Fashionistas, journalists and hangers-on from around the world converge on Paris during Fashion Week. By 1994, producer-director Robert Altman had acquired such a sterling reputation among actors (based on his free reign policy of letting his performers find their own way with their characters within the scenario) that the biggest stars of the time were willing to sign on to the latest Altman project, no matter the material. This may help to explain what Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Julia Roberts, Tim Robbins, Lauren Bacall, Anouk Aimée, Kim Basinger, Rupert Everett, Linda Hunt, Forest Whitaker, Teri Garr, Tracey Ullman, Danny Aiello, Stephen Rea, Sally Kellerman, Lili Taylor and others are doing here, besides chatting-chatting-chatting themselves into a vacuum. Altman, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Barbara Shulgasser, appears to have even more contempt for runway fashion than he showed for country music in "Nashville", but at least there he had a solid group of characters courtesy of Joan Tewkesbury's acerbic script. Altman apes Tewkesbury's fragmented style in the hopes of capturing another irreverent gem, but neither the cast nor the fashions (nor all the overlapping talk) are interesting here. It's nice to see that Loren is still slapping Mastroianni but, without anything else to play, their scenes together merely feed on our movie memories without replenishing them. NO STARS from ****