Eco-concerns upturn moral battle over fur as quiet luxury gives way to ‘boom boom’ looks at Paris fashion week
Gabriela Hearst is an ethical fashion designer, with sustainability at the heart of her brand. And she wants to sell you a mink coat.
Hearst’s Paris fashion week show included a coat, jacket and stole made from vintage real fur. “We bought all these old mink coats in Italy, and pieced them together,” she said after her show.
Continue reading...Former Alexander McQueen protege’s show a major fashion moment as it is first by a new female creative director
The obvious place to start at Givenchy would be with Audrey Hepburn, but Sarah Burton is a more subtle designer than that.
Instead of rewatching Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Alexander McQueen’s protege-turned-successor studied old photographs of Hubert de Givenchy’s first show, in 1952. She was struck by the minimalism of “stripped back, not fussy” clothes, she told Vogue before the show. “It is quite clean, quite pure, obviously postwar,” she said.
Continue reading...Teetering designs, upside-down fabrics and garments made from offcuts created a feel of topsy-turvy drama
Where can you find the author Daphne du Maurier and the sculptor Phyllida Barlow, along with the actor Tippi Hedren and the costume designer Edith Head? Only at London fashion week.
All four women were muses for designers on the third day of catwalks. Barlow’s uncompromising art was the inspiration at Roksanda, where vast ballgowns in bright felt wobbled perilously on the 16th floor of an empty brutalist office block, channeling the audacious spirit of Barlow’s teetering towers of fabric, rope, chicken wire or papier-mache.
Continue reading...Artistic director collects award at Paris fashion week while rumour mill suggests Gucci, Burberry or Margiela move
Friday afternoon in Paris was a big one for the British designer Kim Jones. The artistic director not only presented his latest menswear collection for Dior, he also collected the prestigious Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, a rarity for someone from outside France. In a fashion moment par excellence, the award was presented to him by Anna Wintour, becoming a knight in the process.
Jones has been at Dior for six years, designing the brand’s menswear collections. During that time, he has explored the brand’s rich archive and also personal interests, including TS Eliot’s The Waste Land and Vanessa Bell’s house Charleston in east Sussex. This show was no different. It took Christian Dior’s mid-50s Ligne H collection as its jump-off, but made Casanova – the 18th-century Italian author known for his multiple relationships with women – its muse.
Continue reading...Ex-Gucci star brings 70s haute bourgeoisie ladies in trailing chiffons and Gen Z boys in tattoos and pearls to the runway
Valentino was the hottest ticket of this Paris fashion week, and the show had a sense of occasion to match.
A vast floor was laid with smashed mirror tiles, glittering like a ballroom after an earthquake. Five hundred armchairs and a smattering of glowing lamps lay beneath a shroud of white sheets, as if a grand house had been locked up for a long winter. The house of Valentino was shaking off the cobwebs for a new era and hitting the dancefloor.
Continue reading...Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada celebrate idiosyncrasy, while Ian Griffiths foregrounds mathematical tailoring
A Prada show is never a straightforward beauty pageant, so when the co-designers Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons go out of their way to be contrary and challenging, the result is, frankly, pretty weird.
Thick woollen tights with belt loops. A boob tube with snap pockets on the nipples. Shoes that peel back at the heels like curls of butter. In the cavernous concrete of Prada’s Milanese headquarters, the catwalk was twisted into hairpin bends, so that the audience couldn’t see what was coming next. Each outfit was crazier than the last. A strapless lemon ballgown with sunglasses the size of a gas mask was followed by black jeans tucked into dirty white cowboy boots.
Continue reading...Luxury brand’s studio team turn to timeless tweeds and neat silhouettes in first show since Virginie Viard’s sudden exit
There were 12 boucle-tweed suits, in colours from pistachio to raspberry. There were endless swishy blond ponytails tied with black silk bows, and a clatter of satin Mary Jane shoes with pearled heels. There were Hollywood faces – Keira Knightley and Michelle Williams – in the front row of the Palais Garnier opera house in Paris, countless quilted-flap 2.55 handbags in the front row and a finale bridal gown with a sweeping ivory silk train.
But one crucial thing was missing from this season’s Chanel haute couture show: a designer to take a bow. Since the sudden exit this month of the designer Virginie Viard, who had led Chanel since the death of Karl Lagerfeld five years ago, this mighty luxury brand, worth an estimated £15.5bn ($19.7bn), is headless. The vacancy for fashion’s top job is the talk of Paris fashion week.
Continue reading...Fashion house takes inspiration from Olympic Games in grandest sense for show in garden of Musée Rodin
Like everyone else in Paris right now, the Dior designer Maria Grazia Chiuri is thinking about the Olympics. Her latest Dior haute couture show was staged in the garden of the Musée Rodin, a stone’s throw from the grand open space of Esplanade des Invalides, where banks of seating are already being erected in preparation for the archery competitions of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
But in haute couture, where no price tag is fewer than five figures, athleisure does not make the cut. So this season’s Dior was Olympian in the grandest sense: classically draped goddess gowns, with asymmetric necklines cut to expose a shoulder and skirts cascading in silken layers.
Continue reading...The designer homed in on staples for the show, without losing a sense of adventure or playfulness
The Dior menswear designer Kim Jones has gained a reputation as a somewhat prolific collector of art and rare books. His homes are peppered with pieces by Francis Bacon and Andy Warhol, and he is the owner of the largest collection of Virgina Woolf books and letters in the world – 21,000 pieces and counting. So it’s not surprising the aesthete enjoys melding the world of art with his other great love, fashion.
For his latest spring/summer 2025 collection that he showed in Paris on Friday afternoon Jones worked with the South African ceramicist Hylton Nel. The octogenarian is best known for his plates, pots, figures and vases featuring whimsical illustrations and satirical text.
Continue reading...The house’s menswear show drew on youthful spirit, while Fendi got ready to mark 100 years with a new crest
They have been been ridiculed as snowflakes and “too woke” by some, but Prada’s co-creative designers think gen Z are a generation to be celebrated.
Speaking backstage after their latest menswear show, which took place on Sunday afternoon at the Prada Foundation in Milan, Miuccia Prada said: “Youth is the future. It is hope. We wanted to do something that would express youthful optimism because the times are so bad.”
Continue reading...In a vast futuristic greenhouse at the Louvre, 4,000 guests were shown why the brand is the biggest of them all
Ten years to the day after his first show for Louis Vuitton, Nicolas Ghesquière celebrated a remarkable anniversary in the same Paris landmark where he made his debut. In the ruthless spit-em-out churn of fashion, and in the eye of that storm as the designer of the biggest brand of all, Ghesquière’s is quite the run.
A vast futuristic greenhouse lit from within with 13 vast globe-shaped chandeliers – Louis Vuitton, travel, get it? – filled an entire quadrangle of the Louvre, rising almost to the mansard roof of the museum.
Continue reading...Penélope Cruz and Brad Pitt star in a remake of a French classic as designer Virginie Viard turns the catwalk into a coastal boardwalk
The lights dimmed, and the Chanel show opened with Penélope Cruz and Brad Pitt on the catwalk. Cruz smouldered in a chic black polo neck and discreet diamonds, Pitt twinkly eyed in an open-necked white shirt. They gazed into each other’s eyes, flirted a little, and then – how could either of them resist? – embarked on a clandestine affair.
Well, almost. Cruz was, in fact, sitting demurely in the front row in a leather skirt suit, and Pitt was not in attendance. The rendezvous was on a short film, made for the show and screened above the catwalk, a remake of a seminal scene in Claude Lelouch’s Un Homme et Une Femme, a classic Gallic romance about a widow and widower falling in love that won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes festival in 1966. Lelouch, now 86, was also a guest of honour at Chanel’s show.
Continue reading...Designer returns for first show after two-year absence with new take on preppy and move away from streetwear
“Luxury is the word on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Everyone knows what luxury looks like now, and everyone wants it. But luxury is unreachable for most people. If I can sell an affordable version of luxury, that’s a great position for our business.”
Tommy Hilfiger has returned to New York fashion week after a two-year absence, riding a wave of “quiet luxury” fashion and on a hunch that “dressing up is back. We are moving away from streetwear into a more polished look. It’s in the air – I can feel it,” he says.
Billed as “a New York moment”, the show was a coming of age for a brand that has long aligned itself with popular culture and youth, through close ties with hip-hop and sport. Invitations borrowing the typeface and layout of a New Yorker magazine cover summoned guests to a Friday night at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station, a Manhattan institution hosting the first catwalk show of its 110-year history.
Trays of martinis and old fashioneds made for a cocktail party atmosphere. At his office the morning after the show, Hilfiger recalled his pre-show jitters. “I was thinking, are they ever going to sit down? How are we going to start this show?”
Ralph Lauren is sitting out the season, Calvin Klein went dark as a catwalk name five years ago, and Marc Jacobs has taken to staging shows outside the fashion week timetable. This presents an opportunity for Hilfiger to claim a headlining spot in American fashion, in the city where he started his brand in 1985. He seized it with pedal-to-the-metal exuberance, ending the show with a beaming victory lap dressed in a varsity jacket and gleaming white trainers.
Hilfiger knows how to distill the American dream into a memorable image. Plenty of New York designers make nice clothes, but only Tommy Hilfiger throws the kind of party where the first sight on entry is guest Sylvester Stallone, being served french fries (in a canapé-sized silver cone) and ketchup.
Despite being nowhere to be seen over a month of fashion shows, designer was name on everyone’s lips
The most talked about designer of this season did not have a fashion show at all. She was nowhere to be seen over a month of shows in New York, London, Paris or Milan. Yet despite not having made a single coat, dress or shirt for six years, and never once posting on Instagram, Phoebe Philo was the name on everyone’s lips on every front row.
Finally, on the last weekend of Paris fashion week, Philo made a fashionably late entrance, announcing that she would make her long-awaited return on 30 October.
Continue reading...Designer revisits his lifelong interest in science, with iridescent silks and undulating 3D layers
Giorgio Armani may be the world’s most recognisable designer, but as the 89-year-old wrote in his autobiography, his childhood ambition was to be a physician.
While that particular goal eluded him, at his fashion show in Milan on Sunday afternoon he revisited his lifelong interest in science, citing his inspiration for his new collection as “vibrations”.
Continue reading...Prints symbolising British summertime appear on fashion week catwalk alongside modernised version of brand’s staple product
The scene before the biggest show of London fashion week was quintessentially British: an orderly queue for tea, coffee and eccles cake. Britishness, along with trenchcoats and checked scarves, is what Burberry stands for. This is surely the only catwalk show where Hollywood action hero Jason Statham, acclaimed choreographer Wayne MacGregor and Arsenal striker Bukayo Saka can be found rubbing shoulders in the front row.
The first look on to the catwalk was a trenchcoat. The trench is a Burberry staple – but this had a notably slimmer cut, an elegant dropped-waist silhouette, and was black rather than beige. There were more trenchcoats to follow: some sleeveless, some leather, all of them sleek and minimal.
Continue reading...Menswear has moved away from logos to more refined silhouettes, with collections from Prada to Raf Simons ditching streetwear
Such is the piercing influence of Succession on the wardrobes of the rich and famous that its stars didn’t even need to make a front-row appearance at Milan fashion week to make their presence felt. Excess is out and elegance is in as designers pursue the “quiet luxury” look that owes much of its recent popularity to the Roy family stone.
At Prada, the bellwether of where the fashion mood heads next, the co-designers Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons used the humble white shirt as a springboard for “a reconsideration of simple things”, said Prada after the show on Sunday.
Continue reading...Boston Dynamics’ canine automatons steal show in Paris as maison stages modern fable, designers say
Welcome to the age of the super-robot.
With their impossible proportions, thousand-yard stares and supernatural ability to walk in 5in heels, catwalk models often appear a different species to regular humans.
But it was the models, including Kate Moss’s daughter Lila, who played the role of vulnerable, flesh and blood creatures at the Coperni fashion show in Paris, where they shared the stage with five robots.
Coperni partnered with Boston Dynamics for the first fashion show in which robots, rather than models, were the star turn.
As the lights went down, four pairs of green eyes began to flash in the darkness. When the “Spots” – Boston Dynamic’s robot canines, in tarantula stripes of yellow and black – stalked into the room, there was an audible collective intake of breath as each creature seemed to lock eyes with, and approach, an audience member.
Designer Julien Dossena thanks maison’s founder, who died last month, for his ‘radical expression’
In silver chainmail hoods and Perspex dresses, aluminium-foil suiting and gleaming white space boots, the faithful came to pay their respects. At the first Paco Rabanne catwalk show since the founder’s death last month at the age of 88, the loyal clients and fans who packed the front row alongside the eminent designers Jean Paul Gaultier and Nicolas Ghesquière mirrored a newly minted catwalk collection which was packed with dazzling silver and rustling tinsel in tribute to the futuristic fashion that made Rabanne famous.
Fake fur skirts and trousers made from shards of crystal rustled and shimmied in homage to Rabanne’s delight in fashioning clothes from unlikely materials. The delicate chainmail evening bags which have been a signature and house bestseller for decades made several appearances.
Continue reading...Camel, toffee and charcoal feature in Ukrainian collection created under Russian bombs
You would never guess from the immaculate tailoring and finely turned silhouettes of the Litkovska collection shown at Paris fashion week that its production was frequently interrupted by air-raid warnings, which forced the 23-strong team of tailors and stylists to flee the design studio for a bomb shelter. It remains the only Ukrainian brand on the Paris catwalks and is still designed and produced in Kyiv by Lilia Litkovska and her team.
The bombardments are just one of the logistical challenges faced by the designer and her team in Kyiv. “There are problems every day, but we find solutions every day,” said Litkovska backstage before her show.
“We are very lucky because our studio is close to a good bomb shelter,” added Olena Iakovenko, one of four team members who travelled to France with Litkovska to stage the event.
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