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WINNING TRIO: For Michael Rider’s debut collection at Celine, the French brand shut down the street in front of its headquarters.

While editors negotiated the security checkpoint, Kim Taehyung, aka V of K-pop band BTS, sailed up on a bicycle for his first official event since completing military service last month.

Having arrived early, he whiled away the time by watching guests arrive through a window overlooking the cobblestoned courtyard of the 17th-century mansion known as Hôtel Colbert de Torcy.

By the time he was joined by his longtime friend and fellow Celine ambassador Park Bo-gum and singer Suzy Bae, a veritable scrum had formed around the front row guests.

“Oh la la,” exclaimed Naomi Watts, as she dodged a server carrying a silver platter. The actress and Stripes Beauty founder wore Celine while promoting her book “Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known About Menopause,” and has been toting the label’s Antoinette bag.

“I love everything about this brand, and it’s super exciting for Michael too,” said Watts, who donned an oversized black leather jacket over her gingham shirt dress. “Always a good way to go in my book: a little bit of classic, a little bit of modern and, yeah, a bit of androg’.”

Emily Hampshire was enjoying her first Paris Fashion Week. “You can tell it’s my first: I left my bag open, and that’s supposedly wrong to do,” she joked, after a fellow guest pointed out her 16 bag was not clasped shut.

Hampshire came with her “Schitt’s Creek” costar Dan Levy, who does double duty as her stylist. “He is a kind of style connoisseur, so I usually call him and send him lots of pictures of what I’m deciding on, and then he pares it down,” she revealed. 

It was Levy who introduced the Canadian actress to Rider, but even she had no idea what was about to come down the runway. “I’m just as in the dark as everybody, which is exciting. You rarely get to see something that you know nothing about,” she said. 

Hampshire noted the designer likes to keep a low profile. “You can’t find him on the internet, and there’s not many people you can’t find on the internet. He’s so private, and so this is really exciting to see the secret let out of the bag here,” Hampshire said.

Fresh off the release of “Bonjour Tristesse,” Lily McInerny was getting ready to go back on set. “It’s actually the first time I’ve worked in New York, even though I was born and raised there, so I’m really looking forward to shooting there,” she said.

She’s familiar with Rider’s work at Ralph Lauren. “I’m excited to see what sensibilities from there carry over. And I also understand that he worked with Phoebe Philo in the years of Phoebe Philo’s Celine, so I’m really excited to see if there’s any references to that era of Celine and a return to that style,” the 26-year-old actress said.

Rising star Théodore Pellerin, who played Karl Lagerfeld’s partner Jacques de Bascher in “Becoming Karl Lagerfeld,” enjoys dipping into fashion. “I like designers, I like what people can do with clothes and for an actor, obviously, clothes are very important,” he said.

The Canadian actor is gearing up for the release of two movies in which he plays the lead roles.

“Lurker,” the feature directorial debut for “The Bear” and “Beef” writer Alex Russell, premiered at Sundance and the Berlin Film Festival. The story of a young retail worker who befriends a music celebrity, it will hit U.S. screens at the end of August.

That will be followed in September by “Nino,” for which he won the Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award during the Critics’ Week sidebar at the Cannes Film Festival.

“It’s the story of a young man who is unexpectedly diagnosed with cancer, and we follow him for three days before his first treatment. He locks himself out of his home and he kind of gets swallowed up by the city and the people he meets,” Pellerin explained. 

“The character is kind of forced to confront his mortality in a new way, but it’s ultimately a process that brings him back to life,” he said.

Also in attendance were Alanis Morissette, fresh off her performance at the Glastonbury Festival; Kristen Wiig; Dev Hynes; Hannah Einbinder; Jerrod Carmichael, and fellow designers Jonathan Anderson, Raf Simons, and Lucie and Luke Meier, among others.

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This painting is trying to tell us a story — a very specific one.

We are in ancient India, where you are the lucky recipient of a front-row seat to an archery contest devised by King Drupada, the ruler of the powerful Panchala kingdom in the northern part of the country.

People have gathered to compete for the hand of his daughter, Draupadi, who was traditionally described as one of the most beautiful women of the age, with eyes like lotus flowers and a fragrance you could smell for miles.

Our scene illustrates a swayamvar, which is “a practice where women could choose their husbands from a gathering of eligible suitors,” said Mallica Kumbera Landrus, the keeper of the Eastern art department for the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, where this painting is held. “She could simply have chosen her personal preference from the group, or the selection process could involve a public contest.”

The archery contest, one of strength and skill, is a well-traveled theme in art and storytelling. It’s often used to answer a simple question: Which man can prove himself worthy of this woman?

In some versions of Robin Hood, Robin Hood (in disguise) demonstrates his precision and skill by winning an archery contest and, eventually, the hand of Maid Marian.

In the Odyssey, Odysseus (in disguise) strings his bow and shoots an arrow through 12 ax heads lined up to win (back) Penelope (his wife).

Our contestants here must shoot this fish, revolving on that red stick high above the ground, through the eye:

The scene is festive. The band, in the bottom left corner, is ready to go.

The court is packed with kings and princes from far and wide to win Draupadi’s hand. Many tried to string the bow and hit the eye of the fish, but they failed.

“These are the losers,” said Joan Cummins, who oversees the extensive Asian art collection at the Brooklyn Museum.

As the kings and the princes look on to see how the next contestant will do, their servants behind them hold fans made of peacock feathers (called morchal), to swat away the flies and keep them cool in the heat.

At the center of our view, someone is about to succeed.

This is Arjuna. He’s not quite a god, but he’s not merely a man, either — his mother was a mortal and his father was king of the gods. He’s a skilled warrior and deep thinker. He’s painted blue, Ms. Kumbera Landrus said, because heroes and gods in Hindu stories are often painted like the “midnight sky.”

His bow is strung, ready to shoot his skinny arrow through the eye of the fish. (In other tellings, the contestants aren’t able to look up directly at the fish — only down at its reflection in water or oil.)

Even though we view only the moment before the shot, we know that Arjuna’s shot is true, and he wins the competition. We know because the view on the right is also Arjuna, moments after his victory. It was common in Hindu narrative paintings like this to show the same character twice.

There, his new bride is placing a ceremonial white garland around his neck.

Behind them are Arjuna’s brothers.

There is some deception behind this marriage: Arjuna and his brothers are in disguise, shirtless with their hair in buns, posing as members of the highest social class, the Brahmins.

Above the action below, the gods are happy, bestowing flowers and blessings on the union.

This story told in the painting is most likely thousands of years old. It’s from the Mahabharata, the great epic central to Hindu culture. Sometimes called the “longest poem ever written” (a stage production from 1985 ran nine hours long), it is a tale full of warring cousins — the Kauravas and the Paṇḍavas — with a plethora of subplots, gods, battles, philosophical and moral lessons. And lots of death, too.

The Mahabharata, with variations and retellings, has been likened to a mix of the Odyssey, the Bible, the stories of King Arthur and “War and Peace.”

It’s a sprawling story, and we’re used to seeing big paintings tell big stories. “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” more than 21 feet wide, tells the story of a turning point in the Revolutionary War. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo tells the story of the creation of man.

You might have thought this painting was big, too, based on its complex story and layered composition. But it’s actually only about 16 inches wide.

Paintings like this were made by groups of artists, sometimes family members. The artists built up layers of color, over and over, to get the rich tones we see here. They used brushes that could be as small as a single squirrel hair.

“This is a very fine painting,” said Laura Weinstein, a curator of South Asian art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. “It would have been made for a royal or elite patron and would have been accessible only to the family and close relations and friends who visited them.”

Like a graphic novel or a comic book, this image would have probably been just one in a series telling various parts of the epic tale.

“For those unable to read, the illustrations would have been wonderfully accessible,” Ms. Kumbera Landrus said.

The arrangement of people is straightforward. The “losers” (and their entourages) are on the left; the king and his entourage are on the right; Arjuna stands alone in the middle.

“Over and over again, what we might call naturalism is sacrificed for legibility,” Ms. Cummins said.

For example, though there are two moments depicted, it all takes place in one continuous space, set inside an angled palace courtyard where the perspective isn’t realistic. But it means you can see much more in one image. This perspective minimizes overlap in the faces — there are 116 — so we can see their expressions, hands, jewels, even beard hairs, clearly, despite this small space.

You could hold works like this in your hands, and get really close to inspect them.

“You would get your friends together, maybe have a little something to drink or smoke and look at paintings together,” Ms. Cummins said. “It was a nice way to pass an evening. You can look at these multiple times and still find new details that you didn’t see previously.”

The Mahabharata has been reinterpreted countless times — as recently as just last month, at Lincoln Center — and illustrated in varying styles.

In this scene from the early 1800s, here is Arjuna, doubled again, praying to the god Shiva (upper left) for a powerful weapon that he needs for battle.

Or here, from 1850, portraying Arjuna’s first death (he dies twice), by his (spoiler alert) son, ironically by an arrow.

Both this image and the one above are currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum.

In his training as an archer, Arjuna excelled as a student.

One of his great skills was his ability to simply focus. As the story goes, his archery teacher asked various students, one by one, to look at a target and tell him what they saw. One saw the sky, others saw the tree branches and clouds, and some were distracted by other things that made it into their line of sight.

Arjuna replied that all he saw was the eye of the fish.

“The fish’s eye is used, or was used, as an idiom for maintaining your concentration,” Ms. Cummings said. “Focus on the business at hand. Don’t get distracted.”

This is an installment in our series of experiments on art and attention. If you liked this one, you may like these past exercises: a finished, unfinished portrait; a sudden rain over a bridge; a unicorn tapestry; some buckets from Home Depot; and a Whistler painting.

Sign up to be notified when new installments are published here. And let us know how this exercise made you feel in the comments.