The Scene: a Viktor & Rolf Show on a cold winter day in a tent at the Tuileries.

“Is that Lenny Kravitz?” Michael Roberts, the style director of Vanity Fair, asked as he gazed across the catwalk at someone being mobbed by paparazzi in the celebrity section of the front row.

“No,” a French runway photographer said. “It’s Gary Dadow.”

“Who?” asked Brana Wolf, a seasoned fashion editor.

“Gary Dadow,” the photographer repeated. “The star of ‘Les Experts.’ ”

“Les What?” Ms. Wolf asked. “What kind of show is that?”

“It’s a big hit American TV show,” the photographer said.

“Well, I’m a big TV buff,” Ms. Wolf said, “and I never heard of it.”

“He means ‘C.S.I.,’ ” an American photographer chimed in. “It’s called ‘Les Experts’ in France.”

“Oh,” Ms. Wolf said. “And who is he again?”

“Gary Dadow,” the French photographer repeated, talking about the actor whose actual name is Gary Dourdan, and who, as it happens, recently announced that he would leave the series at season’s end.

“And that’s Lindsay Lohan beside him,” said Ms. Wolf, although the actress slash designer slash tabloid staple was also difficult to identify, with dyed brown hair and eyes concealed behind the sort of sunglasses hardly anybody wears besides celebrity also-rans.

And that was when someone else mentioned that fame is so cheap these days, that paparazzi fodder is so interchangeable, that celebrities are so dime-a-dozen, that often one has no idea whom the photographers are making a fuss about.

Perhaps, this person added, someone ought to invent celebrity Shazam, a fame app based on the music identification service available on cellphones.

That way, in a landscape prophesied with cold accuracy by Andy Warhol, one could point a camera phone at a given person and immediately learn which minor Italian soccer player or which trophy wife of which French intellectual or which former actor on a Jerry Bruckheimer crime-scene juggernaut one was gawping at.

The Scene: Backstage, one hour before the Stella McCartney show takes place on a gilded balcony of the Palais Garnier, home of the Paris Opera.

“It is what it is,” Ms. McCartney said, gliding through a space packed tighter than the No. 1 train at rush hour on a Friday night, referring to the show that was about to start. Looking around at the assembled models, model agents, model minders, photographers, news crews, hairdressers, makeup artists and one former member of the Beatles — her father, Paul — the newly lithe Ms. McCartney added, “At this point, there ain’t no going back.”

And at that moment, the seasoned casting agent James Scully called out “First looks,” signaling that it was time for the models to begin dressing.

And the makeup artist Pat McGrath brushed concealing powder beneath the eyes of Joan Smalls, a 22-year-old Puerto Rican beauty hailed, with characteristic fashion amnesia, by magazine editors and casting directors as the New Face of the Season after Riccardo Tisci, the Givenchy designer, signed her to an exclusive contract for his last couture show.

That there is nothing particularly new about Ms. Smalls, though, she would be the first to admit. Two years before her miraculous discovery here, she was working as a catalog model in New York and shooting Macy’s ads.

“I knew I had so much more in me,” Ms. Smalls said. “But it wasn’t until I changed agencies and they scrapped my book and sent me out again that Riccardo Tisci saw me, and then everybody just followed.”

And Ms. McGrath, who over her 20 or so years in the business has worked with every name model around, said, “You’re hanging around, and all of a sudden they see you, and you’re suddenly new all over again.”

A surprising number of top models started out as catalog girls, Ms. McGrath said, before being saved and repurposed for lucrative high-fashion work. “Back in the day, you paid your dues, and it was good for you because it made you understand the business much better,” she said. “If you’ve been doing underwear ads, my dear, you know what the business is about. You know how to sell the underwear.”

The Scene: Doursoux, an Army-Navy supply store on a side street near the Gare Montparnasse.

“This is pure Dries!” said an American fashion stylist, rummaging through a pile of French combat fatigues, referring to Dries Van Noten, whose collection was one of many here to use military uniforms as a point of departure. At 30 euros (about $40), they were a fraction of what many designer pants cost.

Based on the number of runways packed with more olive drab and camouflage cloth than one would ever see in “The Hurt Locker,” Paris seems set to become the next faux combat zone. Never let it be said that fashion is less than oblivious to current affairs. Yes, the United States is involved in two wars, but that did not deter the style mob from reconnoitering at Doursoux. “If I get a larger size and put a belt on it and paper-bag it, this will look amazing,” the stylist said.

Three days into the week, buyers from stores like Bloomingdale’s had already followed her into the bins of vintage fatigues and Russian army coats and vinyl kit bags devised for the Japanese army. Troops of the Japanese editors who descend on the city during Fashion Week had cleaned the place out of the nipped camouflage jackets and blanket-weight peacoats that Junya Watanabe used as the basis for a show that Julie Gilhart, the fashion director of Barneys New York, called “really commercial and sellable.” And George Cortina, a stylist who does work for influential mega-chains like H & M, has been spotted around Paris wearing gear that made it seem as if he might move out of the Ritz and into a pup tent.