By Aaron Kok - published
Across the many front rows at Paris fashion week’s fall/winter 2025 shows, there was a palpable buzz. The fashion industry, as you may know, has been rocked by a less-than-stable months of late. Designers are shuttling in and out of fashion brands, fashion C-Suites are battening down the hatches against the headwinds, and there’s been a general cry for a sprinkling of inspiration amidst a creative drought that’s lasted for some seasons now.
But, like the old adage goes: when it rains, it pours. And oh, what an outpouring of newness and vision at Paris fashion week. Here were the brightest and best minds who have found a renewed spirit in the way they approached garment making. There were sublime colours—itself a minted move given the usually-somber colour palettes designers are prone to invoke for the fall collections—and inventive approaches to the art of dressing. The best that Paris had to offer stretched beyond mere clothing, and instead offered up different and inspiring ways to rethink the role of fashion in our lives.
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Starting the week was Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri. The Italian-born designer has long found her groove in understanding what modern women want from a House as old as Dior, and she delivered some stellar pieces by referencing Gianfranco Ferre’s architectural predilections. Ruffled shirts, nipped-waisted Elizabethan jackets, zippered corsets and plenty of gauzy sheer fabrics. There was a sense of rebellion in the air that felt invigorating and charged, especially when you consider the larger cultural climate of today, and it was a lovely way to welcome showgoers to Paris.
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That same day, Alaïa’s Pieter Mulier returned the show back to its Parisian camp after last season’s gallivant to New York City. Mulier was clearly in the mood to experiment and play, and this crystallised in his approach to mixing geometric shapes with the curves of a female body. Exaggeration played an outsized role (no pun intended), where hoods came padded to resemble giant cushioned hoops framing models’ faces, and where pleats were angularly arranged to jut out from the models’ hip bones. Outerwear featured blown-up inserts, and the final two looks featured skirts that resembled inverted triangles: sharply shooting out at the waist and tapering down into slim hems around the ankles. Was it a little wacky? Yes, but this collection gave you plenty of novelties to pause, ponder and swoon over.
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We move over to Balenciaga, where Demna was showing what would turn out to be his final ready-to-wear collection for the storied couture House. In the past, Demna has given us upside down parka jackets, couture dresses hastily assembled in minutes, and gargantuan ballgowns that paraded around a bright blue room. So for the designer to open his show with a simple men’s suit, was radical and refreshingly bold.
See, for his final opus, Demna wanted to confront the role of clothing in our everyday lives. There was a twistedness to the quotidian on the runway today, and hit looks include the procession of sober and wrinkled black suits that opened the show, lean-tailored coats that could have easily been nicked from someone’s coat room and deconstructed frocks that showed plenty of leg.
Demna loves a good coat moment, and at the end of the show, the Georgian maestro went back to the classic coat and gave it his Demna touch. Trench coats in red and white as well as a black puffer jacket were elongated into floor-grazing gowns. These demonstrated Demna’s ability to confront the ordinary and elevate them into something fresh and provocative, even controversial.
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This season was marked by a slew of designer debuts. As we know, the arrival of a new creative force often brings a refreshed vision for the future. We had the premiere shows of Julian Klausner at Dries Van Noten and Haider Ackermann for Tom Ford.
Yet arguably, it was Sarah Burton’s showcase for Givenchy that was likely the most-watched of this season’s newcomers, and what a return to form this showcase was. It started in Burton’s early days, when a collection of Hubert de Givenchy’s own patterns from his debut collection in 1952 were unearthed in a renovation project. This sparked something in her, and she wanted to honour the founder’s attention to cut and form. The first look on the runway was a logo-emblazoned catsuit that resembled the Stockman mannequins Givenchy’s ateliers use, and on and on, we saw Burton bring the focus back to the idea of a strong silhouette. After all, Givenchy is so much more than just an Audrey Hepburn moment, and the brand found early success in the way that it envisioned a wardrobe for a modern female customer.
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Burton herself is known for her ability to deliver precision tailoring—something she learnt from training with Lee McQueen, who was once the design force at Givenchy way back when, too—and she sent out dresses that imagined jackets worn back to front, giant bow-like scarves, and couture ballgowns slashed high up the thigh. There was a crisp radicality in the way that she saw her future Givenchy customer: these were clothes made for women who led colourful and on-the-go lives, and the clothes needed to live up to their demands.
From the whitewashed runway of Givenchy to the rose-red underbelly of a public toilet at Valentino. For a brand as revered and regarded as Valentino, for Alessandro Michele to suggest that Valentino’s customers take to a seedy toilet in their finest couture was radical and daring. Michele has never shied away from making a statement, and this second ready-to-wear outing by the designer felt like a much-needed shot of adrenaline and excitement. After all, many of us know the fleeting bonds made and people-watching done on drunken nights in the bathrooms of our favourite clubs. Here are the spaces where strangers would help each other touch up their lipsticks, pay vodka-fuelled compliments to each other, add one another to their Facebooks only to never talk again. Might as well do all of that in Valentino, no?
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Sensuality was a thread through the clothing: models’ bare chests peeked through lace catsuits, tulle gowns and bodysuits walked the runway with their bottoms unfastened. Still, this is a brand that defines elegance, and Michele had ideas on that too. A gold gown with plisse ruffles would stun at any party, as were the daywear of spliced jackets, prim pencil skirts and one particular leopard dress that could be mistaken as being borrowed from Jackie O’s own closet.
Valentino wasn’t the only one inviting us on a people-watching fashion spectacle, because Nicolas Ghesquière made his show for Louis Vuitton feel like a fabulous afternoon spent spying on stylish travellers boarding or alighting from the train. Ghesquière wanted to play on the House’s history in travel, and to do so, the French designer decided to leave the brand’s address of choice at the Louvre for a former train company’s quarters.
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Here, his cast of characters seemed to be coming and going to far-flung locales; a testament to Louis Vuitton’s spirit of travel. Hit looks included the latex trench coats that opened the show, ruffled pouf skirts that were made for catching the first train after a night of dancing and one slouchy knit worn over a silver ruffled skirt that perfectly put comfort and glamour together. In Ghesquière’s mind, these were the clothes that would shod the most fabulous creatures who had places to go; the kinds of travellers that you’d notice amidst the scrum and wonder what intriguing and fabulous lives they lead.