PARIS — That the final day of Paris Fashion Week was also a Mardi Noir — a Black Tuesday, with massed demonstrators marching furiously across the Place de la Concorde to the National Assembly to protest pension reform — seemed inevitable. Of course there would be revolt. There have been fires, plague, floods. How else would anyone have expected this discombobulating, fraught fashion month to end?
The strangeness began with a strangely abandoned New York show schedule, moved to London amid windstorm Dennis, and crawled through Milan with the coronavirus. By the time Paris rolled around, so had face masks and extreme amounts of hand sanitizer.
The last show of the season was held at the shuttered Louvre, which has been closed to tourists and art lovers alike because of staff fears over the virus, but not, apparently, to Louis Vuitton (at least not its courtyards). In trooped the bedraggled fashion folk as always, but the mood was not the same as always. They went past the sunset-dusted pyramid, sure, but also past the groups of police in black riot gear with articulated leather armor and plastic shields, past the dozen police vans idling nearby. Instead of the usual giddy relief because the fashion circus was almost over, there was a barely restrained desire to flee. Get me out of here! Now we can get back to — self quarantine.
But, “you can’t run away from things,” Sarah Burton said backstage a day earlier at Alexander McQueen, just before a show she called “a love letter to other women, my team, our children,” rooted in the history of Wales: its red houses, poetry, quilts, landscapes, “togetherness.”
“You have to be present,” Ms. Burton said. “We have to be bold,” even when we are feeling fragile. Or at least dress as if we are. Ms. Burton’s tailoring — in gray and black lines meant to mimic a blown-up quilting pattern that slashed across the body in graphic detail, often with a swallowtail hem at the back — is all that.
So are her draped blanket dresses in leather and wool, worn over one shoulder; and her intricately beaded dresses worn over slick leather leggings and falling somewhere between spider web and chain mail, plus a little more: look closer and there were hearts embedded in the embroidery. That’s what fashion can give you: a way to be in the world. A way to move through the day however unsettlingly that day evolves because — well, it’s got you covered.
Pun intended. A little humor is no bad thing at the moment. Witness Glenn Martens of Y/Project, who is a dab hand at twisting the basics of everyday to continually challenge what is revealed, what is concealed, and what makes you blink and look again. Like jeans and other trousers cut into a deep V at the front so they seemed perennially unzipped, worn over a variety of bodysuits, like some form of perverse chaps. Now you see it — what exactly do you see?
A way to suggest we’ve all come undone, perhaps. And that despite it all, you don’t actually have to worry that your pants will fall down. There’s an internal waistband. In the end, we figure it out. Hopefully. Mostly.
Chitose Abe at Sacai usually does, setting herself a puzzle every season — how to combine disparate and oppositional elements into an elevated whole — and then solving it. This time it was Chesterfields and tuxedos (masculine clichés) and lingerie (feminine ones), and the result, which could easily have been lumpy, was instead elegantly liberated.
At Miu Miu, Miuccia Prada may have eschewed her usual post-show press meet-and-greet-and-kiss-and-ruminate but her runway ruminated for her in a highly idiosyncratic game of silver screen dress-up: crushed silk sheaths in circus brights, taffeta poufs, 1940s suiting with skirts slit to the thigh; sheer slips dripping crystal drops. As she said via email, clothes “not only impress on others, but help reframe a perception of the wearer in their own mind.”
And at Chanel, Virginie Viard continued her ever-so-gentle lightening up of the Karl Lagerfeld legacy. Her main innovation thus far has been pockets (that’s not sarcasm; pockets are great) but this time she also forewent the elaborate sets Mr. Lagerfeld made famous in favor of a mirrored floor and a few halfhearted smoke machines, across which her models ambled, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in threes, chatting away, as if they had forgotten they were on a runway.
It was charming, in a voyeuristic way, but the stripped-down set also had the side effect of focusing attention on the clothes, which were — not.
There was the usual bouclé, mostly in knee-length skirt suits and coats in citrine and watermelon. There were some little black dresses with the requisite white lace collar and cuffs. There was a nod to Mr. Lagerfeld’s love of a Belle Epoque frock: a strapless taffeta number with detached puffed sleeves. Every look came paired with fairy-tale “seven league boots,” as Ms. Viard called them in her show notes, which were cool.
But there were also hot pants over sheer logo tights and cropped white cotton dickeys. Blouson gray bouclé high-waist sweats and a matching bandeau top. A ruffled wrestling pinafore over a white lace tee. And lots and lots of jodhpurs that looked more like very wide track pants with snaps — brass, diamanté — up the side, most of which had been popped open so the pant legs flapped awkwardly around the calves and knees.
Mr. Lagerfeld often had similar clunkers in his shows, but they were obscured by the supermarkets and airplanes that surrounded them. Ms. Viard left hers front and center. That’s both brave and foolhardy.
Perhaps she was nostalgic for earlier days when the next gen (because these could only have been directed at the youth vote) could mosey along the streets in their Chanel without running into a protest and fearing they would be Marie Antoinette’d in their double Cs (the former French queen is the muse of the season).
But while there’s nothing wrong with a little yen for ye olden days — fashion was built on it — you can’t ignore the reality of right now. After all, the past is how we got to here: this weird, confused, end-of-days moment. That was the point of Nicolas Ghesquière’s Vuitton show, which began in the gloom of a black box stuck in that deserted Louvre courtyard.
Then a curtain rose and lo! a chorus of 200, dressed as characters from 350 years of history, the 15th century to today, voices raised in song. And lo! came frilly petticoats beneath pinstripe suit jackets and motherboard tank tops. Then came elaborately ruched and ruffled pit-stop jumpsuits. Came a jet-beaded toreador bolero atop a leather milkmaid corset and motocross pants.
Came a clash of centuries and styles so jarring and confrontational it was almost cathartic. Ask not whose fault it is we are where we are. Ask instead where we go next.
