In Paris, designers make the case for clothes over spectacle

2023 is poised to be another good year for luxury. That’s largely due to the reopening of China, where the strength of a post-lockdown “YOLO” (you only live once) spending spree is forecast to more than compensate for weakening demand in the US and Europe. Sales are projected to increase 8 to 10 per cent over last year, according to analysts. Shares in LVMH, Hermès and Burberry have all hit record highs in recent weeks on the promise of that spree.

Yet store buyers and even executives at the sector’s leading brands sounded a note of caution at Paris Fashion Week, which concluded amid a general strike in on Tuesday.

“More than ever we have to be cautious,” Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion, said before the brand’s show at the temporary Grand Palais Éphémère. “Inflation, geopolitics . . . everything is uncertain everywhere.”

Pavlovsky acknowledged that the second half of 2022 had been “quite difficult” in China because of repeated Covid-19 lockdowns. “But with the reopening in early January, the business has been improving quite a lot,” he said. “Our Chinese customer has started to travel, not that much to Europe [yet], but to Japan, Hong Kong, Macau.”

That uncertainty could explain the conservative turn that the collections took this season — not only in Paris but also in New York, London and Milan, where understated tailoring in easy-to-sell neutrals led the way.

Or at least in part. Designers also made a collective push against fashion’s transformation, over the past 15 years, from being about clothes to being about algorithms, where success is measured less by the cut of a coat than a designer’s ability to generate “viral” moments online.

In his show notes, Balenciaga designer Demna wrote that fashion had become “an entertainment”, and he wanted to go back to its essence — “the art of making clothes”. He held his show this season in a white, windowless box adjacent to the Louvre — a pointed departure from last October, when rapper Kanye West opened the Balenciaga show trudging through an enormous mud pit.

Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo wrote that she too wanted to “go back to the starting point, working with free patterns, using basic materials.” Her clothes — better to call them sculptures — were meme-able well before memes existed, but the volumes here were more constrained, the designs simpler.

What they did repeatedly was show their innards — black and navy wool was slashed to reveal the white padding underneath; caged crinolines, in crushed velvet and shaggy fur, were constructed around rather than within the garments. Models walked out in twos and threes, accompanied by a genre-mash-up of music — rock one moment, then jazz, now a violin — that shut off abruptly between sets.

Kawakubo and her husband Adrian Joffe together helm a group of companies that spans the avant-garde multinational retailer Dover Street Market and labels founded by her protégés, Junya Watanabe and Kei Ninomiya.

The former consistently orchestrates energetic shows without the need for much of a set — rough plywood and Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir”, blasting out in the Oratoire du Louvre early on a Saturday morning were all the backdrop required for his Mad Max-esque black mesh face masks and combat outerwear in black nylon and leather, harnessed with straps and carabiners with capacious pockets and bags worked directly into the garments. They hit that elusive sweet spot between exciting and wearable.

Elsewhere, classicism prevailed. It prevailed, of course, at Hermès, where Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski showcased smart straight-leg trousers and single-breasted coats in black leather, and auburn and brown knit tunics with knee-length shorts that mimicked the colour variations of hair.

“For me, it’s more about connecting classicism with today, and making classicism relevant,” she said of her approach pre-show. “Making it resilient, strong, and also creative . . . [with] some playfulness, some attitude.” The collection did an excellent job of showcasing the quality and craftsmanship Hermès is known for, though a little more adventurousness, particularly when it comes to silhouette, would give it a lift.

There’s so much fur and leather and feathers on the runway . . . you don’t have to kill anything and it can be just as luxurious’

Classicism prevailed too at Chanel, which I watched online because of the French general strike. There the house camellia took centre stage — literally so — blown up in red in the middle of the show set, around which models walked in tweed jackets, long dresses and coats knit and embroidered with the flower and the Chanel double-C.

Nicolas Ghesquière took a lighter touch with the house codes at Louis Vuitton’s show, which decamped from its usual venue in the Louvre courtyard to the first floor of the Musée d’Orsay, where a raised catwalk mimicked a Parisian side street, complete with pothole covers and the sound of gently honking horns (courtesy of sound designer Nicolas Becker).

Ghesquière wrote in his show notes that this season’s collection began with the question: “What is French style?” The answer is not, as most online listicles advise, defined by Breton stripes and a black blazer. Ghesquière’s collection suggested instead a difficult-to-define combination of simplicity, eclecticism and ease — an oversized bomber jacket over a furry dress and trim ankle boots, an ivory corduroy blazer cinched only at the collar, teamed simply with matching trousers slashed at the knee and black slingbacks. Present too was the element of surprise, seen in a white floral-embroidered dress whose bodice and sleeves were cut away at the back.

Although the shows and collections were generally quiet, some designers still went for spectacle. Coperni designers Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant, who last season sprayed a dress on to the model Bella Hadid — the footage of which appeared to travel everywhere online — this season aimed to duplicate that reach by inviting doglike robots on to its catwalk, one of which removed and then returned a jacket from one of the models.

Though these stunts have been effective at getting the Coperni name out there (and videos from this show, too, were all over my Instagram feed), the robots appeared to have nothing to do with the collection, with its micro-shorts suits and a black leather jacket painted with lambs, or with the brand itself.

In this, Stella McCartney’s decision to show alongside white and dapple-grey horses, made to trot, roll over and perform other tricks at the behest of Jean-François Pignon, a French trainer known as “the horse whisperer,” was more effective. McCartney has been riding and keeping horses since childhood, and the braided-jersey black dresses and sharp riding jackets of this collection borrowed conspicuously from equestrian garb.

“There’s so much leather and feathers and fur on the runway, especially in winter, and I just wanted to show that you don’t have to kill anything and it can be just as beautifully and luxuriously designed,” she said afterwards.

Still, the horses were a distraction from the clothes, and it was depressing watching them being used as entertainment for a fashion show. Unintentionally, it made another case for allowing shows to be just about the clothes.

For more of the FT’s fashion week coverage, go to ft.com/fashion-shows