If fashion is a story-telling business, it should follow that runway shows are narratives.
And yet they cannot be. For starters they lack a plot. It's true that designers can be relied upon to talk about inspirations, journeys or philosophies as the listener's eyes roll back into their head. The truth is, most fashion shows are best consumed, like everything else now, in bits and pieces. They are elements of a continuous internal scrolling, as continuous, algorithmic and addictive as the wheels of Instagram.
So anyway, this reviewer got to see the collections in Milan and Paris this season, with the result that the following is best seen as a mixtape, not rooted in a particular nationality or geography or context, random and somehow impressionistic. and possibly also solipsistic in the way everything is forced into an economy of attention.
Take Mercury. Designer Véronique Nichanian is anything but a household name, probably not even among those in the financial stratosphere this label was created to serve. So what; It's consistently on par with – and in many ways better than – other brands in the menswear pantheon, the likes of Giorgio Armani or Helmut Lang. There's a reason you don't know her.
“We don't do marketing,” Axel Dumas, Hermès' chief executive, said in the company's report. “We don't even have a marketing department.”
Why bother when you produce flattering collections for those people whose initials are enough, as the old Bottega Veneta label once said. So-called quiet luxury generally tends to make a racket. She is a muted version of Ms. Nihanian and whispers riches.
If money were no object, and if this was some imaginative exercise in personal consumption, I'd easily click on one of her light lavender leather jackets, possibly a soft pink jacket too, or definitely the cardigan with subtly colored hems .
Despite the prevailing horror of the world, the season just passed was one in which designers leaned on the poetic. Perhaps precisely because things are so bad, beauty has become a refuge. You'd think so based on the collection created by designer Satoshi Kondo for Homme Plissé Issey Miyake. Notes from the show highlighted various tricky strap details that allowed a wearer to slip on a coat in one of the house's proprietary pleated fabrics and roll it into a small carrying pack.
What this viewer took away from the collection was a burning wish that he had been invited to the upcoming Ambani wedding in India just for the chance to wear seafoam green Miyake cargo shorts or a cape jacket over lilac pleated trousers or a bold white gossip layered look that was a fix to the stiffness that characterizes most wedding dresses.
If Indian wedding fantasies have become a kind of subliminal light motif this season, it could be because designers like Junya Watanabe and Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Garçons Homme Plus have made formal wear so great. Mr. Watanabe did this by radically deconstructing tuxedos as patchwork suits of frayed black or blue denim, then embellishing them with machine patches of white thread and bits of tartan. Note to celebrity stylists and also groomsmen everywhere.
Ms. Kawakubo delved into formal gowns, by no means for the first time. Hers featured ruffles on the sleeves, hemline and tail, and were featured on a soundtrack featuring Erik Satie's music for “Parade.” Sirens, typewriter clicks and gunshots. Horrible headlines came to mind.
However, such is the elegance of Ms. Kawakubo's thinking that the designs also evoked an era different from our own, that of post-Edo Japan: formal, courtly, at once stylized and yet naturalistic. It's fun to imagine wearing such things to attend one of the firefly-watching parties depicted in Junichiro Tanizaki's The Macioca Sisters, one of the literary monuments of the 20th century.
Rick Owens also heard what was essentially the same period—the 1920s and 30s—albeit as embodied by early Hollywood. The show, held on the steps and piazza of the glorious Art Deco Trocadéro complex, was monumental, fantastic and one of the highlights for this observer. It was also bombastic and totally camp.
Probably only a curious child growing up without a television in Porterville, Calif., in the 1960s could reach Mr. Owens' love of Cecil B. DeMille's sword-and-sandal spectacles. Why else would someone do a fashion show with 10 looks repeated 20 times, each on phalanxes of models, over 200 in total. Against the soaring tempo of Beethoven's Allegretto Symphony No. 7, the models came out in formations: four models, five lines, dressed in rolled-up knit shirts, shorts and Geobasket sneakers, almost all uniformly white.
The show was epic as it should be. However, theatrics aside, the clothes themselves were commercial: cycling jackets with a variety of coated treatments. drifty covered chiffon coats; Capes with hoods; and boiler suits. Even a deflated leather version of the knee-high boots he showed last season looked less hideous now that the eye has gotten used to them.
The designs Pharrell Williams showed at Louis Vuitton – a universally themed 'It's a Small World (After All)' show that, one could be forgiven, looked a bit like a market game dressed up as inclusiveness – were safer and commercial. from his latest foray into the clichéd American West. We accept that Mr. Williams is no Virgil Abloh, whose design explorations, while sometimes wild, were always approached with seriousness. Still, Mr. Williams' Vuitton deserves a spot on my mental shopping list, if only because many of the looks featured a style of luggage created for the transcontinental airline Air Afrique in the 1960s.
Recently, the look – a colorful check pattern – has been re-popularized by creatives such as Lamine Diaoune, Amadou-Bamba Thiam and Jeremy Konko, each of whom collaborated with Mr Williams on the collection. I rarely leave a Vuitton exhibition itching to buy anything. However, this time I could indulge my imagination of strolling through an airport hub with one of these bags, perhaps on my way to a seminar on Aimé Césaire.
In a personal playlist for the season, mellow grooves would be the outro. Chief among them is a slow jam of Grace Wales Bonner's tailored and elevated take on Afro-Caribbean streetwear. I would take a “tuxedo” that appeared near the finale. His top was a sweatshirt with a pattern based on the archive of Afro-Caribbean artist Althea McNish, paired smartly with dark trousers and a button-up. Curiously, the throwback qualities of Ms. Wales Bonner's collection unexpectedly brought to mind that of Giorgio Armani, who also invoked tropical vibes in something like his 350th collection in 50 years.
Sometimes it's fun to play HR games while watching the clothes walk down a runway. Mr. Armani turns 90 in a few weeks, and in an imaginary wildcard succession scenario, it's wonderful to think what Mrs. Wales Bonner would do with a global behemoth whose design codes are suede bomber jackets, cable-knit sweaters, things that still look like the '80s men's visuals shot by photographer Peter Lindbergh that have influenced designers ever since — they're practically close to hers.
A shrunken version of similar looks from the '80s appeared at Prada, where designers Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons share a taste for retro references and make ruggedness look cool. Here it took the form of V-neck knitwear, cardigans, ultra-tight necklines and high-waisted trousers with trompe l'oeil belts, worn in the necessary famines. These same clothes on men with a medium waist will look quite different and much more conventional.
On the other hand, printed T-shirts – the ones with sad faces drawn by the deplorable French painter Bernard Buffet – if ironically worn by some rat barely old enough to shave would be really punk.