Paris Fashion Week Says ‘So Long, Farewell’ With Chanel, Miu Miu and Louis Vuitton

PARIS — Miuccia Prada agrees with the suggestion that her Miu Miu brand is the way she tells the world who she is, more so than the collection that actually bears her name. She feels there’s something about the non-fashionness of Miu Miu that is truer to her. That admission will come as a surprise to the thousands of Miucciaphiles who feel the brand is the very quintessence of nextness, but she points to the casting of the new Miu Miu show as proof. “The minute you open up the casting with different ages, sexes, you have to be more open also to change the clothes, and then you really see the meaning of clothes, what they do to people. They’re not pieces of clothing, they’re pieces of lives.”

Lives lived were on the Miu Miu catwalk on Tuesday. Kristen Scott Thomas wore a grey flannel coat over white jeans. One of Prada’s eccentric customers gleefully sported a brown suede jacket crusted with embroidery. The last few seasons, Miu Miu flayed its mark on fashion with Miuccia’s indulgence of her fascination with girlishness. Now it’s the “lady” that intrigues her. Check the signifiers in the new collection: the gloves, the strings of pearls, the diamond brooches, the fur coats (“It’s not real,” she added quickly.) But it’s her natural inclination to defuse such emblems. Gigi Hadid wore her fur over what looked like a nurse’s uniform. That’s the kind of strange combination Miuccia thrives on. Uniforms, wool tights, parkas, what looked like policeman’s boots with a flaring skirt and poplin shirt. Kind of proletarian, because she’s never shelved the sensibilities which shaped her student years.

She told me once she uses ideas she can’t abide in her collections so she can confront them.

We were talking about corduroy at the time. Tuesday’s confrontation involved the jeans and fur coat combination worn by Rianne Van Rompaey and Mica Argañaraz. I told her I don’t think there’s any such thing as bad taste. She laughed heartily. She knew her last look – a savagely chic black cocktail dress with a sly cut out on the thigh – countered anything I had to say. Anyway, I find it immensely reassuring that Miuccia Prada has Miu Miu as a piece of her life, because it makes the fashion world a better place.

A footnote: the walls of Tuesday’s venue played a short film by the artist Cécile B. Evans about the elusiveness of memory. These words stood out: “The imprint of what it meant to be loved will never leave you.”

Miu Miu Autumn/Winter 2024 (Spotlight/Launchmetrics.com)

The Chanel show also featured a short film made, as usual, by Inez and Vinoodh, but this one had a little more star power than before. Brad Pitt and Penelope Cruz were lovers by the seaside, strolling on the sand, ordering in a restaurant, wondering if there were any rooms available “upstairs.” The classic theme from “A Man and a Woman” played on the soundtrack, so we must be in Deauville, the resort where everything started for Gabrielle Chanel in 1912.

Virginie Viard has always felt for this part of the Chanel legend. Maybe that’s why the collection she showed was her best to date. Of course it started with a hat. So did Chanel.

But light, long, lean coats (dusters almost) over tweed suits with belted jackets amplified the echo of classic Coco. The languor of beauty lost in love was pervasive from beginning to end, from slouchy knits to floaty tea dresses to a full-skirted hostess gown. But Viard also mixed in smart shearlings and leathers. And she anchored almost everything in boots (shearling-lined to the thigh, even), which made an authoritative noise as they stomped around the Deauville-ish board-cum-catwalk. There was, as ever, too much. A judicious edit of some of the more lumpen looks (tweed is as tweed does, especially in a culotte) would have sharpened the show’s impact. But Viard created a convincing full wardrobe with this collection, real but also infused with the Chanel mythos, which, in retailspeak, spells gold.

Tuesday was clearly a good day for the monolithic megabrands, because Nicolas Ghesquière transfused his tenth anniversary collection for Louis Vuitton with blood drawn from his stellar past (Balenciaga days, even). The procedure was immensely assisted by his artist collaborator Philippe Parreno, who designed a backdrop that will surely enter the annals of set design. A gigantic mothership structure, a spiky neon ball, fed signals to satellites around the 4500-seat marquee. Parreno has been designing these tented structures since 2006. LVMH’s deep pockets allowed him to create the sensation of suspension inside a dome that was being thoroughly surveilled by craft periodically roaring overhead with copter-like noise and probing lights. I felt like I was buried in the bowels of “The Creator,” a movie which the entire world needs to rush out and see, preferably in IMAX.

Although “Dune 2″ opened this week, also in IMAX, and Ghesquière’s love of sci-fi (I told you it was a theme this season) inclined him to a clutch of all-white looks with functional big pockets that wouldn’t be out of place in Denis Villeneuve’s space. Shiny fabrics, big paillettes and assorted alien closures sustained the illusion. The models had furry paws (wookie hands, rather than the wookie feet Milan favoured). A couple of dresses trompe-ed a Vuitton trunk with its hardware, like something half-remembered from another millennium.

Ghesquière moved on to gilded, brocaded opulence which still managed to maintain an off-world eeriness, like visions of long-gone elegance. Furiously flouncing metallic skirts and pelts of strange beasts introduced the Empress of Outer Space in her broad-shouldered goddess dress and then – the Empire in ruins – brought her back in tatters and feathers. Narrative complete. The show was a spectacular reassertion of complete control by Ghesquière. The discipline showed, as did the budget. Do you think any of the young designers competing for the LVMH Prize last week will be here one day?