Paris Fashion Week — collections built on clothes made to last

When you strip away much of the apparatus that has come to surround fashion shows, as many designers have done this season — the big, conspicuously expensive show sets, the enormous guest lists, the flashing bulbs bouncing off the celebrities front row — the clothes are left to stand on their own.

That was precisely what designer Jonathan Anderson was after when he erected a white cube on the magnificent grounds of the Château de Vincennes, a few miles east of Paris, for Loewe’s show on Friday morning. “You are forced to look at the clothing,” he explained.

Not that there weren’t celebrities — there were several, including Schitt’s Creek actors Catherine O’Hara and Dan Levy — but the set was simple, its whiteness punctuated by colourful waist-height cubes of confetti by the artist Lara Favaretto.

Through these, the models moved in simple white dresses (which were vintage) printed with blurred florals and what looked like a smudged black-and-white photocopy of a female nude, and silk evening dresses looped over metal spheres pinned below the collarbone. Their earnest elegance was lightened by quirky long-sleeve shirts and long shorts covered in big, overlapping feathers, and flat boots that pooled around the ankles like dropped trousers.

Anderson said he’d been thinking about “realities”, and how “in the room [the collection] looks like one thing, and then we have an audience online who sees it a different way”. For guests in the room, it was easy to see that the blurred dresses, inspired by the work of German artist Gerhard Richter, were printed that way; but online they gave the illusion of being out of focus, he said.

Anderson was also wrestling with how to keep the collection feeling fresh for when it arrives in stores four to six months from now. “There are so many [collections] and we’re sort of over them by the time they get into store,” he said. “How do you make collections that are not for right now but in six months? It’s a hard thing for the designer now, where clothing becomes overexposed very quickly.”

One answer came in the form of knitwear that, to those in the room and watching online, look like relatively traditional cardigans, but actually stick on to the body — something that can only be discovered when encountered on a shop rail.

The clothes also stood on their own at Dries Van Noten, where fabrics — hand-painted, hand-drawn, woven in small batches at 100-year-old mills — were the “essence” of the collection, the designer said backstage.

His simple black runway snaked through the seats of a theatre, where models walked past in thigh-high platform boots and coats painted in big gold strokes at the waist; jackets patchworked from solid wool, lace and semi-sheer embroidered chiffon; and pinstripe jackets and coats decorated with neat rows of gold top-stitching, one layered over a pair of bronze silk trousers crumpled and over-embroidered with flowers. They were beautiful and intricate, a celebration, the designer said, of “old things. Things you never want to lose in your life, things you have to mend . . . because you love it so much and it’s falling apart.” 

Chloé’s Gabriela Hearst was also designing with longevity, and quality, in mind — her polished leather and shearling coats, some pieced together from long, narrow strips of dyed leather, “are meant to be passed on”, she said pre-show. “That’s why I do timeless. If I hit a trend, it’s an accident.”

Timelessness is what The Row excels at. Founded by former child actors Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen in 2006, The Row is the rare American label to have transplanted its shows from New York to Paris and succeeded. Its intimate, salon-style show in Paris this week was attended by the who’s who of buyers and editors, who were drawn not by the designers’ celebrity or advertising dollars (they don’t advertise), but because their total commitment to quality and lasting-but-not-staid design has captured the fashion zeitgeist.

It has also captured wallets. Designers at other houses often marvel at the mark-up on The Row’s products — particularly on its knitwear — but many women (and I am one) appear perfectly happy to fork out a premium for clothes that are, without exception, well made, comfortable and easy to put together.

It was the fabrics, and the outerwear, that did the heavy lifting at Wednesday’s show: angular coats cut amply from brushed wool and leather, and enormous black cashmere ponchos cut from the sides like tabards. Trouser suits were easy and mannish, while evening dresses and bustiers-over-trousers were cut from the same thick wools as the coats, made formal through clever draping.

There was a similar architectural purity in Rick Owens’ clothes this season. Having spent much of his winter vacation at the feet of the pyramids of Luxor, Owens said in his show notes that he wanted to reduce his collection “to the simplest of shapes”, which, like the pyramids, were made grand and otherworldly through their enormity.

The forms were, naturally, mostly triangular — short capes coated in matt sequins; leather coats and knit dresses with shoulders moulded into sharp points, some soaring past the head; and marshmallow-y shawls (Owens called them “jumbo padded garlands”) encasing arms and hips. “Times like these might call for a respectful formality and sobriety, with moments of delicacy as reminders of what is at risk and at stake,” he said, alluding to the war in Ukraine.

“‘Quiet’ doesn’t work for our woman,” Daniel Roseberry wrote in the show notes accompanying his first ready-to-wear show for Schiaparelli — a riposte to the mood gripping designers elsewhere this season. “Our global clientele have made it clear that they want something powerful and distinctive from us.”

That was what Roseberry delivered — and in the form of a full (if formal) wardrobe, which ranged from a white cotton shirt layered under a black leather trouser suit to sumptuously draped velvet cocktail dresses, one cut out in the shape of a keyhole at the breastbone.

It is details like these — along with the gold-plated body parts, such as noses and ears, made into jewellery, and the heels shod with gold-painted toes — that have made Roseberry’s designs for Schiaparelli so distinctive, without resorting to logos. There is no apparatus needed here — they are pieces that will sell themselves.