It was hot out there at Paris men’s fashion week, where air conditioning is simply not done. Oppressive and banal, the heat was the great equalizer. “It’s so hot,” was the universal icebreaker. It worked with actors, rappers, professional athletes or someone you haven’t seen in six years.
At ASAP Rocky’s second runway show for AWGE, the poor guys hired to pose as a SWAT team were all stoic and withering by the time Rihanna took her seat an hour and a half late. With Riot Rose, her two-year-old son, on her lap, and the new yellow and red Dior Dracula tote by Jonathan Anderson at her feet, she immediately whipped out a motorized hand-held fan.
Rocky called the collection “Obligatory Fashion,” which he said was a meditation on clothing, perceptions and stereotypes, and his three-week court trial earlier this year. The show, set in a church, featured metal detectors and a judge presiding from a bench. After the finale, Rocky took Riot from Rihanna’s arms and took a victory lap, wearing long, wide-leg leather shorts and patent leather Christian Louboutin Mary Janes from the collection.
Kiko Kostadinov’s guys looked light, fresh and cool, particularly in his take on Bulgarian military pajamas. They opened a collection meant to depict a single working day in a fictional island town. The clothes bore the mark of Eastern Bloc uniforms and Japanese tailoring reimagined in special fabrics that looked softly weathered — kasuri cotton, seersucker wool and abstract paisley twill — many of which were custom-made by the luxury fabric maker Lanificio Luigi Ricceri in Prato, Italy.
When Dries Van Noten retired from fashion last year after 38 years, people wondered if anyone could carry on his magic. The pressure on his successor, Julian Klausner, is immense. His first men’s collection, following his debut line for women in March, struck many house chords: embroidery, print, saturated colors and a masculinity that had a lot of the feminine. Mr. Klausner, who spent six years working in the brand’s women’s atelier, went out on a limb with his styling, showing a sarong over a pair of khakis, long-john shorts and a green satin cummerbund over a knit polo.
Sander Lak is another former member of the Dries Van Noten design team. Mr. Lak burst onto the New York fashion scene in 2016 with Sies Marjan, a label with the buzz of a European designer. He received loads of attention, a CFDA award and an exclusive with Barneys, but the label closed in 2020. Mr. Lak quit fashion for five years, moved to Los Angeles and started writing a screenplay. Now he’s back with Sanderlak, a men’s and women’s collection.
Mr. Lak plans to frame the collection around a different location every year. Year one was Los Angeles. “When you wake up in a place like L.A., what does it feel like?” Mr. Lak said he asked himself. Jeans, T-shirts, loose, airy cotton shirts and tailoring in happy, sun-bleached colors, all of which were woven together on a single coat by the upholstery firm Maharam.
“The colors are supposed to work together,” Mr. Lak said. “You can pick anything, and it matches with anything.” This feels like something he learned from Mr. Van Noten.
A girl who won’t grow up. A boy who jumped the moon. Un paysan who became un duc. Emily Adams Bode Aujla, Colm Dillane and Simon Porte Jacquemus were there to remind us of the power of childlike wonder. Each designer staged a presentation or show of wild ambition on a different scale.
The life and songbook of Morris Charlap, the Broadway composer known for scoring “Peter Pan,” inspired Ms. Bode Aujla to turn l’Opéra Comique into a dollhouse for her spring collection. Green River Project, her husband’s design firm, created four incredibly detailed miniature maquettes depicting scenes from Mr. Charlap’s life in Paris and at a camp in the Poconos.
All 70 Bode men’s and women’s looks were presented on a meticulously arranged tableau of dolls that felt from another time. Some wore bunny slippers. Some had their ears pierced. Ms. Bode Aujla zeroed in on Mr. Charlap, she said, “to capture the essence of what it meant to be a child, and that turning point before you become an adult.”
Mr. Dillane might actually be Peter Pan. He turned the hallowed halls of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at the Louvre into a live pop-up storybook for the KidSuper show. He wrote, illustrated and art-directed “The Boy Who Jumped the Moon,” the self-inspired tale of a kid who dreamed big and wasn’t afraid to fail.
Models, including the Italian soccer player Mario Balotelli, burst out of two-story-high renditions of pages from the book, flipped by attendants, while idols of music and sports, including 2Chainz and Isaiah Simmons, took it all in like young boys. Eventually, Mr. Dillane popped out of one of the pages. He aimed to amaze.
Mr. Jacquemus, standing a few feet away from Louis XIV’s marble bathtub in the Orangery at Versailles, choked up after his runway collection, titled “Le Paysan.” He remembered visiting Versailles as a kid from a farming family from Provence. Look at him now.
Chauffeured guests walked through the orange, lemon, oleander, palm and pomegranate trees arranged across the parterre into the south-facing central gallery. The trees are stored there during the winter. The grand 500-foot-long hall with 40-foot vaulted ceilings was constructed in 1663 to be naturally climate-controlled.
“This is what we need,” said one guest.
The show closed out the week with a parade of men and women in poetic, operatic silhouettes derived from traditional Provençal peasant garb. The tiered gowns and soft hourglass suits would have looked fabulous at a fancy wedding. During this week, in this town, nothing said success like comfortable, temperate air.
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