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Every late September, when the style mavens descend on Paris for fashion week, they envision enjoying buttery post-show croissants and the occasional pack of Vogue cigarettes savored guilt-free at after-parties. But this season, it’s a bit different: Paris is infested with bedbugs.

Videos shared on social media show bedbugs crawling over seats of the Paris Metro, which carries more than 5 million passengers a day. Some Parisians have reported bites at various big-chain movie theaters. The French meme accounts are having a field day. “You have to understand that in reality no one is safe, obviously there are risk factors but in reality, you can catch bedbugs anywhere and bring them home,” Paris’s deputy mayor, Emmanuel Grégoire, said Friday.

Although Parisians don’t seem too concerned about the bedbug infestation (the metro, bars and movie theaters are just as packed as they’ve always been), at Paris Fashion Week shows, attendees have been trading tips on how to avoid catching them: store your luggage in the bathtub, they said; if you take public transportation, don’t sit down on the fabric seats; buy a $220 bedbug-killing heater on Amazon.

Bedbugs are a common urban scourge, often found living in mattresses, carpets, clothing and linens, and usually surfacing at night to feed (on your blood, that is). They typically bite in a telltale zigzag pattern, leaving clusters of three to five bites on the skin that can cause itchiness, redness and swelling and burning. In major cities like New York, having a brush with bedbugs is such a universal experience that the New York’s health department has their own bedbug complaint line.

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