Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,
Paris Fashion Week is no longer in the business of clothes. It is in the business of humiliation. The Spring/Summer 2027 season opened in the French capital this week as a contest to see who can manufacture the most freakish garbage: outfits and makeup built to wipe out sex, wipe out beauty, and leave the human face looking like a prop from a cheap horror set.
The models are interchangeable. Rakishly thin. Ghoulish. Faces sanded into the same deformed, demonic mask. The crowd claps. The trade press calls it "prestige." Ordinary people looking at the footage call it a dystopian freak show.
And of course, the ever present MESSAGE is in full force. In one clip, a black model in a gold gown staggers down the runway with two lifeless white male figures slung over her.
PARIS Fashion Week 2026 ?
An African carries the bodies of two dead White men (Mannequins).
This isn't 'Fashion', this is an ugly satanic circus.
Everything beautiful in the West has been corrupted by depravity & has been destroyed.
pic.twitter.com/XHFH4SycGB
That was not a random stunt. It was the finale of The Ninety-Nine Percent, the Paris Fashion Week debut of Montreal label Matières Fécales - French for "fecal matter" - staged Monday at Place de la République. Designers Steven Raj Bhaskaran and Hannah Rose Dalton put 99 models on the square. Every one of them, Vogue reported, was a person of color.
The images that defined the show, Vogue wrote, were the last two looks: "two young Black models carried Sarah Sitkin's hyper-realistic statues of well-fed old white men wearing dollar-bill blindfolds."
FashionNetwork described the close as two models - one in a white single-button suit, one in a gold lamé gown with a train - "each staggering beneath the weight of mannequins portraying billionaires, hoisted on their shoulders."
Bhaskaran framed it as liberation. "This one is for the 99%," he told Vogue. "It's taking the source of power from last season and giving it to the people that we want to empower." In a longer note he added: "Ninety-nine models of colour and ninety-nine looks by a designer of colour. The casting wasn't just a creative choice; it reflects all the people I grew up with in social housing." He called Place de la République "a place of revolution" and said it was "perfect that the first-ever fashion show" there was "organised by a group of immigrants like us."
The previous Matières Fécales collection, The One Percent, had already gone in for dollar-bill masks over the eyes, "guilt gloves" of white lambskin with bloody palms, and prosthetic faces with blacked-out eyeballs that Times Now described as "almost devilish." This week's sequel just swapped the sermon.
Last season the house dressed the rich as demons. This season it dressed "the 99%" as gods and hung the rich, white, and male off their backs like carcasses. The industry called it a 'protest'.
Imagine the outrage if the imagery were reversed.
PARIS SPRING FASHION WEEK ?
The video on the left is the REAL video from Paris Fashion Week.
African carries 2 dead White men on her back, everyone claps & this is seen as acceptable.
The video on the right would cause global outrage, model & designer would most likely... pic.twitter.com/pV23VQeTVS
Paris is the perfect setting for it. The city that once stood for light, proportion, and a civilisation sure enough of itself to invent haute couture has spent decades deleting the culture that made the place matter.
Mass migration and the official cult of modernity have turned whole districts and the banlieues into parallel societies while the old French capital is kept on as a backdrop for visitors.
Interior ministry figures for 2025 put foreign nationals at 87 percent of theft suspects and 61 percent of sexual-violence suspects on Île-de-France public transport - in a country where foreigners are about 9 percent of the population.
A runway that erases sex, beauty, and the European face is not an accident that happened to land in Paris. It is what a conquered capital stages when its elites have already decided the native civilisation is finished.
The runway was only half the story. The front row at what is still sold as the most prestigious fashion week on earth featured animal-head masks, dollar bills taped over eyes, headset hardware, nails like weapons, haircuts that look like the individuals lost a fight with a woodchipper.
These are front row guests at Paris Fashion Week.
It is considered the most 'prestigious' fashion week in the world. pic.twitter.com/kwzyx4TdLN
This is the clientele. The clothes are designed for people who have already decided that looking human is bourgeois. Gender is sanded off. Beauty is treated as a political error.
Makeup does not enhance a face. It cancels it. Bone structure is pushed toward the same starved, hollowed, slightly wrong geometry until the models stop being women or men and become a single branded ghoul.
This is not "fashion" it's a deviant gimp show. The individuals now involved in 'Paris fashion week' are solely focused on creating more stupid freakish garbage than their peers. pic.twitter.com/MRRPHOc0Dj
— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) September 29, 2026High fashion isn't even about clothes anymore. It is just an excuse to push bizarre, dystopian garbage on the public.
Paris Fashion Week is as close to a satanic culture as you can get, and regular people are entirely sick of it. pic.twitter.com/dKkNiWE6sn
This is what the circuit now produces: not desire, not dressmaking, but a scavenger hunt for which house can make the human form look most cursed.
Paris Fashion Week just started@grok, is the stylist behind
this collection Jewish? pic.twitter.com/gLAxvo5skY
It's a cross between the Hunger Games and a Satanic freak show.
?? Welcome to Paris Fashion Week, 2026
While the world is on fire ... the rich enjoy themselves in that way. pic.twitter.com/iD4X9NQyTN
?? Meanwhile during Paris Fashion Week
The Home of World Fashion & their most illustrious week of the year shows clearly that the Satanists have still captured the entire Fashion Industry.
They don't even hide it. pic.twitter.com/KkXDcYnUgs
The same starved silhouettes keep coming back. The same cadaver makeup. The same flattened sex. The same racial morality play dressed up as couture. Luxury's ruling class has decided that the highest status signal is contempt for the thing fashion used to sell: a beautiful woman, clearly a woman, wearing something a normal person might actually want.
Beauty is not a conservative hobby. It is one of the oldest human instincts that modernity now treats as suspect. A culture that cannot stand a pretty face, a female silhouette, or a male body that is not being in some way tortured or murdered, will not stop at the runway.
It will keep going until the only acceptable look is the one that says: you are not a man, you are not a woman, you are not a people, you are inventory.
Tyler Durden Wed, 09/30/2026 - 06:30Readers by now know how we've laid out the looming rearmament supercycle in the West colliding with the "own the bottlenecks" theme, as resource nationalism makes industrial metals and rare earths scarce because of Beijing's export restrictions.
Adrien Rabier, Bernstein's equity analyst covering European aerospace and defense, penned a note on Tuesday explaining why the European defense rearmament cycle remains a top investment theme and even outlined a timeline.
In a report titled "European Defense: Beyond the order boom," Rabier said EU defense firms are set to enter a massive demand-driven cycle for new weapons.
Here's the timeline in three phases:
Stage 1: New paradigm (2022-2026).
The first stage, following the invasion of Ukraine, was characterized by rapid order collection. It drove multiple expansion across the sector, in anticipation of faster growth. The stocks re-rated from 9x EV/EBIT (-30% discount vs. SX600) to 15x currently (+17%). Exposure to the best geographies (Germany) and the quickest growth segments (short-cycle) were the most important drivers of performance.
Stage 2: Re-Arming Europe (2026-2030).
The second stage marked the transition from an order-driven performance to execution-driven, as backlogs became rich across the sector. Exposure to structurally attractive product categories will remain the most important factor, in our view. We expect the narrative against short cycles products, legacy weapons, and Ukraine-related demand to intensify. Our "new warfare" basket is up +14% YTD, vs. the "old warfare" basket down -34%. We expect this gap to keep widening. We see few positive catalysts for the sector, and therefore favor self-help stories. We expect investors to focus increasingly on the exit multiples, as we head toward Stage 3.
Stage 3: Normalization (2030+).
After the re-arming phase, we believe European military budgets will normalize near 3% of GDP. European Defense should then return to a GDP+ growth and ~12% EBIT margins sector, close to the Index's average.
Rabier's key message is that investors will reward companies capable of converting backlogs into profitable deliveries:
With all players now virtually benefiting from very large backlogs, the ability to convert backlog into profitable growth and scale capacity efficiently will matter more. We continue to view electronics exposure as the best, because these businesses grow through volume and content share, and are easier to scale (Thales, Leonardo, BAE Systems). Some companies will also benefit from turning around parts of their businesses (TKMS, Leonardo).
Top picks:
One major constraint on both Europe's rearmament cycle and the looming US weapons buildup is access to reliable, conflict-free supplies of critical materials. Larger budgets and expanding order books can translate into weapons deliveries only if manufacturers secure the necessary copper, tungsten, and rare earths that are in scarce supply.
That makes "owning the bottlenecks" a complementary investment theme to the broader defense buildup.
Tyler Durden Wed, 09/30/2026 - 05:45European governments are racing to blunt a fuel shock that even some analysts now refuse to forecast, as Brent crude holds near $100 a barrel and diesel prices climb across Europe.
The international oil market has been expensive for months. What has changed is the confidence of the people paid to explain it. JPMorgan told clients on Sept. 17 that, for the first time since fighting began around Iran about seven months earlier, its commodities team no longer has a baseline view of how the disruption ends.
"We simply don't know how to model the endgame," the bank's analysts wrote, after several economic thresholds they once assumed would force a diplomatic off-ramp, including oil above $100 a barrel, had already been crossed.
The bank said a Brent price near $90 would have been consistent with known supply and demand in September. Futures instead traded around $100 and higher as traders priced the risk of further losses that no one can yet measure. By Monday, front-month Brent was still hovering near $99 a barrel.
Inventories are doing little to cushion the blow. The U.S. Energy Information Administration has said prices are likely to stay elevated until Middle East oil trade is restored and stocks can be rebuilt. The International Energy Agency's September report put the scale of the drain in starker terms: observed global inventories fell another 95 million barrels in August, taking the cumulative draw since February to 507 million barrels, or about 2.8 million barrels a day. World oil supply is now projected to average 100.7 million barrels a day in 2026, down 5.7 million from a year earlier.
Diesel shortages are acuteIn some countries, such as Hungary, there is a major imbalance in terms of available energy sources. Crude held in strategic storage remains ample, but diesel is quickly running out. Data from the Hungarian Hydrocarbon Stockpiling Association show gas oil stocks at 520.3 kilotons at the end of January and about 390 kilotons at the end of both July and August. That thinner diesel cushion matters in a country where more than 1.3 million passenger cars run on the fuel and the regional market is competing for the same scarce imports.
Pump prices have already moved. Official and commercial trackers put Hungarian diesel around 701 forints a liter in late September on some official series and closer to 730 forints on daily station averages - well above the roughly 593 forints recorded at the end of June. The original worry in Budapest was not whether prices would rise, but how quickly 800 forints would stop looking like a distant ceiling.
That speed is not a mystery to central bankers. Bank of Slovenia research covering euro-area data from 2005 through 2026 found that a 10% rise in Brent lifts pretax diesel and gasoline prices by about 6.5% and 6.2%, respectively, over the longer term. A large share of the increase shows up at stations within the first two weeks - faster than the physical chain of shipping, refining and wholesale delivery would suggest.
The European Central Bank has reached a similar conclusion and added an unwelcome twist: refinery margins can amplify the shock. During the spring spike, Brent briefly reached $138 a barrel while diesel at the refinery gate jumped to $197. ECB staff later estimated that refining margins were contributing about 41 euro cents a liter to euro-area retail diesel in mid-September, and they told reporters those diesel margins may not peak until October.
The way down is slower than the way up. Taxes, refining and transport costs, inventories, margins and local competition all delay relief when crude finally eases. That asymmetry is why governments are acting now, before higher fuel bills work through freight, food and services and lift broader inflation.
Europe-wide crisisThe policy dilemma is the same from Lisbon to Warsaw: protect households and trucking firms without writing a blank check for fossil-fuel consumption. Europe has answered with a patchwork rather than a single rule. Some governments cap retail prices. Others cut excise taxes, sometimes below the European Union minimum. A third group aims help at farmers, haulers and other heavy users. A few still let global prices hit consumers with no cushion at all. The result is that the same barrel of oil can produce pump prices that differ dramatically at the pump across Europe.
Here are just a few examples of what Europe looks like in this regard.
Germany will cut energy tax by 14 cents a liter from Oct. 1 through year-end, about 17 cents once lower VAT is counted, in a 2.5 billion-euro package.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz said drivers who depend on a car every day "are reaching their breaking point."
Berlin is also talking with the oil industry about a temporary price cap modeled on Luxembourg or Belgium, aimed at Jan. 1, 2027.
The Czech government will restore a station-margin ceiling from Oct. 1, cut diesel duty to the EU minimum and cap retail margins at 2.50 koruna a liter.
Poland has floated a 60% levy on oil companies' extra profits to finance about 4 billion zlotys of price relief, though the plan faces parliamentary and constitutional hurdles.
The International Energy Agency has described the response as global, not merely European. In a matter of months, the number of countries applying fuel subsidies rose from 16 to 38, and the number cutting energy taxes rose from 40 to 57. Pew Research Center, drawing on IEA tallies from mid-June, counted 113 countries that had taken at least one energy-cost measure after the Iran war, including tax changes in 55 countries and fuel subsidies in 32. The agency's own warning is implicit in those numbers: governments are treating the symptom at the pump because they cannot reopen the Strait of Hormuz from a finance ministry or end the war in Ukraine.
Tyler Durden Wed, 09/30/2026 - 05:00Google parent Alphabet on Monday took Brussels to court over two European Union orders that would force the search giant to open its Android devices to rival AI services and hand competing search engines access to its search data.
The Google logo at the VivaTech show in Paris on June 15, 2023. The Canadian Press/AP, Michel EulerThe European Commission issued both orders in July under the Digital Markets Act, the EU's gatekeeper law, which Brussels says exists to ensure fair competition and prevent monopolies in tech.
"We're appealing decisions that will force us to share people's private search history without sufficient anonymization and weaken vital security protections on Android," said Oliver Bethell, Google's senior director of competition.
"People use Search for their most personal questions - from medical worries to close relationships - and mandating we share these personal queries without adequate safeguards would cause irreversible harm to user privacy."
Google argues the data would go to unvetted businesses without users' knowledge or consent, and that once it leaves Google's systems, third parties could re-identify users and expose their personal lives, trade secrets, or sensitive government information. Advances in AI have made that kind of re-identification far faster and cheaper, the company adds.
As the Epoch Times notes further, the EU-enforced changes are set to kick in in January 2027.
Google's challenges, filed in the Luxembourg-based General Court, Europe's second-highest court, on Sept. 28, will not prevent them from taking effect unless the California company seeks interim measures to delay them as proceedings continue.
A European Commission spokesperson told The Epoch Times that the commission "takes note that Alphabet has announced that it will lodge an appeal against the Commission's decisions at the General Court. As always, the Commission will defend its decisions in court."
The Commission added that it should be "stressed that the two specification decisions carefully consider the integrity and security with respect to the features involved, as well as ensuring the protection of the personal data of end users."
At the time, the commission said the first decision aimed to ensure that competitors' AI services "can compete with Google's own AI services, such as Gemini, by having equal access to features on Google's Android devices."
The aim of the second, the EU said, was to "rebalance the playing field by giving third-party search engines access to search data that only Google Search can collect at scale."
Google's move marks the latest escalation in the company's long-running battle with European regulators over the scope of the Digital Markets Act.
The tech giant has already been slapped with multiple fines totaling billions of dollars in recent years after a series of European court rulings found it had breached aspects of the Act.
The targeting of Google and other American tech giants such as Apple, Meta, and Amazon by EU authorities has drawn criticism from Washington, with President Donald Trump saying in July that his administration would open a formal investigation into the EU's trade practices, threatening new tariffs over billions of dollars in fines leveled against U.S. tech companies.
In a Truth Social post on July 24, Trump said the investigation would begin "immediately" under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows the president to protect U.S. businesses against unfair trade practices with tariffs and sanctions.
He accused the EU of "robbing" U.S. companies and, in turn, American taxpayers.
"The European Union is at it again and, as usual, taking direct aim at GREAT American Companies!" Trump wrote, referring to European enforcement actions over recent years against Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon.
As yet, there have been no public revelations regarding that investigation.
Tyler Durden Wed, 09/30/2026 - 04:15