If fashion is a storytelling business, it should follow that runway shows are stories.
Yet they cannot be. For starters, they lack a plot. It’s true that designers can rely on talking about inspirations, travels or philosophies while the listener’s eyes roll back in their heads. The truth is that most fashion shows are best consumed, like everything else now, in snippets. They are elements of an ongoing internal scroll, as continuous, algorithmic and addictive as Instagram scrolls.
At least that’s the way this critic came to look at the collections in Milan and Paris this season, with the result that what follows is best seen as a mixtape, not anchored to any specific nationality, geography or context, arbitrarily and in a sense impressionistic and probably solipsistic in the way everything is fundamentally forced to live in an attention economy.
Take Hermes. Designer Véronique Nichanian is anything but a household name, probably not even among those in the economic stratosphere for which this label was created. So? She’s as good as – and in many ways better than – other names in the menswear pantheon, the likes of Giorgio Armani or Helmut Lang. There’s a reason you don’t know her.
“We don’t do marketing,” Hermès CEO Axel Dumas said at the company’s fair. “We don’t even have a marketing department.”
Why bother when you create cheerful collections for people whose own initials are enough, as Bottega Veneta’s old slogan once said. So-called silent luxury usually causes noise. Ms. Nichanian’s is a muted version, whispering richness.
If money were no object, and if this were a fantasy exercise in personal use, I would immediately click on one of her featherweight leather field jackets in light lavender, possibly also a light pink varsity jacket or definitely the cardigan with subtle color blocking on the zoom.
Despite the prevailing horrors of the world, this past season was one in which designers leaned into the poetic. Perhaps it is precisely because things are so ugly that beauty has become a refuge. You would think so based on the collection that designer Satoshi Kondo created for Homme Plissé Issey Miyake. Show notes pointed out several tricky harness details that allowed a wearer to take off a jacket in one of the house’s developed pleated fabrics and roll it into a small carrying bag.
What this viewer took away from the collection was the fervent desire to be invited to the upcoming Ambani wedding in India just to get the chance to wear a Miyake cargo shorts outfit in seafoam green or a jacket cape over a lilac pleated pants or a stark outfit. white gossamer layered look that was a correction to the stiffness characteristic of most bridal wear.
If Indian wedding fantasies become something of a subconscious leitmotif this season, it could be because designers like Junya Watanabe and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons Homme Plus have been so fantastic in formal wear. Mr. Watanabe did this by radically transforming tuxedos into patchwork suits of frayed black or blue denim, then decorating them with machine patches of white thread and bits of tartan. Memo to celebrity stylists and groomsmen around the world.
Ms. Kawakubo dabbled in formal dress gowns, certainly not for the first time. Hers were ruffled at the sleeves, hem and tails and were shown against a soundtrack of Erik Satie’s music for “Parade.” Sirens, typewriter clatter and gunshots. Gruesome headlines came to mind.
Yet such is the elegance of Ms. Kawakubo’s thinking that the designs also evoked an era other than ours, that of post-Edo Japan: formal, courtly, at once stylized yet naturalistic. It’s funny to imagine yourself wearing such things as you take part in one of the firefly viewing parties depicted in Junichiro Tanizaki’s ‘The Makioka Sisters’, one of the literary landmarks of the 20th century.
Rick Owens also listened to what was essentially the same period – the 1920s and 1930s – although epitomized by early Hollywood. The show, held on the steps and piazza of the glorious Art Deco Trocadéro complex, was monumental, fantastic and one of this observer’s highlights. It was also bombastic and completely camp.
Possibly only an eccentric kid growing up without television in Porterville, California, in the 1960s could achieve the affection Mr. Owens feels for Cecil B. DeMille’s sword-and-sandal glasses. Why else would anyone stage a fashion show with ten looks repeated twenty times, each on phalanxes of models, more than two hundred in all. Against the thumping cadence of the Allegretto from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the models marched in battalions: four models, five rows, dressed in wrap-around knit shirts, side-slit shorts and Geobasket sneakers, almost all uniformly white.
The show was epic as intended. But beyond the theatrical features, the clothing itself was commercial: motorcycle jackets with a variety of coating treatments; roving hooded chiffon coats; hooded capes; and boiler suits. Even a deflated leather version of the pumped-up knee boots he showed last season looked less freaky now that the eye has grown accustomed to them.
The designs Pharrell Williams showed at Louis Vuitton – a show with universal ‘It’s a Small World (After All)’ theme that, you could be forgiven for thinking about it, looked a bit like a market game dressed up as inclusivity – were more confident and more commercial. then his final foray into the cliché of the American West. We accept that Mr. Williams is not Virgil Abloh, whose design explorations, even if sometimes crazy, were always approached seriously. Still, Mr. Vuitton deserves. Williams a spot on my mental shopping list, if only because many of the looks feature a luggage style designed for the pan-continental airline Air Afrique in the 1960s.
Lately, the look — a multicolored check pattern — has been repopularized by creative types like Lamine Diaoune, Amadou-Bamba Thiam and Jeremy Konko, each of whom collaborated with Mr. Williams on the collection. Rarely do I come away from a Vuitton show with the itch to buy something. Still, this time I could indulge the fantasy of strolling through an airport hall with one of those bags, perhaps on my way to a seminar on Aimé Césaire.
In a personal playlist for this season, soft grooves would be the outro. The top of which is a slow jam from Grace Wales Bonner’s bespoke and elevated take on Afro-Caribbean streetwear. I would take a ‘tuxedo’ that appeared at the finale. The top was a patterned hoodie based on the archives of Afro-Caribbean artist Althea McNish, elegantly paired with dark pants and a cummerbund. Funnily enough, the throwback qualities of Ms. Wales Bonner’s collection were unexpectedly reminiscent of those of Giorgio Armani, who also evoked tropical moods in what was roughly his 350th collection in 50 years.
Sometimes it’s fun to play HR games while watching the clothes go by on the catwalk. Mr. Armani turns 90 in a few weeks, and in an imagined succession scenario, it’s wonderful to imagine what Ms. Wales Bonner would do with a global behemoth whose design codes — think suede blouson bombers, rib-knit sweaters, things that still resemble the 1980s menswear photographs that photographer Peter Lindbergh took and that have influenced designers ever since are fundamentally close to hers.
A shrunken version of similar ’80s looks popped up at Prada, where designers Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons share a penchant for mixing retro references and making edgy look cool. Here it took the form of V-neck knits, cardigans, super-fitting crew necks and high-waisted trousers with trompe l’oeil belts, worn on the necessary famine. The same clothes for men with an average waist would look very different and a lot more conventional.
On the other hand, the printed tops—the ones with sad faces drawn by the awful French painter Bernard Buffet—would, if worn unironically by some skate rat barely old enough to shave, be truly punk are.
