An explosion of creativity in Paris fashion

Her mouth was set in a queenly moue. Is there anything she still believes in? “No,” she said.

Kawakubo’s was one of her finest collections in recent memory. The shapes shrank, moving close to the body, but maintaining their push and pull between historical and vernacular dress, tempered with antagonism: Leather jacket sleeves became panniers; a top of ruffled bulges looked like boxing gloves, worn over a sparkly and hairy skirt; a dress of flaps looked like so many discarded ideas of dresses bunched together, with the model holding out a pair of flaps as if she were preparing to curtsy in court. A dress of black and olive would be the perfect Oscars ensemble for a really daring genius.

Her models walked erratically: one paused mid-runway to ball up her fists and stomp her feet, others stopped and bent to front-row attendees with menace. Were they intimidating the powers that be? Asking the attendees what business they had, thinking this was fashion? Some began walking, then turned back, as if to say, “Why am I even doing this, anyway?”

Demna, of Balenciaga, put it best following his terrific Sunday show. “I think that fashion has to be radical,” he said. “It has to be on the edge. Otherwise it’s a scam. It’s like, you know, we’re trying to trap people to buy wallets, and that’s not what I’m doing.”

As Demna’s collection (technically Winter 2024) demonstrated, that doesn’t mean ridiculous and escapist. Here, it meant sophisticated, in a strange dance with the past and the way people live today. He began in conversation with Cristóbal Balenciaga, the mercurial founder of his house, with gowns and dresses that were deliberately stiffly crushed and creased. There were even skirt suits, like a full skirt and blousy track jacket in python, and moved into upcycled sweatshirts turned into day dresses and suit linings as floppy men’s suits. It made all the wardrobe clothes of other designers look mealy mouthed — you can be pulled together but not boring bourgeois.

Overall, the clothes were more formal. Cristóbal “used to do a lot of two piece ensembles, like a dress with a bolero. And I thought, how can I do that? Because I will probably never do a bolero in my life. So I thought, maybe the tracksuit is my bolero, and then I made it in python leather. There is a chicness that I wanted to do because it’s a bit the direction I’m taking it from now—” He stopped himself, maybe wanting to leave room to change his mind. “For now. I’m thinking about the future of Balenciaga.”

Demna has not returned to form, but leaped forward. This collection had few sweatsuits and sneakers, and his sense of chic, as he put it — grotesque and elegant, packed with personality and intelligence — is very contemporary.

Underneath this new creativity is an obsession with objects: what value do things hold in a digital world? What is luxury — is it an emotional relationship with objects, craftsmanship, anything that is intelligently designed? Demna sent all of his guests strange finds from eBay as invitations — Vogue editor Mark Guiducci received a copy of Kate Moss’s first American Vogue cover; Nordstrom’s Rickie De Sole a Paris snow globe; I, a dachshund owner, got a dachshund figurine — because he often does his research on the auction platform. He loves to see treasure in what others see as junk — his finale dress was a gown made of countless brassieres. It was strapless. (Ha-ha!) I cackled as the model lurched down the runway. Laughing at fashion can really feel like a release.

No one explored these questions of objects and value more thrillingly than Jonathan Anderson at Loewe on Friday. He took the detritus of country house living and exaggerated and caressed it: scrollwork from the leg of a Chippendale chair became decoration for a lapel, those dogs that appear as figurines or on needlepoint pillows were beaded onto bags or exploded onto bulbous dresses. Then there were the lean and odd gowns, and beaded evening suits and with snakey long tailcoats, exaggerated versions of the required ensembles for those “dress for dinner” nights at long tables that look so frigid in films like Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park” and Jane Austen adaptations. You could practically see a woman in the gown and another in the tailcoat covered in beaded caviar sitting at two ends of a ridiculously lengthy table, slurping consommé and yelling “WHAT?!” across the uselessly vast, gleaming expanse.

“The idea of an aristocrat is a foreign thing now,” he said after the show. “It’s nearly nonexistent.” And yet the obsession with taste, status and objects has never felt more present. TikTok is overstuffed with talking heads holding forth on what rich people really do, and a corner of the internet has developed a parasocial relationship with Emerald Fennell’s film “Saltburn,” about a lying middle class Oxford student who becomes so obsessed with a classmate, and his extravagant family and house, that he kills them off one by one before taking possession of their sprawling estate. It was a profoundly mediocre film, but it resonated with the Old Money TikTok crowd. Dare I say that this Loewe collection is like if “Saltburn” was good?

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Like Demna, Anderson has left a previous era, where he interrogated what clothing could be in clean and unstyled looks, and gone somewhere new. Triumphant.

Hermès designer Nadège Vanhee also found a new space. Vanhee is a classic Parisian cool woman — statuesque, with a coy manner and a talent for wearing red and orange. She is extraordinarily intelligent and feels deeply — things worth pointing out in a fashion review because you want a bit of her in the clothes. Her collections at times have been self-consciously cool, not quite capturing the essence of her and her house — the latter of which is the most unconsciously cool thing in Paris, and maybe even the whole world. Every brand wants to be Hermès (even Demna’s hit bag, the Rodeo, is a visual pun on the Birkin), but no one can replicate their particular wit nor their desirability.

These clothes were cool because they foregrounded those qualities — warmth of spirit and desire. A rain shower took place in the middle of the runway, and models walked nonchalantly around it. What’s a little rain to her? And the clothes — leathers in the most delectable butters, bordeaux and blacks, with big broad shawl collars, worn with fitted leggings and trousers that were tight in the hottest way. The clothing was aggressive but completely composed — a killer combo.

You can’t talk about creativity in Paris without talking about Rick Owens, the only designer daring to be sensitive, or perhaps it’s that he’s sensitive enough to be daring. The colors of his show were staid, sad: sharp capes and bodysuits in taupes and clay browns, gowns in a faded pink, like the color of an unreturned kiss, and knits in the gentlest sigh of blue-green. He showed the collection in his Paris home, a temple to preservation and the beauty of decay. It was an extraordinary act of gracious intimacy. He is, without a doubt, our finest living American designer, and one of the best in Paris — a Madame Vionnet who, with empathy, shows us another way to live, to find ourselves, to feel.