What went down at Paris Fashion Week?

Fashion month came to a close yesterday after an eight-day spectacle in the City of Light. With its star-studded audiences and haute couture grandeur, Paris once again delivered all the glamour and legacy the city has long been synonymous with. It reminded us why, even amid a year of major reshuffles across the industry, Paris remains the heart of fashion.

Although New York hosted the first ever official fashion week, Paris has staged events showcasing collections since the 1700s with défilés de mode (literally, ‘fashion parades’), arguably making it the original. Ever the innovator, the city’s modern-day watch parties hosted by La WatchParty returned in full force, streaming the catwalks around the city.

The week began with Anthony Vaccarello’s thirtieth collection in Saint Laurent’s signature spectacle before a glowing Eiffel Tower, where models walked through a hydrangea-filled garden that spelt out ‘YSL’. In the collection notes, Vaccarello described the Saint Laurent woman as “heroine and classic, singular and multifaceted”. The collection showcased this through oversized bows and silhouettes looked on by an eclectic front row including the likes of Hailey Bieber, Central Cee and Madonna.

Not everyone shared Vaccarello’s tenure, though. This season was filled with highly anticipated debuts, none more so than Jonathan Anderson’s first collection for Dior. Having left Loewe earlier this year to take the helm, Anderson opened with a short film by documentary maker Adam Curtis. “Do you dare enter the house of Dior?” the film asked, flashing archival footage spliced with horror clips. The show explored ‘harmony and tension’, opening with a white plissé lampshade dress and featuring reimagined puff skirts and bubble hems. French First Lady Brigitte Macron and Johnny Depp were among those in attendance.

Meanwhile, at Loewe, Anderson’s successors Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez unveiled their vision for the Spanish house: paper-plane shoes, shrunken leather coats, razor-cut denim and strapless towel dresses, while glass clutch bags, origami-folded shoes and spray-painted leather dresses reflected their experimental approach.

Across the city, Matthieu Blazy made his own mark with a poetic debut at Chanel. Guests received a necklace with a house-shaped charm engraved with the brand’s double C, with the show’s location and time barely visible through its tiny window. Inside the Grand Palais, Blazy transformed the space into a glowing solar system, an ode to Gabrielle Chanel’s fascination with the night sky. “I wanted to do something quite universal, like a dream, something outside of time,” he said. Enormous planets hovered above a black runway as the French-Belgian designer charted an entirely new galaxy for the storied house.

At Balenciaga, Pierpaolo Piccioli’s debut The Heartbeat took inspiration from the iconic 1957 Sack Dress. Piccioli took Balenciaga’s original gazar fabric devised by Cristóbal Balenciaga into a futuristic ‘neo-gazar’. The show also made headlines because of Meghan Markle’s surprise debut front-row appearance, where the former princess was draped in all white.

At Hermès, Nadège Vanhée leant into the brand’s equine legacy and transformed the runway into a stretch of sand scattered with shells, drawing inspiration from an antique Camargue saddle found in the house’s archives. Rick Owens staged his show across from the Palais Galliera, where his retrospective Temple of Love will continue through January. Meanwhile, Seán McGirr’s explosive McQueen collection at the Centre Pompidou explored ‘carnal restraint and release’ through sharp tailoring, corsetry and leather.

Themes of memory and rebirth threaded throughout the week. Victoria Beckham took inspiration from adolescence and revisited coming-of-age ’90s classics, such as Romeo + Juliet and The Virgin Suicides for inspiration. The result ranged from feathered minidresses to crisp white tanks with a nostalgic edge. 

Entre Deux is the name of Chloé’s SS26 collection, which was exhibited at the UNESCO headquarters. Chemena Kamali chose the venue to celebrate “dialogue, freedom and openness” as she showcased a collection inspired by the house’s 1950s silhouettes, with swathes of draped florals.

Celebrity narrations became somewhat of a thing, too. From Cate Blanchett reciting Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place” at the Louis Vuitton show to Lana Del Rey’s recital of her own poem for Zimmermann, as well as Pamela Anderson’s reading for Alessandro Michele’s Valentino show, it all felt poignant, theatrical and very Parisian.

Finally, Valentino brought much-needed and twinkling optimism. The collection entitled Fireflies drew inspiration from a letter by Pier Paolo Pasolini written in 1941, which was read out by Anderson, and drew on fireflies as a symbol of resistance and hope amid darkness. It was a much-needed reminder of the power of hope and the role that fashion can play in it. As the show notes say:

“We need to disarm the eyes and reawaken the gaze. It’s the only way to understand how the gloom of our present is actually woven with light swarms of fireflies: hints of worlds to come, traces of beauty that resists standardisation, sensitive epiphanies able to reconnect us with the human. Fashion, in this sense, can become a precious ally. Its task is to illuminate what loves to hide. Revealing shy signs of the future.”