PARIS — It was a bit of a shock to the fashion world on Sunday — at the end of Milan Fashion Week — when Miuccia Prada announced that Raf Simons would be joining her company as co-creative director. But only a bit of a shock.
“Raf to Prada” rumors had been circulating for months. The more surprising news was that he and Ms. Prada would be equal design partners, a first-of-its-kind long-term arrangement.
In recent years, there had only been one similar partnership, when Christian Lacroix collaborated with Dries Van Noten for one show — just one season. But a partnership with “no end date to the contract,” as Ms. Prada said at the secretive surprise news conference? That was a big deal. And one that might inspire other brands — caught in the sales-driven cycle of hirings and firings — to consider similar moves.
But until that happens, The New York Times has spent the first few days of Paris Fashion Week asking front-row guests which contemporary designers they would like to see team up: fashion as fantasy football.
It was an easier question for Andrew Bolton, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, than for others. He has been putting together the museum’s next big exhibition, called “About Time: Fashion and Duration,” which will examine connective moments in fashion history — pairing designs that have similar elements but made in different eras by different designers.
He thought it would be interesting to see Ralph Lauren and Tom Ford work together — two distinctly American designers: one who’s driven by sentimentality and the other by sex (but both by cinema).
“Their inspirations are similar but their aesthetic conclusions are very different,” Mr. Bolton said.
For similar reasons, the Garage magazine editor Mark Guiducci suggested a pairing of Mr. Ford and the much-lauded Pyer Moss designer Kerby Jean-Raymond. “It would be interesting to see how they could influence each other,” Mr. Guiducci said. “They represent two different generations of American glamour.”
He also suggested Marc Jacobs and John Galliano, purely for “the theatricality of that.”
Theatricality inspired the stylist Law Roach’s response, too: “Phoebe and Donatella,” he said, to the delighted gasps of his seatmates. Phoebe Philo was, in her Céline years (before her current hiatus from fashion), a famous minimalist while Donatella Versace has always been a famous maximalist, but both are “two powerful women designers,” he said. “Their aesthetic is so far away. It would be cool to see them meet in the middle.”
At the Chloé show Thursday morning, Sofía Sanchez de Betak, a fashion and travel influencer, suggested the Japanese designer Kei Ninomiya and Pierpaolo Piccioli of Valentino. Derek Blasberg, director of YouTube Fashion and Beauty, said he would “love to see a super edgy European’s take on classic American sportswear. So, Hedi Slimane for Michael Kors? Nicolas Ghesquière for Donna Karan? Jonathan Anderson for Calvin Klein?”
Others thought outside the industry box. Aya Kanai, the newly appointed editor in chief of Marie Claire’s U.S. edition, proposed that the actor Billy Porter partner with Jeremy Scott at Moschino.
Mr. Porter’s star has risen in fashion with each dramatic, gender-bending, fine art-inspired red carpet appearance. And Mr. Scott lives for drama — his latest Moschino show was inspired by Marie Antoinette, complete with models in towering wigs wearing elaborate dresses resembling tiered cakes.
As disrupters, they would be a match, Ms. Kanai suggested.
“Jeremy totally reinvented the brand,” she said. “And Billy has inspired us all to think about the red carpet in a completely new way.”
