Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Courtesy of The Row, Miu Miu, Louis Vuitton
Miuccia Prada’s idea for Miu Miu was the smallness of the human body in the vastness of the world. That sensation is one many people feel every time they look at their phones, a remoteness from events. It’s also a good way to think about fashion. Indeed, some of the best collections in Paris originated with a simple query. Michael Rider of Celine wanted to know what elements stay on your mind, since so much rapidly fades. Matthieu Blazy asked, “What is Chanel?”
From left: Photo: Courtesy of Miu MiuPhoto: Courtesy of Miu Miu
From top: Photo: Courtesy of Miu MiuPhoto: Courtesy of Miu Miu
At Miu Miu, the results were clever. Prada and her team know how to lay down a look that you believe. In six months, we’ll see girls slinking into the spring 2027 Miu Miu show in plain, dull gray or beige minidresses, leather blazers, car coats with matted fur at the hem, and low-riding leather jeans that look put through a dryer. Stuff appeared not only small and shrunken, it was deliberately insignificant. There was Chloë Sevigny in specs, her hair messily combed back, in one of the gross fur blazers, her legs bare, wearing flat clogs on a moss-covered runway. Her clothes basically said: I’m not here.
But of course you noticed them.
Photo: Courtesy of Miu Miu
Prada’s genius is to play against expectation, to anticipate and at the same time keep things real. A lot of fall fashion is rich and overtly feminine (think of Dior and Schiaparelli) with the objective of using materials and techniques to further elevate the brand. But it also has trouble sitting comfortably in the real world, a world made tense by rapid change and conflict. Which is something that Prada seemed to grasp in her main collection, designed with Raf Simons, and in their influential fall men’s show. In their lean dark coats and suits, with the fabric worn thin in spots and shirt cuffs hanging out, her figures were more attractive for being self-aware and detached than glamorous.
At Miu Miu, the small, austere shapes and dull, aged materials conveyed vulnerability — appropriate for the brand’s younger age group. One guy’s creased black leather jacket and matching pants seemed to drip on his body, like he hadn’t changed in days. But he also looked cool.
Photo: Courtesy of Miu Miu
Prada is one of those designers whose fashion inspires an audience to think I want to look like that. (Her stylists, hair and makeup people, and casting director contribute too.) Others with that power are Blazy and Phoebe Philo and, this season at least, Rider and Marc Jacobs, whose show in New York I’m still thinking about. But many other designers just give you a look. It can be interesting and confounding, like Duran Lantink’s amazing Gaultier show, but it doesn’t necessarily inspire. Still other brands hold what amounts to an editorial shoot on the runway.
To appreciate the better designs in Nicolas Ghesquière’s show for Louis Vuitton, on the final day of Paris Fashion Week, you had to look past the mountainous costumes at the start, the shepherd or sherpa hats and models toting huge baskets on their shoulders, not to mention hobo bags on the end of long sticks (an image that deserved the mocking the designer received online).
From left: Photo: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com/Courtesy of Louis VuittonPhoto: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com/Courtesy of Louis Vuitton
From top: Photo: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com/Courtesy of Louis VuittonPhoto: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com/Courtesy of Louis Vuitton
Ghesquière was on a high-altitude trek, and there were some good things, like a blouson in a mix of dark brown and black leather, floaty dresses in a patchwork of fabrics, and a mohair mini embellished with an image (possibly painted-on leather) of two lambs, one in Vuitton boots. It’s the work of Nazar Strelyaev-Nazarko, born in 1998, a wonderful painter whose style is influenced by Renaissance and Baroque art.
From left: Photo: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com/Courtesy of Louis VuittonPhoto: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com/Courtesy of Louis Vuitton
From top: Photo: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com/Courtesy of Louis VuittonPhoto: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com/Courtesy of Louis Vuitton
Photo: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com/Courtesy of Louis Vuitton
At Hermès, Nadège Vanhee took us on a nocturnal journey. The area around the seats was filled with moss and other plants, and the models emerged from a twilight-blue doorway. One of her ideas was to show how certain fabrics subtly changed color in different light — from, say, gray to deep red. Another idea was to project “a disciplined sensuality,” as she put it, with both fluid and fitted leather pieces, knit jodhpurs, and a leather-and-knit minidress integrated with a modernist silk scarf design, from 1951, by A.M. Cassandre (who also designed the YSL logo).
From left: Photo: Dominique Maitre//WWD via Getty ImagesPhoto: Dominique Maitre//WWD via Getty Images
From top: Photo: Dominique Maitre//WWD via Getty ImagesPhoto: Dominique Maitre//WWD via Getty Images
“You have movement and freedom, but you have rigor,” she told me. But I wish Vanhee would loosen up more and move a bit away from her strict shapes, which are starting to look rigid and repetitive.
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen didn’t leave the house with their Row collection. But then they never do. There’s no theme, as far as I know, since the Olsens don’t make themselves available to reporters, and pictures from their show are released days later.
From left: Photo: Courtesy of The RowPhoto: Courtesy of The Row
From top: Photo: Courtesy of The RowPhoto: Courtesy of The Row
I don’t have a problem with any of this. The clothes speak clearly enough. The more dynamic looks in a predominantly black and white offering, with touches of deep red and a flesh-tone beige, included a sheared jewel-neck shearling coat, a fitted charcoal vest styled with a kind of gathered cummerbund and a light-blue shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and simple tops layered with raw-edged chiffon and worn with slim skirts or pants. Nothing we haven’t seen before but somehow, like a dark shirt worn with belted masculine trousers, can always look right.
Among the collections closing out a newsy Paris Fashion Week was Kiko Kostadinov, where the London brand’s women’s designers, Deanna and Laura Fanning, presented a cool and lucid collection inspired by observing morning bird-watchers in a park near their former studio — or, as the sisters put it, “the tension point between the watched and the watcher.” They essentially asked the question What is it to be seen? And they answered it with shapes that fluttered between robust and delicate, like utility jackets (with ample pockets and strong shoulders) and draped skirts in luminous fabrics. I loved a fabric in a mottled blend of greens, brown, and blush pink, used for a bomber and a long slim vest with shorts. It seemed a kind of new urban camouflage, of a piece with their free, idiosyncratic style.
Photo: Courtesy of Kiko Kostadinov
Set up in a Left Bank apartment, the New York designer Christopher John Rogers showed his usually playful dresses with Pierrot collars and glam bows, but his knitwear and bleached-denim impressed me more, in part because the geometry and colors were crazy-good and because, on a human, their energy is almost radiant.
From left: Photo: César Buitrago/Courtesy of Christopher John RogersPhoto: César Buitrago/Courtesy of Christopher John Rogers
From top: Photo: César Buitrago/Courtesy of Christopher John RogersPhoto: César Buitrago/Courtesy of Christopher John Rogers