Paris Fashion Week review: Sex, seduction and powerful silhouettes

Euronews

14-03-2025

The best fashion designers are always equipped with a remarkable compass that helps shape our emotional, aesthetic and style tempo. At Paris Fashion Week (PFW), with a mega schedule of 72 shows and 37 presentations, that compass was whirling.
History has been at the forefront as Victorian dandies were on display at McQueen and Dior, who paraded 18th-century style doublets. There were shape shifting silhouettes (cubist tailoring at Junya Watanabe, padded hip maxi skirts and giant ruffled Jacobean shoulders at Alaia) and a taste for splendour; whether that be bejewelled baroque jackets at Schiaparelli; snapper back lambskin coats and tailored shorts at Hermès, or a floor length carnation red shearling fur coat at Balenciaga.
The sheer array of concepts, the intricacy of craftsmanship and myriad points of view defy neat trend buckets. There's a commitment in Paris to the extraordinary, to transcendence and to the ultimate seduction of deep-pocketed clients and fashion fans alike. Facing a luxury spending slump, designers are pushing 'beyond' on all levels.
'I wanted to make things that can inspire, and that can never be replicated by fast fashion. The women in my life are lone stars - there's no one else like them, and there could never be. I hope they, and all women, feel the same about these clothes,' said Daniel Roseberry at Schiaparelli.
It was a week of standout debuts. British designer Sarah Burton, at Alexander McQueen for 26 years, made her start at Givenchy, where her former mentor and boss Alexander McQueen, and before him, John Galliano, have triumphed in the creative director position.
Burton, who is adored for her storytelling prowess as well as her remarkable aptitude for dressing real women (diverse ages and body types) began with a stack of Hubert de Givenchy's sketches and patterns that had been hidden between two walls at the original maison and were discovered in 2018. It gave Burton insight into the spirit of the atelier and the hand of one of fashion's most gifted couturiers who coined the Bettina blouse and Audrey Hepburn's little black dresses in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
But rather than pay strict homage, Burton let her powerful imagination soar and presented a study in stripped back elegance, starting with the literal foundations. There were pointy 50s brassieres and knickers under flounced hemmed mesh dresses, segueing into back to front sculpted tuxedo jackets and gorgeous chinoiserie embroidered opera coats.
The crescendo was a tulle strapless grand gown in sunburst yellow. With Cate Blanchett (last week sporting a curvy leather skirt suit straight from the runway), Timothée Chalamet and Ellie Fanning donning designs, the Givenchy world is sparkling again, and will be soon fuelled by the sale of 'it items' like the shiny ankle boots bearing the tag Givenchy 1952.
Like Burton, Haider Ackermann at Tom Ford opted for an intimate presentation – all the better to see his meticulous tailoring and colour palette that saw absinthe green fashioned into a duchesse satin-sleeved column dress, tiny sparkles on an immaculate tuxedo suit and languid men's tailoring in violet and pistachio wool.
Location, location! The ladies toilet might not be an obvious choice as a show set but Alessandro Michele turned to this place of intimate conversations and vanity as inspiration with models emerging from the red lacquered stalls (a cinematic take on Valentino's famed red) to parade his deliciously frivolous gowns.
'I imagined a public toilet: a counter-place that neutralises and suspends the dualism between inside and outside, between what is intimate and what is exposed, between the personal and the collective,' says Alessandro Michele, the Roman designer who is known for his philosophical thunk.
There's lot to love between the sinuous fake fur-trimmed jackets; gold frill tiered evening dresses; silky slips worn over lace bodywear and neoprene hoodies. It was styled with a youthful freedom that eschews ladylike etiquette and signals Michele's bid to woo a young fan club.
Since launching with a resort collection in 2024, Michele's team are excelling in VIP dressing with a legion of actors donning Valentino's ethereal, nostalgia-tinged confections.
For his debut at Dries Van Noten, Julian Klausner, formerly head of women's wear, captured the magic of the Paris Opera in resplendent form – baroque velvet coats dripping with jewels; a bolero made from silk curtain tassels; glimmering sequin skirts and emerald devoré velvet sarongs – that revelled in seductive drama. The brand, now owned by Puig, will open stores in London, Milan and New York this Spring.
The Saturday schedule at PFW is always dedicated to the fearless creatives who work under the umbrella of the Comme des Garçons collective. Founder, the radical Rei Kawakubo, upturned bourgeois chic on its head with her black distressed 'bag lady' silhouettes in the 1980s.
To Led Zeppelin's 'Stairway to Heaven', Kawakubo's protégé, Junya Watanabe, presented a vision with rock star guts, featuring leather and wool jackets with trapezoid protrusions (an acoustic enhancing design perhaps), bell bottoms and khaki M1 cocoons. His 'rockers' looked blissed-out in this sonic world.
Meanwhile, Kei Ninomiya at Noir pursued his vision of engineered sculptures (he never uses seams or zips) in joyful designs like a gown made of giant rainbow textural bows, or one in resin-coated candyfloss-like swirls. The mission? 'To achieve expression impossible with just fabrics,' says Ninomiya.
At Comme des Garçons, the indefatigable Kawakubo explored questions of size and aimless repetition to an audience of visionaries, including lensman Paolo Roversi. 'Smaller is stronger,' stated Kawakubo. 'Recently we feel that big business, big culture, global systems, world structures maybe are not so great after all,' she notes of her pathway.
To that end, she set about imploding and distorting classic tropes, such as the pinstripe and houndstooth skirt suits that opened the show, with jackets boasting helter-skelter 3D shapes, and skirts with jutting-out angles. That amplification continued, including a sheath dress in shades of pink velvet made from multiple stacked pattern parts, topped by a mutant-fringed hat with two crowns. Kawakubo's perverse twist on perspectives and angles is akin to viewing a Picasso.
Exploring identity, sexuality and the anatomy, Dutch designer Duran Lantink is a big talent who moulds fabric, exaggerating the female hourglass. This season, sleek sheaths with foam padded contoured hips, animal print leggings and coats with exaggerated curved shoulders appeared in a faux workspace setting. In Lantnik's Orlando world everything is fluid: a male model paraded in silicon boobs, while a female model wore a vest made to look like a rippling torso.
Anatomy is also at the core of Pieter Mulier's terrific vision for Alaïa, and he works in the footprints of Azzedine Alaïa himself. Developing highly technical materials – skin-fine jersey, wool that looks like fur - he champions innovation and the kind of sculptural proportions that turn mere mortals into otherworldly sirens.
Hips are eroticised with fringe hula skirts, jackets given giant snaking tubular trims, and sensuous dresses draped, slashed and tied.
Physical splendour is why women adore and seriously collect Daniel Roseberry's Schiaparelli. The creative has fused his Texan roots with Schiaparelli's flamboyant artistry in wasp-waisted jackets, body contouring dresses constructed from satin ribbons, and bejewelled pagoda shouldered trophy tops.
Note: big buckle belts, cordovan leather handbags and western boots are back in high style at Schiaparelli - and ready to stroll grand boulevards and rodeos alike.
Women who move inspired the creative studio at Chanel. The Grand Palais was transformed with a giant spiralling ribbon and bow installation.
House tweeds were cut into elegant linear suits featuring coat dresses over flared trousers in shades of raspberry, ochre and khaki, topped with sombreros. Bomber jackets were trimmed with ribbon ruffles while tulle capes and robes veiled miniskirts and shorts. Giant pearls were everywhere, even making a signature heel.
It was wildly pretty and highly versatile, but the real oomph of innovation will be witnessed in October when incoming artistic director Matthieu Blazy makes his debut.
Respect for women who get things done (and don't look back) is a motivation for Nadège Vanhée-Cybulski at Hermès, who masterfully worked leather, silk and cashmere into high-functioning luxury such as reversible coats, saddle flap shorts and marbled velvet tube dresses with skin revealing zippers. 'Sculptural, resilient, seductive,' is Vanhée-Cybulski's holy trinity - and the mantra is attracting a consistently high turnover at this heritage maison.
Fashion is a portal into the past, into the future, and Seán McGirr is deftly playing with history and time in his third collection for Alexander McQueen. Embracing the sartorial precision of the neo-dandy were ruff-necked lace blouses, peeping above fitted torso jackets, gold bullion embroidered cloaks, and a series of flamboyant chiffon dresses in fuchsia or iced lilac, made of giant furls and plumes that might have been teleported from a Victorian music hall.
Travel is a real money maker at Louis Vuitton, with its 19th century trunk making giant accessories even bigger business. The set design team transformed L'Étoile du Nord, a building adjacent to the Gare du Nord, into a giant concourse catwalk for a cast of models styled as traveller archetypes: the sporty dude, the footloose beauty, the musician, the uniformed corporate worker, the multi-tasking mother.
Nicolas Ghesquière's anthropological study proved heart-warming and made for thrilling viewing. The vast collection featured latex raincoats, divine silk slips with giant ruffles, hooded knit coats, giant cloche hats, slouchy boots, leather-trimmed cape coats (all the better for going incognito), and gabardine flying suits.
Fictive belongings were packed into striped mini trunks, roll bags, LV monogram violin cases and hip slung bags. The track? Kraftwerk's 'Trans Orient Express'. The moving silhouettes were filmed and screened through the windows on the floors above, with the human parade then dissolving into the blur of a bullet train. And it all sweetly aligns - hospitality and travel group Belmond is owned by LVMH, and the Orient Express is the cherry on top of its expanding portfolio cake.
As thousands of fashion folk headed back to airports and rail stations, Ghesquière made a grand salute to the wonder and privilege of travel.
Spanish researchers have found the remains of a facial fragment in Atapuerca, in northern Spain, which has been identified as the oldest known face in Western Europe, with an age of between 1.1 and 1.4 million years.
The study, published in the journal 'Nature' and led by IPHES-CERCA, has revealed this key discovery about the first human migrations in Europe.
The fossil, unearthed in 2022 and nicknamed 'Pink' in a nod to the leader of the project, Dr Rosa Huguet and the group Pink Floyd, belongs to a species of hominid more primitive than 'Homo antecessor'.
After an exhaustive analysis, the scientists attribute the fragment to 'Homo affinis erectus', a species close to 'Homo erectus', although the classification is not yet definitive, which leaves open the possibility that it is a population not yet identified in Europe.
"It is possible that we are dealing with a different species, a new species that is not a 'Homo erectus'. What we do know at the moment is that it resembles 'Homo erectus' and that it is clearly different from the species we have known so far in Europe," Xosé Pedro Rodríguez-Álvarez, a specialist in the lithic industry and co-author of the study, told Euronews.
The team of scientists, led by researcher Rosa Huguet of IPHES-CERCA, has pointed out that this finding is a key piece in understanding the evolution of humans on the continent. The discovery is especially relevant, as it places the arrival of these first populations in Europe before the 'Homo antecessor', whose remains date back approximately 860,000 years.
"There are examples of 'Homo erectus' in Asia and Africa, but on the European continent until now a human with these characteristics so similar to the 'Homo erectus' of other continents had not been discovered, " says researcher Xosé Pedro Rodríguez-Álvarez.
This is the third time that Spanish scientists have broken their own world record by finding the oldest human in Western Europe. The first major discovery took place in the 1990s, when the remains of an unpublished human species, 'Homo antecessor', were dug up at the Gran Dolina site.
"When the fossils of 'Homo antecessor' were found at the Gran Dolina in 1994, it was already clear that they were different from all the species known until then, and in the end it was decided to create a new species, which was published in 1997," says Rodríguez-Álvarez.
These fossils, some 900,000 years old, surprised the scientific community, as they challenged the idea that the first humans in Western Europe were no more than 500,000 years old. In addition, 'Homo antecessor' had surprisingly modern facial features, with a flat face structure that resembled that of 'Homo sapiens'.
"Later, in 2007, we also discovered in the Sima del Elefante, but in an archaeological layer above it, a human mandible dated at about 1.2 million years ago," adds the researcher. This fossil exhibited primitive features in the chin area, although its internal structure showed unexpectedly elegant characteristics.
In addition to the facial fragment, the researchers have found stone tools and cut marks on animal bones, suggesting that these early Europeans were already using lithic technology to hunt and process meat, adapting effectively to their environment. The landscape at the time, in the Lower Pleistocene, combined forests, grasslands and water sources, providing abundant resources for these early populations.
"They are simple tools that were made using rocks that can be found very close to the site, mainly flint quartz and limestone, which are local rocks (...) We can relate these tools to their use to make use of the ballistic resources of the sierra," explains the co-author of the research.
The cut marks identified on the animal remains found show clear evidence of the use of these tools to flesh animal carcasses, according to Rodríguez-Álvarez. "What they were probably doing was butchering small animals, because apart from the tools, we have also found around 6,000 animal bones in that layer," he adds.
The Atapuerca sites, considered a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000, contain the oldest and most numerous remains in Europe, and the discoveries that have been made there have had a great impact on science. "We have two different sites with very ancient human fossils ranging from 850,000 to more than 1,100,000 years old in a fairly small space of about 20 square kilometres," says the scientist.
This finding not only strengthens Atapuerca's role as a global reference in the study of human evolution, but also opens up new questions about the diversity of hominids that inhabited Europe in ancient times. Atapuerca researchers consider this discovery to be a significant step towards understanding the origins of humanity on the old continent.
"There are other sites in France and Italy that are between 1,000,000 and 1,100,000 years old. The difference is that there are no human fossils there. The only human fossils from the Lower Pleistocene, that is, the only human fossils older than 800,000 years in Europe, are all in the Iberian Peninsula, in Atapuerca," he says.
It is hoped that future studies and excavations will continue to shed light on how the different migratory waves and early human populations shaped the evolutionary history of the genus 'Homo' in Europe.
"To propose to the scientific community the existence of a new species, you have to have a lot of fossils. You have to do very deep studies, and now we are talking about only one, which is very interesting and very representative, but it is only a fragment of a face. We would need many more fossils to be able to say for sure that it resembles 'Homo erectus', but that it is different," concludes the scientist.