Fashion Review: Burn It All Down

PARIS — There’s no good way to write about fashion in the wake of the scorched-earth event that took place Thursday in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington. No respectable segues into focusing on clothes. No agreed-on manner in which to describe the bizarre collision of two realities: sitting outside in the courtyard of the Palais de Tokyo in the sunshine, and watching the American contingent huddled in groups of two and three over their phones, streaming C-Span while waiting for the Rick Owens show to start.

But you can’t ignore it either.

It was, after all, the backdrop against which a group of collections was viewed. It is the birth of the environment in which a lot of these clothes will ultimately be worn. It’s why, when halfway through Mr. Owens’s show a soaring Tatlin’s Tower suddenly burst into flame and a wave of heat swept across the stands, it was impossible not to sit back with a jolt and think: yeah. Burn it all down.

Why his sci-fi witches in leather, canvas and denim robes of accordion diamond cutouts, some bearing torches to light the darkness; his insectoid generals in jutting triangular plates; and his high priestesses with wimples framing their heads that turned out to be T-shirts, the neck hole pulled up around the face, the arms streaming down behind, thrummed with current events convergence. Why the dusty stripes of a flag billowing from the arm of a long gown like the standard of a new nation, and even the rectangular bags, long and skinny as a rifle case, worn tucked into a chopped-up workman’s leather apron slung round the waist, made sense.

It was aggressively beautiful but it was also, on the Owens spectrum, unexpectedly wearable, especially the mini-shifts of silken fringe in new dawn colors, and cathartic.

Though it’s tempting to dismiss thinking about clothes at all at such a time — and on my social media feed, people did — or to say “hey, it’s my job,” or to praise the virtues of an aesthetic respite, the truth is, they have a role to play. They can either make a woman (or man) feel protected and powerful or hobbled and exposed; they can communicate romance or fragility or adventure or art. They can express the deep fungibility of identity in its most immediate state.

And we’d be remiss to ignore that, too.

Though it does change the balance of expectations when it comes to a show. It demands more, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

It frames the choice of Julien Dossena at Paco Rabanne to take the house’s chain mail heritage on the Silk Road — to mix it up with Indian prints, florals, lace and gold coin trim; to mix it in with a silver brocade Nehru-collared pantsuit and drop open-weave gold mesh over the top — as escapism with a provocatively hardy (instead of hippie) edge.

It underscores Jonathan Anderson’s increasingly assured ability to combine arts and crafts and sophistication at Loewe in desert patchworks of suede, bleeding slashes of muslin, liquid satin pajama suits sprouting ostrich feather vests, bulbous cotton khaki parachute skirts, and lacy piecework dresses (and some macramé bags), with a self-sufficient air.

It makes the moody romance of Sébastien Meunier’s crushed roses in black suits and silken trench coats at Ann Demeulemeester feel as insubstantial as smoke.

But it raises questions around what, exactly, the teeteringly decorative soldiers in Olivier Rousteing’s Balmain army have to do with the mobilization of the female voice, trussed and bound as they are in voluminous paper-bag pants and molded silver breast plates, sporting jackets with flying buttress shoulders so sharp they threaten to poke out an eye, and futuristic mosaic mini-dresses with a portrait of the Sphinx front and center.

What mystery, exactly, are they guarding? Was there a message in the black and white hieroglyphs on sweaters, the bandage dresses of shredded white chiffon, the shredded denim embedded with Swarovski and the stiff, scarab curves that stretched from the neck to the thigh? Maybe, but if so, it was obscured by the fan pleating, lost in the glare of the over-the-knee silver boots.

And it makes the self-conscious irony of Virgil Abloh’s Off-White, its focus on athcouture and winking logo and metaphor meta-commentary splashed on athletic tanks, seem like the easy way out.

Mr. Abloh is currently a darling of the fashion world, his fingers in many pies: friend of Kanye, artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s men’s wear, and, as a Nike collaborator, the designer of Serena Williams’s famous United States Open tutu.

That look was the genetic forerunner of this collection, a pastiche of the sporty (tank tops and leggings made from Nike tube socks à la Margiela! Sheer sweatpants worn under tailored one-button jackets!) and the soignée: giant tulle skirts à la Valli; crisp white eyelet shirtdresses; floaty ruffled nightie gowns. All worn by a mix of supermodels (Kendall, Bella, Kaia, Karlie) and super-athletes (the sprinter English Gardner, the heptathlete Katarina Johnson-Thompson), who got equal treatment on a runner board.

The ingredients of relevance were all there: a celebration of musculature and achievement; a belief in the importance of functional freedom; a little frippery to lighten the tone. Yet the clothes skittered across the surface of each. Mr. Abloh is new to this game, and as he often says, he comes from a different kind of training camp (plus, he sure is busy), but this seemed like nothing so much as a kind of fashion karaoke.

There’s too much quoting, and not enough genuine creation. One thing that has become very clear: Words matter, and they linger, whether on a garment or televised to the world. Fill-in-the-blank metaphors, not so much.