At Paris Fashion Week, Designers Play Their Hits

You could almost sort the Paris shows into two categories this season. There were the designer debuts—namely the long-awaited collections of Haider Ackermann for Tom Ford, Sarah Burton for Givenchy, and Julian Klausner for Dries Van Noten. And then there were the mainstays like Dior, Rick Owens and Isabel Marant, who presented collections about ideas, silhouettes, and proportions that showcased their signature aesthetic. But they all stuck to what they do best.

Klausner worked under Dries Van Noten for six years before being given the reins after the brand’s founder announced his retirement after 38 years. The show space, a tunnel-like room at Palais Garner, the 1900-seat opera house slap bang in the ninth arrondissement, was intentionally chosen by Klausner as an ode to his love of performance and theater. “The collection was created with the venue in mind,” he explains.

When you think of the Dries, you think of the rich, deep jewel tones, crystal embellishments and clashing brocades—a sort of textural identity that not many brands can lay claim to. How was Klausner going to maintain the DNA but give it his own spin? By keeping the colors and textures and shifting the silhouette.

Klausner presented a series of casually draped, barely clinging onto the shoulder shapes; something he described as “deshabillé looks.” Reappropriated shoelaces became stitch accents on the lapel of jackets and looped together as necklaces. Curtain tassels formed elaborate belts and bolero jackets. Fuller skirts in heavier wools were waisted with a corset belt. He seems dedicated to the same sort of considered craft that Van Noten himself centered. It was a promising first chapter for the designer.

“Mass Production,” the 1977 thrashing proto-punk track from Iggy’s Pop first album, was the soundtrack to Rick Owens’s Fall 2025 show as well as his first show in New York 23 years ago. It’s fitting. Owens explained he’s been thinking a lot about the past. His years travelling to the industrial Italian town of Concordia, where his factory is located. A continuation of his menswear show at the top of the year. A yearning to get back to basics. Not that basics to you or I are the same to Rick Owens. Long skirts with high center front and center back slits are made in wool drill, lacquered denim, or pirarucu—a dinosaur-looking skin. Jackets and coats are also cut in a British mélange wool felt blended with kemp, also known as dead hair. Leather bomber jackets, lined in leather. Avid Rick acolytes, both in the front row and whose faces, dressed head to toe in Owens, were squished up against the glass at the windows of the Palais De Tokyo were delighted.

Schiaparelli has already become a household name, thanks to the red carpet gusto of creative director Daniel Roseberry. But with its extraordinary prices and limited distribution (the brand is stocked in just four retailers in the US), the brand needs to get into the ready-to-wear game in a more meaningful way. After a couple of false starts, Roseberry found his footing in what is familiar to him—his Texas roots. With a warbling Lainey Wilson as the soundtrack, Gigi Hadid, Mona Tougaard et al. sauntered down the runway salon-style in brown calfskin leather jackets embossed with the emblematic codes of the house and topped of with off-white shearling collar and matching high-waisted cowboy pants and Western-inflected stiletto boots. Even alongside the cowboy garb, Roseberry still injected the glamour. Long bustier dresses were embroidered with beads, golden discs and antique silver mirrors, and a long champagne-colored halter neck dress with a swimmer’s back was embroidered with tonal glass bugle beads, helping to round out a collection that felt fit for outfitting women for the grind, glamour and rigmarole life tends to throw at them.

At Chloé, Chemena Kamali also considered the complex lives of women today. “I was inspired by the contradiction of the lavish and opulent with the more paired down realness and instinctive ease of the Chloé woman,” she noted. “This collection also explores the beauty of plurality, and the influences that shape us as women.” Since showing her first collection in February 2024, she’s quickly reestablished the carefree boho Chloé girl. She’s also one herself, complete with tousled hair and a collection of 1500 antique blouses. There were floor-length quilted jackets with fur trims, lacy gowns with crinolines at the hip in soft blush, black and white, silk slips in twilight blue and sea-foam green, and fur tails swinging from reissued Paddington bags (which, given the Y2K frenzy that’s still rippling across the culture, are set to be a hit). Kamali’s successfully interpreting what worked for her predecessors at Chloé and, playing on the right side of nostalgia, without it feeling staid.

Over at The Row, guests were welcomed with a hospitality reserved for a beloved house guest, except we were in an opulent building previously home to Crédit Foncier de France. We were invited to convene on the carpeted floor and as proceedings became so hushed you could hear the creak of the floorboards, the first model meandered between the adjoining rooms. It was hard to not notice she was barefoot. Another model, barefoot. One after the other, models came down the runway in thick stockings sans shoes, as if they were wandering around their gilded abode. It was a gutsy move from a brand that’s had runaway success in the last few years, partly due to their success in footwear. There’s a decadence we’ve come to expect from the brand, clothes that center look and feel. Their most recent offering, when broken apart, was simple in execution but made more playful in a sort of reverse styling: a sweater under a gown, a blazer under a sweater (the designers have long worked with stylist Brian Molloy). Plush wool leggings were draped over the shoulders of perfectly tailored macs. Sweeping speckled melangé coats, micro bags in the nook under the arm. The models’ hair tucked into delicate black bonnets or wildly messy and trinket-laden (think salt and pepper shakers, magnifying glasses). This season at The Row, it’s not what you wear, it’s how you wear it

link