Keeping your blood sugar levels stable in the course of the fashion month marathon is a must. And if that is available in the shape of a Big Mac meal being inhaled within the space of three seconds behind a automotive, then so be it.”

But this isn’t an issue of why people go to McDonald’s during fashion week (they’re hungry, probably!) it’s the extent to which it gets aestheticised on the feed. “There’s some hilarious taboo in tucking into caviar-stuffed jacket potatoes one meal after which a McFlurry the following,” says Laura Hawkins, fashion features editor of Vogue. “In any case, fashion loves a high-low moment. Sure, you may love a €1 cheeseburger but you are also travelling around in a chauffeur-driven automotive. I feel that is why people enjoy posting their Maccies pics a lot.” The main focus of those posts, then, is less on the food itself and more on the status of McDonald’s, and when wedged inside an IG dump (all runway videos and Barbara Sturm bathroom selfies) a humble tray post is shorthand for ‘I’m not overly concerned with the preciousness and pretension that collects around industry events’. 

The juxtaposition makes for a classic fashion image: one where Victoria’s Secret angels and Karl Lagerfeld dangle pizza and burgers into their mouths, or where high fashion models pose in low-grade diners, or where Moschino borrows from McDondald’s tomato-red and mustard-yellow uniforms. When editorialised by the very institutions which have worked so hard to keep up the distinctions around “good” and “bad” eating habits (Lagerfeld said “nobody desires to see curvy women”) the suitable to fast food is positioned as an ethical one. ‘I’m allowed to eat calories because I’m thin and successful.’ Even when the people behind these IG posts oppose those attitudes, it helps that they’re often slim – but does the tray post compound fashion’s fraught relationship with food? Or is it an innocuous fit pic? “I feel it’s a little bit little bit of each,” Tindle says. “But I would love to hope it was more the latter. On a practical level, you do get so hungry between shows that every one ‘weight loss program’ rules (should you’re bothering to follow any in the primary place) are inclined to exit the window anyway.”

The spectre of your individual status – clinging to job title, follower count, class, or physical appearance – is an ambient companion at fashion week. But McDonald’s (where the wealthy eat as badly because the poor) offers its customers a level of status anonymity. Menus might cater to local tastes but there’s a uniformity to the restaurants’ design and ambience that creates a setting as familiar as home – you may, quite literally, be anywhere on the planet and inside a McDonald’s. And it could be a shelter from all of the candied figs and wax-dipped pears that no person desires to eat at The Row. “Most individuals on the show circuit feel misplaced and I at all times find an unbelievable solace in munching on my fave fast food,” Hawkins says, having found herself weeping right into a bag of chicken nuggets while first covering the Haute Couture collections. “Particularly once you spend most of your day things that epitomise unattainable luxury and comparing what shoes you’re wearing to everyone else’s,” she adds.

Even when it’s just smoke and mirrors (or a low-slung mule and a Kiko Kostadinov bag) tray posting is barely perceived as being glamorous when the person behind it has the illusion of status. But there’s also something to be said about that big ‘M’ rising from the depths of fashion season like a fluorescent steeple and spire. “My highest and lowest points at fashion week are all linked to McDonald’s,” Hawkins says. “Crying before a Vetements show in 2018; feeling giddy with joy surrounded by UK press at Malpensa airport after six never-ending days in Milan in 2019. And I’ve sat within the Maccies next to the Eurostar terminal countless, countless times. Irrespective of what number of fancy frites you eat, it’s those chips that at all times taste the very best.” All that is to say: be it in Recent York, London, Milan, or Paris, we’ll at all times have McDonald’s.