Lyas: ‘I’m really bad at keeping my mouth shut’

This story is taken from the spring 2026 issue of Dazed, which is on sale internationally now. Pre-order a copy of the magazine here.

Elias Medini is, for want of a better phrase, a fashion influencer, known simply as Lyas to his masses of followers. The Paris bar he’s chosen to meet at – Le Saint Denis, 10th arrondissement – is a short walk from his new apartment, a recent upgrade from a smaller flat. Le Saint Denis was also the setting for last June’s Dior watch party, where Medini, on failing to secure an invite to Jonathan Anderson’s SS26 debut, orchestrated a breakaway event. Hauling a flatscreen television from home, he invited his Instagram followers to watch the livestream with him. More than 300 people took him up on the offer, spilling from the one-room bar out into the street.

The event exposed a gap in the market, one which Medini quickly filled with La Watchparty, an open-invite event series where young fashionphiles gather to watch livestreamed catwalks. While the fashion show was an exclusive experience brands fought decades to protect, Medini razed and rebuilt that in the space of a season. La Watchparty proves fashion can function as both mass entertainment and community-builder, evidenced by the thousands of joyful kids in attendance. Brands have got on board too, sending gifts and prizes to the watch parties, which run parallel to their own shows.

It’s January in Paris, and a rogue Christmas tree haunts the corner of Le Saint Denis, engulfed by excessive amounts of tinsel. A newspaper cutting is framed next to the tree: an interview Medini gave the New York Times about the watch party. Another photo of Medini, wearing a Santa hat at the bar’s Christmas party, is thumbtacked to the wall. If you didn’t know who drinks here, the shrine-like interior might give it away. Cultish adoration seems to follow Medini wherever he goes.

A few minutes pass, and he walks through the door in a leather jacket, adidas trackies and monk-strap dress shoes. His dark curls are all but obscured by a thick black headband; its cracked pleather coating reminds me of crumbling bark. Swipes of bright red lipstick, now a Lyas signature, cover his mouth. The staff at the bar greet him like a son, before he turns to me and sits. “It’s so nice to see you again.”

Medini and I have met before, in the lobby of the Château Royal during Berlin Fashion Week. That was two years ago now, and a lot has changed. On a superficial level, his Instagram follower count has exploded from 50k to more than 400,000 people. But with a raised profile comes the pressure of maintaining it. “It’s been wonderful. I wouldn’t say it’s been overwhelming at all,” he says of the past two years. “OK, it has been at some point – but I’ve recentered myself. After multiple panic attacks and anxiety crises, I’ve become more in tune with who I’m meant to be.”

Who Medini is meant to be is apparently a kind of critic-cum-socialite, attending fashion shows and reporting on the biggest houses in the world, sometimes whether they’d like him to or not. Medini already had a rapidly rising following before 2024, thanks to his takes on fashion news: acerbic, unfiltered, and posted to Instagram and TikTok. His first videos date back to late 2021 and early 2022, dissecting looks on Vogue Runway from his laptop. He picks apart shoots, shows and magazine covers, but he also heaps on praise as much as he critiques. He has his favourites, of course (Saint Laurent, McQueen, Jean Paul Gaultier), but a positive review one season does not guarantee the same the next. Medini’s content is smart, funny and entertaining, rooted in his strong fashion knowledge – but it’s the sheer honesty, sometimes bordering on the assaultive, that’s won him plaudits as well as enemies.

“I’m really bad at keeping my mouth shut,” he remarks across the table, gleaming with mischief. He recounts a 2025 appearance on Radio France, where host Mathilde Serrell unexpectedly played his take on Louis Vuitton’s AW25 men’s collection to the station’s 7.2 million daily listeners. Visibly uncomfortable and squirming in his seat, he was forced to back himself. “I went on national radio and said it was level zero of design for Pharrell to put his own face on a hoodie and sell it for three thousand fucking euros,” says Medini, who suspects he's been blacklisted by the brand.

“I went on national radio and said it was level zero of design for Pharrell to put his own face on a hoodie and sell it for three thousand fucking euros”

In person, you can see why so many people are captivated by Medini’s antics. He’s magnetic in a way that evades most clouty fashion people, and perpetually on the charm offensive. His soaring profile has also allowed him unprecedented access to the rich and famous. He’s been granted an elusive John Galliano interview, and wore the designer’s celebrated 2024 Artisanal collection, which was “the biggest stamp of approval“ that he could ever get. He’s toured Madonna’s house on Instagram, and his friendships with the top models of the day – Alex Consani, Lulu Tenney, Loli Bahia – occupy prime real estate on his feed, like Capote’s Swans but for gay people with double-digit screen time. According to Medini, however, celeb-adjacency isn’t a strategy for self-promotion – he’s simply delighting in the zeitgeist. “It’s not a plan at all. I just love being with the moment,” he says. “I love to be a part of now.”

Medini has flourished in a time when the parameters of creative jobs are increasingly ill-defined. Publications describe him as an influencer, critic, content creator, commentator and more. When I ask him what he thinks he is, he responds with a flippant “who cares!” and offers no further explanation, apparently quite pleased with the silence that follows. I respond with the suggestion that he might be a journalist, to which he pushes back. “I don’t consider myself a journalist, I say I ‘talk about fashion’. I don’t consider myself a critic. I find this quite restrictive, and I want to be able to do what I want to do,” he says, before finally conceding: “If people want to know – if they want to put me in a box – I say I’m a fashion agitator.”

This evolution, from Elias Medini to Lyas the Agitator, has been in near constant advance. A self-described “young kid who comes from fucking nowhere”, Medini was born in Paris to French and Algerian parents and brought up in Rouen, 80 miles from the capital. “I was a queer kid in a Muslim family, so it was quite complicated to come out or just be comfortable with who I was,” he says. Medini found solace in fashion, and recalls seeing one formative fashion show as a teenager: Jeremy Scott’s AW14 debut for Moschino, when the designer riffed on SpongeBob and Chanel in high-camp glory. “I loved it so much I didn’t know what to do with it,” he remembers. “I was looking at the photos like, ‘What the fuck do I do with this? I have no one to talk to about it.’ I couldn’t even put it on Facebook because” – he takes a pregnant, reflective beat – “everyone would have called me a faggot.” The photos remained tucked away on a private Tumblr account.

At 18, Medini moved to Paris and enrolled in film school. Fashion might have been his protective layer, but cinema was his first true love. “Since I was very young, I’ve always wanted to tell stories, and a great way to do that is cinema,” he says. A career in film “was always the goal”, but after graduating, Medini spent two years shopping a script called Two Thousand Per Cent, a kind of modelling mockumentary with graphic violence and a forced coming-out. “I really thought that I had a gem on my hands,” he says. “I still want to do it.” When that didn’t go to plan, he decided to refocus on his other great love: fashion. 

“I was going out every fucking night in Paris, and the people who go out aren’t the cinema people – it’s the fashion people,” he says. While partying, Medini met Pierre A M’Pelé AKA Pamboy, the former editor-in-chief of French GQ, and collaborated on a series of videos, parodying fashion archetypes. Despite its virality, GQ cancelled the series. “Too much money, too much production shit,” Medini cites as the reason. But with his taste for fashion commentary ignited, he set out to discover “a way to do it from my room – and that was through criticism.”

While the first few years were mostly confined to his laptop, everything changed when Medini met public relations empresario Lucien Pagès, who has become a bit of a fashion fairy godfather for Medini since. “We invited him to attend one of the Saint Laurent shows, which was one of his first major fashion shows,” Pagès tells me, over email. “He arrived in a tuxedo, incredibly chic, very composed. People were drawn to him in a very natural way – there was a kind of collective fascination. That was the moment I truly saw his star quality.”

Saint Laurent A/W24 was followed by an avalanche of invites, with Medini moving from influential bedroom critic to front-row fixture. Implicit in that trajectory, however, is the suggestion that the fashion establishment saw his critiques as a threat, and brought him in as a way to shut him up. “Yeeeaaah,” he responds, unconvincingly, before launching into a tangential anecdote. I ask again if it’s beneficial for brands to have him on side, but his phone rings and he takes the call, apologising and switching to Do Not Disturb afterwards. I ask a third time, and after some evasiveness, Medini eventually concedes that his videos became less critical when the big invites started rolling in. “I did tone it down when I started to get invited to bigger shows. I was like, ‘OK, fuck. I have to shut my mouth now.’ And then it all came to a head when I saw that Dior show.”

“People don’t like to see the new generation come into this industry and break open the doors that were shut by the people before. I don’t want to repeat the mistakes that my older peers made with me”

Medini’s less-than-favourable review of Maria Grazia Chiuri’s SS25 show caused a fashion firestorm. It’s a cosmic irony that Medini’s next act – as the pied piper of fashion’s new generation – came from that other interaction with Dior: the SS26 watch party at Le Saint Denis. The positive press generated from the event resulted in a personal thank you (plus a new season bag) from Jonathan Anderson, and miraculously healed his relationship with the brand.

After the success of the first watch party, Medini rebranded as La Watchparty, upgrading to larger venues and branching out in London and Milan. Besides creating a space for young people to collectively experience fashion, it’s clear that Medini is also healing his inner child, the one who had to stash his Jeremy Scott pics. “I really wanted to create an event the kid in me would’ve loved to attend,” he says. “It’s also weirdly an excuse for me to watch a fashion show with my parents and my family, because I never was able to do that before. They came, and they sat through the whole show, and we were together. Finally, it was a shared dream.”

As the murky grey outside is replaced by the yellow glow of streetlamps, Medini invites me to inspect the designs for his La Watchparty merch at his new apartment. It’s a spacious place, with just a couple of used wine glasses dotted across the counter, and monographs on David Wojnarowicz and Ruven Afanador artfully arranged on a coffee table. He pulls up his laptop and shows me a T-shirt with the phrase ‘When I can’t sleep I goon to McQueen SS98’ printed across it, next to a cartoon face wagging its tongue. Another shows a cartoon man sitting in front of an open laptop, which may or may not be Medini. “​​I don’t want it to be too obviously me, because some people might hate me, but still want to buy the shit,” he says.

As much as Lyas is adored, I’m keen to broach the topic of his detractors. These people mostly come from within the industry, dinosaur editors who refuse to accept that a new wave of commentators is holding space on the front row. Medini has become representative of that new guard, but it’s also opened him up to criticism and sparked debate about whether internet personalities deserve front row access, side by side with seasoned journalists.

Earlier, at Le Saint Denis, when I asked him if he’d become a lightning rod for these kinds of criticisms, his response was brusque. “I’m sure a lot of people don’t like what I do, but maybe if they… yeah, no, I’m taking this personally,” he said, before trailing off. Here in his own home, he’s a lot more receptive to the line of questioning. “People don’t like to see the new generation come into this industry and break open the doors that were shut by the people before,” he says, matter-of-factly. “I don’t want to repeat the mistakes that my older peers made with me. They saw me as competition, and I don’t want to make that mistake when the next generation comes.”

In a moment of meta-coincidence, the conversation is halted when Medini remembers he has to jump on a video call with Dazed editors to plan our accompanying shoot. They discuss a shot where, at a fictionalised watch party, he is lifted into the air by the crowd of attendees. Medini briefly opposes that particular suggestion, which I address after the call. “I’m not too sure about it,” he says, in a rare display of reticence. “It’s a bit too wannabe rock star.” I gently remind him that people attend his watch parties as much for him as for the fashion. When it comes down to it, what’s La Watchparty without La Rockstar? “That’s the thing – I don’t want it to be just that,” he replies. “I want it to live without me at some point, so I can go and make my movies, and have the watch party still happening.” He pauses, for just a moment, contemplating. “But maybe I do need to be the face of it at the beginning.”

Raised skyward by fashion’s next gen, the photograph remains in the final shoot.