At Paris Fashion Week, Art Meets Commerce

This season, their Winter collection considered the idea of the undone: clothing in a state of flux. In the midst of making, what do we see? And are they, on closer inspection, worth preserving? Tiny price tags on the outside of embellished evening coats, silk tops, the pattern cut almost as the toile, fashioned to be unfinished, with threads loose and floating as the models walked. A beautifully embroidered dress, raw-edged, in brilliant blue, wrapped around the body, fashioned as if it were a towel.

At a re-see the next day, the message became even clearer. Their viral Margaux bags, the same ones that caused a months-long waitlist last year, were pre-crumpled and distressed. It was perhaps a cheeky wink to the designers’ past reputation for carrying beat-up Hermes Kellys and other worn luxury bags they were seen toting in the early 00s. But back to the feel—velvet robe-style coats, finished with mink on the inside and soft-as-butter slip-on leather booties to tuck into everyday cotton corduroys. There were single-strand pearls visible underneath a nude turtleneck, not out on display, but yours to feel, paired with perfectly cut trousers. The Olsens’s collection begs you to put yourself first. And who would we be to disagree?

If The Row was looking inward, Chloé’s Chemena Kamali was looking outward. Her collection, titled “Devotion”, asked us to look closer at the “humanity and empathy in how clothing can both hold emotion and carry memory in a world that often feels mechanized and accelerated.” The brand has always dealt with the more romantic and human sides of dressing up; Chloé’s founder, Gaby Aghion, was a pioneer in the 1950s, breaking away from the rigidity of pret-a-porter at the time, offering a softer, more liberated silhouette. Kamali’s been continuing this tradition, but this season she seemed to take it one step further.

Folk played a big part, not just the music and fashions, but the idea of passed traditions. Kamali showed hand-knitted cardigans, almost like the ones you would dig out of your grandmother’s attic, complete with matching beanies. Mousseline dresses, like the ones you’d see in the window of a vintage shop, in punches of bright red, checked green, and prairie green. They called to memory the free spirit of the 70s, but it wasn’t without a modern edge–most of them were paired with thigh-high cowboy boots folded down to reveal a peekaboo of shearling. Kamali said the collection was “an invitation to see fashion not as escape, but as connection.” And in our discordant times, togetherness, fashion or otherwise, is a message worth sharing.

Elsewhere, Rick Owens and his devotees gathered at Palais de Tokyo for his fashion week offering he called “Tower”. For Owens, clothing goes one step further than just a practicality or necessity, but a sort of protection. Tower sheaths that opened the show were cut in glossy bull leather, boiled wool, or Kevlar, a fiber 5 times stronger than steel, traditionally used in protective clothing such as body armor. The clothes from there seemed to cocoon and envelop the body, albeit in silk/cashmere and huge goat-hair coats, off-kilt on the shoulder, almost consuming its wearer. Flight jackets and tower mini mantles were designed in thick felt, handcrafted in a small atelier in Bikaner, Rajasthan, and were paired with Rick’s signature platformed boots. Owens cited Marlene Dietrich, an enduring influence, as someone he was thinking of again, more for her humanitarian resolve this season, as well as her position as a sex symbol. The designer shared that she had a “mix of morality and artifice with a strong sense of responsibility and grit.”

While we wrestled with ideas that felt in direct response to our current times of turmoil, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez begged us to hold on to moments of levity. Carrying on from last season, their debut, where the duo introduced their visual and design language (think bold primary colors, multi-layering as an everyday way of dressing, and high-fashion sportswear hybrids), this season they said, “Humour can be revolutionary, at times the most piercing way to deliver a serious message. As the audience sat around life-sized dog and dolphin plushies courtesy of artist Cosima Von Bonin, the designers used the last collection as their canvas and let loose. Pointelle slips were made new in kinky latex. They showed thrice-hooded bomber jackets in tangerine with gingham and fur trim. A wrap-around shag mini dress in brown and deep purple was the sort of dress you’d wear with ease. Pockets and collars on puffers can actually inflate; just make sure you’ve got the $3,000 air pump required. Frivolous? Yes. But fun!