As is often the case, Miuccia Prada summed it up after her Miu Miu show. What? The gist of the whole darn season. Even when Mrs. Prada’s clothes are ho-hum, her sense of direction is spot-on. This is a time when fashion should be simple, “Completely dis-adorned,” she said, as she perched atop the mossy runway of her set. “You can decorate it mainly with hats, shoes and extra things.”
The point being, “your body, your mind, is enough.” When life is hard, getting dressed should be easy.
The wizards of the runway have already made things tough by hiking their prices beyond most people’s pale, apparently catering to billionaires and constructors of their own walled-off reality — but not to everyone else. There’s a backlash brewing. Some humility and understanding is not a bad look.
Mrs. Prada modeled what she meant, with a stripped-down show of tiny slip dresses and cool suiting — Empire-waist jersey jackets over pipe-cleaner trousers with buttons at the ankle left undone so they had a rock-star flare and made legs look miles long — worn with a variety of sparkly shoes and even more sparkly bedazzled trapper hats.
Throw on some basics, and add a wild accessory. That’s an idea anyone can grab of a morning. Or just do as Gillian Anderson did, closing the show in a layered shift dress scattered with rhinestone embellishments and not much else.
It was the right end to a season in which the most convincing shows were the ones that just focused on great clothes. The kind that reminded you what designers, and this whole circus, has to offer. The kind you could imagine slipping into tomorrow because they didn’t involve a total renegotiation of your existing wardrobe. That offered a sense of occasion, without demanding you rise to one. Or just some ideas for what to wear.
At Dries Van Noten, for example, Julian Klausner mixed teenage tropes — varsity jackets, denim, shrunken school blazers — with 17th-century Flemish opulence in easy separates, like plaid shirts with elaborate golden embroidery at the cuffs. The best touch: The cuffs were detachable, for ease of laundering.
At Chloé, Chemena Kamali offered airy folkloric romance grounded by straightforward tailoring and romper stomper boots. Just throw on your prairie skirt, add a jacket and go. And at The Row, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen added a touch of transparency to their white shirting and a spray of feathers to the neck of a black jacket — a twist on the elegant everyday.
That’s why the Louis Vuitton show struck such a discordant note. In his usual tent in a hidden courtyard of the Louvre, Nicolas Ghesquière had enlisted the help of the production designer Jeremy Hindle, of “Severance” fame, to construct a futuristic landscape of bright green moss-covered geometric hills. (What was it with mossy runways this season? In addition to Vuitton and Miu Miu, there was also one at Hermès; it was the weirdest trend of the collections.)
Amid the alien wilderness wandered a troupe of luxury nomads, or luxury sci-fi shepherds, in bombastic cloaks with megatron shoulders, crinkly metallic sweatsuits sprouting furry fringe at the seams and armorial patchwork. Also cropped tartan tops with matching minis embedded with paintings by the Ukrainian artist Nazar Strelyaev-Nazarko of actual sheep playing with what seemed to be Louis Vuitton-branded boots. According to Mr. Ghesquière, the art was reproductions of an actual oil that had been lent and adapted for purpose.
Oh, and there were soft leather pochettes tied onto hobo sticks and an entire panoply of wacky hats, most notable paper captains’ hats actually made from sheepskin, and upside-down basket hats so large they looked like potential life rafts. If there was a flood, you could just flip them over, hop inside, and float away. Though they might get a little leaky. Which is how the whole out-there concept seemed.
Louis Vuitton is, of course, primarily a leather goods brand. In many ways that means the show is merely a conduit to the bags; the vehicle that creates the buzz that drives the accessory engine. Celebrity appearances aside, the clothes aren’t expected to be worn, except by a very tiny few. It’s too bad, because hidden underneath all the costumery was a beautiful silver lace shift dress; a cool, crinkly jacket with the slightest whiff of the palace.
They were just hard to see amid all the costume. Designers disappearing into their own head space is an approach that increasingly only seems legitimate for Rei Kawakubo of Comme Des Garçons, who has made abstraction her signature (this season, in constructions like black holes that had sucked in various tropes of femininity throughout the ages). And whose work, no matter how abstruse, has a visceral impact grounded in currency.
Mr. Ghesquière, on the other hand, looked to have lost his compass.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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