At Paris Fashion Week, a Mixed Bag
Today in Paris, Jonathan Anderson opened the Dior show — his first women’s ready-to-wear collection for the house — with a short video by the British television journalist Adam Curtis. Curtis has been making films for more than 30 years, often dealing with politics and the effects of mass culture, and is perhaps best known for the 2021 six-part film Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World. He once described our perceptions as fragments: “That’s how people think now. They make associations, and there’s no meaning. That’s the world we live in.”
The Dior video is a brief kaleidoscopic history of the brand, and more, it’s also an unfiltered view of the spectacle and devouring creatures around it — editors, celebrities, corporate bosses. It’s a world that is at once extravagantly creative and hollow. The video is one of the most memorable things I’ve seen related to fashion in a while, probably because it expresses a lot of truth.
In a season of debuts, when people are looking for newness, the current environment — the political strife and tension, the sense of confusion — raises an interesting question. How can even a great collection break through in a world where many things now seem unrecognizable? What qualities make something memorable enough to switch on your mind? Another designer put that question to me the other day, and I think it’s possibly the most challenging thing facing the industry. As it happens, many of the collections I saw on Tuesday didn’t meet it.
One that did was Dries Van Noten, where Julian Klausner has been the creative director since late 2024. His initial showing last March struck me as overly rich and layered, a bit of a drag. On Tuesday, he stripped everything back; the aesthetic was still recognizably “Dries,” as they say, but Klausner was taking the brand into new territory. It was lighter, less embellished, more relevant in its attitude. I wondered what had caused the shift.
Referring to his spring 2026 men’s show in June, Klausner said, “I was really touched by the reaction, and a lot of people read into it something optimistic, joyful — which I hadn’t intended. It was inspiring to me, that a collection could provoke that kind of emotion.” When designers talk about hope and joy, I tend to shudder and look for the nearest exit. It’s usually just rhetoric.
But Klausner made good on his word, in part because his approach remained fairly simple. He drew inspiration from a surfer’s wetsuit — how “elegant a surfer’s silhouette can be,” as he said — and from the energizing effect of sunset, and from the 1960s, especially for geometric prints, because the decade is symbolic of optimism. “I wanted the girls to feel really relaxed,” Klausner said. They walked like normal humans down the wide runway — that is, no big model moves or fake attitude. The music did a great deal of the emotional work. By Philip Glass, it was from the 1985 movie Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.
Overall, the collection felt intuitive with the surfer silhouette translated into striped jersey onesies, including one version with a soft robe coat. Klausner broke up most of the looks with some distinctive jackets (in what looked like sturdy cotton) with minimal embellishment, worn with cropped pants or rompers. There were some frills — at the waistband of cotton pants, say — but the gesture seemed offhand, not rich.
One of the best things about the collection was the number of sheer, floating coats or dresses — call them caftans — in geometric prints. Over underwear (or, in your daydreams, a swimsuit), they were a different, more realistic way to dress in summer. They weren’t in the least nostalgic. Some of the bold prints verged on Marimekko, and the red circle pattern on the closing dress suggested the Target logo. Though maybe they don’t have a Target in Antwerp, where Dries Van Noten is based. Still, the optimism and a lightness of being came through.
Nicolas Di Felice also put on a strong, timely show for Courreges. The opening looks, in cool shades of blue and then black, came with helmets veiled tightly with UV blockers in the same tones. And for the finale, there were sheath dresses in a sleek, wet-looking material with a kind of sun or heat shield rising to the face.
Di Felice, one of the most sure-footed designers in Paris, called his show “Blinded by the Sun”; he turned up the lights at the end to a rotisserie glare as guests reached for their shades. It was a clever commentary on rising temperatures, but Di Felice also delivered a sharp collection of spare modern dresses and separates, including some terrific pieces assembled from tiny bands of material (including, possibly, leather), each band precisely set in a stack up the dress or skirt, and finished with a tiny, aligned buckle. He showed the looks with low-heeled ’60s boots that still feel right.
Stella McCartney opened her show, which drew a horde of friends and celebrities to the Pompidou Center on Tuesday night, with the actress Helen Mirren standing in the middle of the catwalk as she read the lyrics from the Beatles’ 1969 song “Come Together.” Despite Mirren’s reading, the come-together vibe didn’t quite land. Still, McCartney showed some novel designs, notably denim woven with a material called PURE.TECH that helps clean the air and lovely feathery dresses in pastel and neutral tones made of a plant-based plume, Fevers.
At Louis Vuitton, a narrator intoned the words from “This Must Be the Place,” the 1983 Talking Heads song with the refrain “Home is where I want to be.” Nicolas Ghesquiere brought his audience to the summer apartment in the Louvre of Anne of Austria, a French teen queen in the 1600s. Apparently, the ornate rooms had not been opened to the public in a century. Getting to them, I felt as though I had walked halfway to Austria.
Ghesquiere was indeed at home with an eclectic mix of soft styles that evoked bed jackets, nighties, and a kind of Proustian mental retreat. Several garments were remarkable in their individuality, notably an openwork vest that made me think of porcelain — tea in the rumpled sheets — but the collection as a whole did not leave a deep impression. Come back to the real world, Mr. Ghesquiere.
Metieres Fecales didn’t impress, despite the hype around the label, by Steven Raj Bhaskaran. Though the workmanship is mostly fine and the dedication to diversity apparent and laudable, far too many of the glamour shapes recall the aesthetics of John Galliano, Demna, and even Thierry Mugler.