PARIS – Fashion. Sports. And of course, the rain.
Those were the topics — separately, and together — on everyone’s lips as a gaggle of luminaries from sports, entertainment and media packed into Ralph Lauren’s Paris eatery Saturday evening in yet another high-wattage celebrity Olympic gathering in the French capital.
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The starry crowd at Ralph's Restaurant included Oscar winner Jessica Chastain, Nick Jonas, John Mulaney and Alan Cumming, among other entertainers. First lady Jill Biden arrived late and drew a large crowd around her.
“Saturday Night Live” executive producer Lorne Michaels was there, pointing to his shoes and noting they were still wet from the previous evening’s epic, and rainy, opening ceremony. “These shoes are not all-weather,” he explained. The ceremony had left many drenched, but most still very happy to be there — including Michaels.
“Let’s put it this way, I was watching in a place with a lot of stars, and nobody was complaining,” he said.
Also not complaining: the Olympic athletes in attendance, who’d spent much of the previous evening on a boat in the rain. Had they been worried about catching cold?
“It was a thought,” said Jeffrey Louis, a member of the U.S. breaking team competing in the sport’s Olympic debut, “but then I figured we’d just all get sick at the same time."
"So we all embraced it,” added Louis, who said he had tried to cover up with a poncho briefly, but when he put it down, someone swiped it. But he survived the rains in good health — in any case, his competition is not until the end of the Olympics.
Likewise, Chiaka Ogbogu, a U.S. volleyball player, decided to not to worry about colds. “We’re in it, so might as well not worry about it," she said she thought at the time. Also, she noted: Athletes are some of the toughest people out there. They can deal with colds.
Ogbogu, who is competing in her second Olympics after Toyko in 2021, said she was delighted to be at a Ralph Lauren event because she is a self-described “fashion nerd.” Asked which team uniform she liked the best — besides her own Team USA kit, which she was wearing — she noted the elegant Mongolian uniform, which has been widely acclaimed. She also admired Haiti's vibrantly colored designs, which likewise have gained attention
Singer-actor Nick Jonas cited a special reason for loving the Indian uniforms in the three colors of that country’s national flag: “My wife’s Indian,” he noted, referring to spouse Priyanka Chopra. He'd just flown into Paris a few hours earlier for a whirlwind few days at the Games, during which he plans to watch gymnastics with star SImone Biles, among other things.
Jonas missed the chance to see the opening ceremony in person — and to get wet — but watched it on TV. He said he was amazed by the production values — noting in particular the French tricolor smoke billowing over a bridge. “That was like nothing I've ever seen," he said.
As for fashion — the theme of the night — almost everyone seemed to agree that these 2024 Olympics had taken fashion up a notch. Ogobogu, the volleyball player, said it was “almost inevitable — I mean, it’s Paris!”
David Lauren, the label’s chief branding and innovation officer and son of founder Ralph Lauren, who did not attend, attributed it partly to the rise of social media and how quickly images of Olympic fashion travel these days, as compared to 2008 when the label began outfitting the U.S. team.
To make his point, he whipped out his phone and showed an Instagram video of LeBron James, a U.S. flag bearer with Coco Gauff, being readied in his white Lauren jacket with red-and-blue trim. It had nearly 850,000 likes.
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For more coverage of the Paris Olympics, visit https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games.