Paris Fashion Week climaxed with two collections that couldn’t be further apart. Flights of fantasy via the futuristic folklore of Louis Vuitton and kicky, streamlined, thrown-together contemporary chic at Miu Miu.
Vuitton was a fantastic display for red carpet hits, magazine covers, the Metropolitan Museum’s permanent collection, and girls with great gumption. Miu Miu was the perfect wardrobe for the coolest looking gang in any front row we’ve seen so far in Paris.
They love to write in Paris that ‘Victory Travels in Louis Vuitton.’ This Tuesday, fashion has never travelled better in Louis Vuitton, after it staged a collection, whose wellspring was the first voyage of the brand’s founder as a young man from the Jura Mountains to Paris back in 1854.
Mountain mode, highland imagery, and Caucasus cool rippled through this unique futurist folkloric collection, presented inside a giant glass-windowed box in the Cour Carrée du Louvre.
Inside of which, Vuitton’s artistic director of women’s collections Nicolas Ghesquière commissioned a brilliant set by Jeremy Hindle, the production designer of Severance and Zero Dark Thirty, the award-winning film on the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Hindle built a series green foamy mountains, meadows, and sharp peaks, through which light streamed like sunrise as the show began.
Nicolas’ brief to Hindle: “Nature that you would put inside a museum, within a museum. Not mimicking nature but sublimating it.”
As the soundtrack kicked off dramatically with Goodbye by Apparat, Ghesquière’s imagination went into overdrive. Though he denied references to any specific culture, the opening quartet of looks recalled Georgian shepherds with their V-shaped shearling capes, famously chronicled by the great Georgian nomadic painter Niko Pirosmani. Before showing hyper-mode shepherdesses in handkerchief skirts and frilly blouses, several carrying a staff and shepherd’s crooks.
“Universal folklore. Travelling through the world like nomadic people. It’s about a collective of images we all have,” said the ever-youthful Ghesquière in a post-show huddle with critics. One sensed a passage through the Mongolian steppe with some stylish mini cabans and tunics, made in combinations of real fur, shearling as fur, or woven vegetable fur. Often paired with high-altitude track pants, pencil pants, or frilly britches. His gals were folky, but they were also fit.
Playing with smart visual puns- like necklaces and elongated earrings developed from a partnership with the Man Ray Foundation. And the headgear was something else: potentates foot-long conical hats; massive fabric feather nests one metre wide; mammoth Ilocano hats; Peruvian Chinchero Trilbys; or to Kyrgyzstan for Kalpaks on steroids. All the way to two monster basket weaves, like those used as containers in Italian beach clubs.
wide; mammoth Ilocano hats; Peruvian Chinchero Trilbys; or to Kyrgyzstan for Kalpaks on steroids. All the way to two monster basket weaves, like those used as containers in Italian beach clubs.
Nicolas teased the mood in his invitation- small naive images of lamb in military boots, taken from oil paintings by Kharkiv-born artist Nazar Strelyaev-Nazarko. His girlfriend actually models for Vuitton. Counter-intuitively climaxing with Looking For The Rain by Mark Lanegand on the soundtrack, which sounded as if his nomads were being sucked into a vortex.
“We wanted to find a common point, not so much specific cultures. So, we looked at functions, like the shepherd. Folklore is done to fight the force of nature. So, we wanted endurance, protection, and free movement- just like the capes,” said Ghesquière, attired in a black Levi’s jean jacket, jeans, and boots.
All told, it was the single most original Fall/Winter 2026/27 women’s collection by any billion-euro-plus brand in the 30-day season that ended in the rain in Paris this Tuesday.
From the mountains to the valley, since Miuccia Prada had the entire floor of her set covered in earthy moss. The sylvan scene was juxtaposed by the ornate red floral damask wallpaper covering the walls of the French rationalist era Palais d’Iéna. The collection turned out to be office clothes and party gear for the hippest gals in the city. A mood telegraphed by a great teaser video of a young lady trying to hold down a desk top computer in an office underwater. Shot by an aspiring young filmmaker Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic, the latest young female director given a leg up by the Signora Miuccia via her Fondazione Prada. Opening the show with quirky pant suits, the jackets cut with a mega high waist, the sleeves cut short, the pants extending three inches too long, raking the lichen and small wood scraps on the runway. The same jacket coming as micro coatdresses topped by trappers’ fur caps and finished with sequins.
Whipping into shape scrunched up leather jumpsuits, pencil pants and smocks, anchored by studded river-running sneakers or shining sneakers. Everything looking like a Milanese had thrown together an old coat from her mum, a borrowed silk top, funky new shoes, and a dash of strass. Looking great, without really trying very hard. No wonder Miu Miu is the most commercially hot catwalk brand this decade.
Though the stars of the show were proper movie stars- Chloë Sevigny in a leather jacket and skirt both of whose trims morphed into shearling. To Gilian Anderson- in full Iron Lady attitude- icy as she claimed the finale passage in an exquisitely embroidered layered tulle sheath. Both looking comparatively tiny compared to real-life veteran models like Gemma Ward or Kristen McMenamy. Even if this was the shortest cast we’ve seen in Paris in three decades of shows.
“The smallness of our human bodies in the vastness of our world,” commented the house on Instagram. How true.
