If luxury fashion isn’t yet at an inflection point, it certainly feels close. Geopolitical turmoil and a global spending slowdown on luxury goods has ushered in a period of self-reflection and reinvention at major brands.
That manifested at Paris Fashion Week in a succession of designer debuts at houses including Tom Ford, Givenchy and Dries Van Noten; and in shows with sharply reduced guest lists and narrow catwalks that brought the clothes up close. Designers experimented with new silhouettes; backstage, they spoke of a renewed focus on pattern-cutting and fit. And while there were a lot of broad-shouldered trouser suits (and the ties to go with them), the collections were more traditionally feminine on the whole.
Anthony Vaccarello did not send a single pair of trousers down Saint Laurent’s runway. “I tried pants, but they felt forced,” he said pre-show. Instead, there were thigh-length jackets and funnel-neck blouses with big, rounded shoulders that narrowed into low-slung belts and slim pencil skirts with side pockets and vertiginous slingbacks.
It was a Y-shaped silhouette that drew on Yves Saint Laurent’s 1990s haute couture, sans the shoulder pads. In fact, there were no underpinnings at all, Vaccarello said, and nothing rigidly tailored — napa leather and elastic technical fabrics including jersey and a filmy silicone-slicked muslin held everything up, softening the angular cuts and enabling movement “to give an idea of freedom”, he said.
The show concluded with a succession of slip-like ball dresses that were even more adventurously cut, their bulbous skirts emerging mid-thigh beneath bow sashes and cocoon-backed leather jackets. It was a powerful and persuasive collection, full of pieces — like those leather jackets — that women really want to wear.
Miuccia Prada and her stylist at Miu Miu, Lotta Volkova, have a knack for pinpointing what women don’t know they want to wear — but will once they’ve seen it on the Miu Miu catwalk. No longer merely Prada’s “little sister”, the brand has become an industry bellwether, single-handedly launching the micro mini skirt, underwear as outerwear, and the statement grey hoodie. It’s translating at the till: retail sales climbed 93 per cent between 2023 and 2024, surpassing the €1bn mark and making Miu Miu the fastest-growing luxury brand of that size.
This season Prada wrapped her show set in yellow moiré and outfitted models in slinky ribbed knits over cone bras, scant slip skirts cut above the knee, faux fur stoles and rounded, 1960s-ish jackets in heavy wool that emphasised breasts and shoulders. One model evoked Marilyn Monroe, another Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, but gone awry: jackets were left partly unbuttoned and dress straps slipped off shoulders, as if these women (and a few men) were not quite keeping it together. In her show notes, Prada called it “an evaluation of the feminine”, with garments “manipulated, folded, shifted and shaped to curve”.
“I’m not sure we are at an inflection point, but the energy after Covid is not the same as today,” Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion, said in a pre-show interview. “There is a need for a new energy; you [can] see it this fashion week.”
Chanel is in a holding pattern as it awaits for new creative director Matthieu Blazy to start work next month; he will show his first collection at Paris in October. The brand has continued to show 10 times a year since designer Virginie Viard’s departure last summer after five years at the helm; the shows credited to the studio.
Not that the clients care, Pavlovsky said. “For them it is about Chanel. They don’t feel the difference [when designers change].”
That was what made Blazy, beyond his immense talent as a designer, the right man for the job. “Chanel is not about Matthieu; it’s about Chanel,” Pavlovsky said. “In the world of designers, not many are ready to work for a brand, they are ready to work for them[selves].”
A towering black bow was erected at the heart of the Grand Palais, around which models moved in clothes that cleaved to other Chanel signatures: tweed jackets with matching shorts or ankle-length skirts that fanned out gently mid-hip, columnar tweed coats trimmed with braid, and a slim black dress festooned with bows. It was nice if dull, but the accessories were a miss: Faux pearls popped up on bags with gold circular handles and on the heels of ankle boots, stamped with Chanel’s double-C — an effect that was tacky rather than witty. Blazy has his work cut out for him in the accessories department.
Blazy’s mandate is to define what Chanel looks like for the next 10 or 15 years — “hopefully longer,” Pavlovsky said. “The Chanel of today is still a lot about [late designer] Karl [Lagerfeld]’s push and vision. Virginie brought a lot of femininity. Karl was very structured. It’s time to inject another energy.”
On the business side, Chanel remains cautious, he added. The European boutiques are continuing to benefit from the strong dollar, and China has “started to reboot”. There’s been no discernible effect from the trade wars brought about by the Trump administration, at least not yet. “More than ever there are uncertainties. We are more cautious in everything we are doing.”
Louis Vuitton has felt the impact of the luxury slowdown, although it remains the biggest company in the industry, responsible for about half of parent company LVMH’s profits. This season clients, press and influencers were schlepped in vans to an undisclosed location an hour and a half before show time — which turned out not to be a train, as some (myself included) had hopefully speculated, but rather L’Étoile du Nord, tucked behind Paris’ main rail station. An anticlimax.
Perhaps that was why the collection too felt anticlimactic; the mix of strong colour, slick tailoring, technical sportswear and leather carryalls a bit tired. One seatmate applauded its wearability, another the prettiness of the evening dresses, but to me it lacked the adventurous volumes and silhouettes that have made previous collections so futuristic and singular. Ghesquière, who has been Louis Vuitton’s designer since 2013, has designed around the same brand codes for a long time. Perhaps that approach, too, is in need of a refresh.
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