There was a tender typewritten note from Nicolas Ghesquière on every seat at his first show for Louis Vuitton this morning. “Today is a new day. A big day…Words cannot express exactly how I am feeling at this moment…Above all, immense joy.” Emotions were high in the crowd, too. Few designers are as beloved, respected, or copied as Ghesquière is, and he’s been off the scene and badly missed since his departure from Balenciaga a year and a half ago. Only Raf Simons’ debut at Dior was as breathlessly anticipated as Ghesquière’s at Vuitton. They’re the jewels in Bernard Arnault’s LVMH crown, and Arnault was in the front row today, seated alongside Princess Charlene of Monaco and other lights from the worlds of film (Catherine Deneuve), art (Cindy Sherman), and fashion. Jean Paul Gaultier, for whom Ghesquière worked early on, turned up, as curious as the rest of us to see what the new LV, after fourteen years of Marc Jacobs at the helm, would look like.

As the metal blinds of the Cour Carree show space opened to bright sun, Freja Beha Erichsen emerged in a black leather snap-front coat with a wide caramel-colored collar, carrying the new Petite Malle bag, a miniature LV trunk at her fingertips. The coat’s flared A-line cut and abbreviated thigh-high hem was the show’s predominant silhouette, but if that shape cued a 1960s vibe, the workmanship was 21st-century state of the art. “The knowledge of the team is extraordinary, the best of the world,” Ghesquière said afterward, clearly delighted to be back at the red-hot center of things. You won’t find a more luxurious coat than the black crocodile shown here, despite its industrial zip front, or a jacket as well made as the one he patchworked in different colored leathers.

Naturally, there were a lot of skins, a lot of suede, a lot of leather, and naturally Ghesquière used them in innovative ways. A pair of cool evening looks had molded leather bodices and knit skirts aswirl with hand-cut feathers. Elsewhere, the designer’s famous flair for experimentation was somewhat scaled back. (That mostly holds true for the bags as well, save for a double-handled style that in fact came with just one handle.) “I will not say it was effortless, but it was a much more natural and easy process,” he went on. “I listened to the girls in the studio a lot, the women around me, what they want, what they need.” That came across in an outfit like the checked three-button blazer accompanied by glossy leather jeans and a red cardigan with a frilly white collar underneath, and in another that consisted of a white turtleneck, a trim black jacket, and a skirt in wool and crinkly leather, the new LV suit. And in a third that was as straightforward as a ski sweater and a belted A-line mini can be. Skirts and dresses were squarely the focus, yet fans of Ghesquière’s life-changing trousers could take heart at the sight of a high-waisted style into which he tucked a khaki jacket. In any case, there will be plenty of seasons for pants. This was a great beginning, understated but not without power, for Ghesquière and the new Louis Vuitton.
—Nicole Phelps
Runway Feed

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Miuccia Prada started her personal revolutionary role in the fashion industry with one simple item: a black nylon rucksack. She took the banal, the ordinary, the everyday and made it desirable, luxurious, and special. She started to design and define what luxury could be by the appropriation of the normal. What she presented at Miu Miu today was a continuation of that task. A task and a collection that was so enjoyably witty, subversive, and skewed that it reached new heights of the “avant-bland.”

Prada frequently returns to normality; she often revels in it. This is not to say that she just presents something desultorily and day-to-day, then shoves it on a catwalk—that’s not fashion, after all. Instead she designs, re-contextualizes, and skews. Prada makes you think as well as laugh, and above all she infects you with a desire for quilted nylon from the bottom of your heart. And that’s because, well, she has a desire for quilted nylon from the bottom of her heart. “Everybody thought I was crazy with this, with the amount of times we tried getting this right,” the designer said of the key fabric of the collection. “I worked for one month on the right windbreaker that was not puffy-puffy. The perfect windbreaker—I had to get it right.”

“I am fixated on the notion of no useless design,” Prada continued. “Ideas are a different thing. But when things are overdone from nothing, I can’t stand it; it had to be more real, more wearable, less pretentious. What is normal, what is real, is what is important. In Paris you go slightly more grand, but this time I went, ‘Who cares?'”

Who cares, indeed. Prada covered the entire Palais d’Iéna in clear plastic, from floor to columns, echoing that Prada code of the clear plastic mac that made a familiar appearance in the collection and was added to by skirts, tops, and boots. The rest of the venue was covered in rough scaffolding; again utilitarian—you sat on it. A mini version of the supportive metal scaffolding poles was formed as heels for shoes. Above all, the designer presented a new kind of Miu Miu girl, one more stripped down and utilitarian than ever before. This was a girl that would not be out of place in the north of England, wearing a ski jacket and a school uniform, eating crisps at a bus stop in 1986, like a Rita or a Sue from an Alan Clarke film. Re-contextualized in this highest of fashion settings, she was aggressively normal, avant-bland, normcore.

Yet as the show progressed, she became more and more extravagant. As Tori Amos’ version of “Enjoy the Silence” was replaced by a dance mix of Depeche Mode’s original, the girl exploded into quilted brocades that looked to have Lurex running through them, her home knits revealing delicate underwear underneath. Intricate metal appliqués appeared on plastics—the silhouettes were similar, but the fashion came to the fore. Yet you were still left with the lingering impression of the start: the quilted nylons, the windbreakers, and the everyday. “Normality is weird,” said Mrs. Prada. And in fashion, that is undoubtedly true.
—Jo-Ann Furniss
Runway Feed

The Hermès show was staged in the Palais Brongniart. It was once the stock exchange, which made it an appropriate location for a presentation from a label whose name is a global byword for luxury. It also made the atmosphere all the more striking: There wasn’t a moment of ostentation, just dark velvet curtains with a twenty-foot drop, a sense of shadowy mystery, and Echo & the Bunnymen on the soundtrack. Stealth wealth, indeed.

Christophe Lemaire wouldn’t want it any other way. The woman he envisions for Hermès is remarkably consistent with the creature that populates his own collections: She’s a little bit mysterious, a little bit exotic, and fiercely independent. After the show tonight, Lemaire mentioned the Russian steppes, the ancient East-West trading route known as the Silk Road, and Persian carpets as reference points. It was easy to see the carpets in his dense, rich prints, and a Mongolian horsewoman might recognize some of the designer’s proportions. The coat in shaggy goat was as wild as the wind.

Lemaire said he’d been musing on all the characters a woman could be. But it wasn’t really those ethnic personae who carried the show. His notions of a strong, graceful, urban style were more persuasive. He tipped his cap to trends—lush knitwear, oversize
coats—but the slightly exaggerated proportions of his jackets and pants once again seemed more of a reference to Martin Margiela’s tenure at Hermès, and were just as elegantly slouchy, especially in an ivory tux with an extravagant shawl collar, or a coat-dress, also in ivory, that was closed with a single button.

About that stealth wealth: Lemaire offered a tunic in paper-light chiffon crocodile, pinned at the back, casually falling open from a single closure at the back of the neck. Such ease, combined with the utter luxury of the material, defines Hermès. In fact, with Véronique Nichanian as creative director for the men’s collection and Lemaire in charge of womenswear, the company now puts forth an idiosyncratic but completely convincing statement about luxury dressing in the twenty-first century.
—Tim Blanks
Runway Feed

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All the theatrics that have amped up the entertainment value at previous Moncler Gamme Rouge shows were MIA today—no huskies, simulated weather, or nearly nude gymnasts. If you wanted, you could watch the light boards running the perimeter of the space that projected Koyaanisqatsi-style footage of urban and environmental scenes. But, with no disrespect to last year’s canine models, the clothes needed to resume their role as star players. And sure enough, Giambattista Valli’s three-part collection offered up the type of graphic and material dynamism (plus Pharrell-size fur hats) that will make any future polar vortex easier to endure.

On average, coats hovered around the knees, which were almost always clad in sport leggings, their cuffs sheer and ankle-baring. The mixing made all the difference; a champagne-hued Persian lamb coat ringed with a triple stripe of pylon-orange mink opened the show. Midway through, in the droll-meets-drab UPS uniform grouping, a crocodile front gave way to a Persian lamb back. A fuller A-line coat bifurcated a camo print up top with a raw-edged Persian lamb skirt. Speaking of which, the prints came from graffiti artist Maurizio Cannavacciuolo, whose drippy effects and text-image interplay counterbalanced the haute fabrications and will likely find an eager audience among men (who will finally be able to purchase the Gamme Rouge runway looks this fall).

Both men and women, though, will appreciate the all-purpose accessories, namely a croc card case dangling from a coat strap, baseball-beanie hybrid caps, and thick-soled slip-on sneakers. All three details might have gone unnoticed had you been distracted by a mise-en-scène.
—Amy Verner
Runway Feed

Zadig & Voltaire wrangled a variety of industry heavyweights for its show today: models Kirsten Owen, Soo Joo Park, Hanne Gaby Odiele, and Jamie Bochert; runway music master Frédéric Sanchez (who spliced U2’s “Numb” with Missy Elliott’s “One Minute Man”); and producer Alexandre de Betak. While designer Cecilia Bönström did not try to pass off her sweaterdresses and embellished parkas as anything more than “clothes with attitude,” it’s clear that the brand understands the importance of perception. For all the spangled jumpsuits and jackets, there were an equal number of well-designed knits. The overarching message came via a military green coat, to which Bönström added trendy detailing and accents of tangerine. She used a vintage dress to inform the final look, and loosely adopted Warhol’s flowers for the collection’s sole print. Styling was crucial here. What happens if, a few months from now, a shopper enters a store and tries on the long embroidered lace skirt; will she figure out that it looks best when worn with an oversize sweater, attaining Bönström’s oppositional ideal? There’s no way to know—and certainly no way to control it. All the more reason to stage a knockout show.
—Amy Verner
Runway Feed

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Zuhair Murad doesn’t much like insects—except for butterflies and dragonflies, beauty muses of the bug world. So for Fall, he expressed their sinuous bodies and wing shapes as custom guipure lace patterns and strategically placed cutouts. Murad pointed to a special technique that allowed a puzzle of crepe pieces to be superimposed onto jersey, and showed off python-patterned lace embroidered with the same abstracted idea. A digitally rendered print stretched wing veining into a decorative filigree. Even the leather lacing on a grouping of dresses borrowed the insects’ bulbous abdomen shape, tiny as it is, for female body contouring. The most elaborate interpretation of all used openwork and embellishment across the entire torso and down the hip in a way that seemed as delicate and detailed as actual wings. Murad, who says he pored over books and examined some specimens back home in Lebanon, has become so synonymous with eveningwear that you easily forget he does daywear, too, and batwing sleeves supplied the most notable, tangentially thematic update. This luxe Lepidoptera collection allowed Murad to stretch his wings, but the OTT ornamentation was far less persuasive than a solid black crepe mermaid dress with lace godet pleats. Such relative simplicity made it a rare beauty.
—Amy Verner
Runway Feed