Paris Fashion Week: an intimately feminine vision

Where are the fashion designers? It’s a debate that has animated professionals in the sector in recent weeks, after the cascade of appointments, at the end of 2023, of men’s designers at the head of prestigious brands: Sean McGirr at McQueen, Adrian Appiolaza at Moschino, Alessandro Vigilante at Rochas or even Matteo Tamburini at Tod’s. However, women are definitely there, and have a lot to say about how clothing shapes the identity of the person who wears it or facilitates their daily life. During the fall-winter 2024-2025 women’s collections week, which was held in Paris from February 26 to March 5, the artistic directors competed in imagination and creativity to offer wardrobes combining commercial viability and fashion fantasies.

“As a woman who designs for women, I want to offer clothes in which we can breathe and feel beautiful”, affirms Marine Serre, who seeks the point of balance between dream and reality. The parade takes place at Ground Control, warehouse at 12^e district converted into a multidisciplinary living space, where guests can order a coffee or a slice of pizza. “I wanted to recreate the spirit of the market, where people stroll, chat, create connections”, explains the designer, who recruits most of her models from the street. Women over 30, muscular, curvy, slender or twins arrive, their child wedged in a baby carrier or a newspaper under their arm, carrying their shopping bag or pulling a Shopping Cart from which protrude leeks.

“Showing the beauty of the ordinary is also what I try to do with clothes”, details Marine Serre. The Frenchwoman offers a complete wardrobe, focused around a few strong ideas: the moon print, her signature, is scattered across a transparent black fishnet dress, a tight-fitting jumpsuit, a twin-set in pop colors, a bustier worn above a python shirt, a denim work jacket. Basics with a twist (embroidered white shirt, multi-print dress, paneled jeans) complete this very convincing wardrobe.

At Miu Miu, Miuccia Prada also seeks to dress a wide range of women, but she thinks more in terms of age, seeking to define a “dress vocabulary from childhood to adulthood”. Demure jackets stop above the navel and before the wrists as if their owner had just experienced a growth spurt; dresses with Peter Pan collars are worn with colorful tights and shoes with straps and round toes… all elements that make up the prepubertal wardrobe. To illustrate maturity, Miuccia Prada chooses bourgeois signifiers such as the pearl necklace, the brooches, the long gloves, the handbag, the little black dress.

Comfortable impression

Between the two pass a few teenage figures, tight low-waisted jeans, exposed stomachs and fake fur carelessly placed on the shoulders. Like Marine Serre, Miuccia Prada chooses a wide cast, from the African-American rapper Angel Haze to the sixty-year-old actress Kristin Scott Thomas via the transgender stylist Dara Allen. A successful collection and more subtle than the previous ones, all in visible miniskirts and panties, but which will perhaps have less impact.

“ I want clothes to be intimate, personal and cherished », explains Louise Trotter, who presented her second collection for Carven. After working at Joseph for nine years and at Lacoste for four years, where she succeeded in injecting sporting codes into an urban wardrobe, the artistic director here explores femininity with restrained elegance. Straight coats with rounded shoulders and men’s jackets with an exaggerated build immediately give the impression of comfort.

“Nothing is more attractive than a woman who is comfortable in her clothes. It builds self-confidence.”, says the designer. An idea that she pursues with beautifully transparent full skirts, tops with thin straps, wide pants cut from a thick fabric or even flat shoes, rounded ballerinas or second-skin boots. The color palette, oscillating between mouse gray, chocolate or vermillion, is just right, while the opera gloves and the imposing but not flashy jewelry sometimes evoke a wardrobe from another time. However, there is nothing anachronistic in this wardrobe designed by the most discreet of the English designers in Paris.

Because Parisian fashion week also has its share of famous British people. Among them, Stella McCartney, who this season celebrates two female figures: Mother Nature and her own mother, Linda McCartney. Under a greenhouse in the André-Citroën park, by way of introduction, screens broadcast an ecological manifesto: “I am the only mother for whom it is natural that she survives her children. But what will be left of me after you? », asks the voice of actress Olivia Colman. Stella McCartney has always stood out for her commitment to animals and the environment, and each season continues to expand her list of green textile innovations: faux crocodile leather made from agricultural waste, recyclable aluminum sequins, organic hemp without pesticides…

Not sure that this is enough to save the planet, but Stella McCartney’s stylistic proposal, inspired by her mother’s wardrobe, is very convincing: draped and light dresses with long trains contrast with shouldered suits, worn without anything underneath. The vaporous dresses display clear colors – white, blood red – which give them character, while the more masculine pieces come in old pink or gray beige. Accompanied by Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, the designer’s father, applauded heartily.

Two-collar knitted sweaters

Victoria Beckham is another Englishwoman at Paris fashion week who benefits from a sizable family fan club: her husband, David, a former footballer, and their children. In a rather happy mood despite her broken foot and her crutches, this season she sought to celebrate the feminine silhouette. For this, the emphasis is placed on pants, whose legs appear endless and as if floating around the body. “These very long pants are new for the brand. They really lengthen the leg thanks to their low crotch. I really like using sewing tips to create an illusion »explains the stylist.

The illusion continues in this wardrobe where large shouldered jackets are held in the back by a simple strap threaded around the neck, where knitted sweaters have two collars and where metal clips resembling hangers serve as clasps for clothes. draped and transparent dresses. The collars of the coats and small leather jackets, set high on the neck, emphasize the idea of ​​an elongated silhouette. The whole thing is very portable despite its experimental side.

Chitose Abe, founder and artistic director of Sacai, also seeks to take clothes out of their ordinary framework: on the catwalk, we think we see zipped jackets with patch pockets, long thick knit sweaters with tulle inlays, pea coats with ruffled hems or large men’s jackets… But if you look closely, each of the forty-six silhouettes presented is in fact a dress that mixes and merges elements of other garments.

“Fashion is the armor that allows us to survive the reality of everyday life,” explains the designer, quoting New York street photographer and fashion historian Bill Cunningham (1929-2016), who inspired this collection. The Japanese woman proves once again that, when it comes to accumulating, deconstructing or judiciously attaching fabrics, she has no equal.

Whether they explore fashion as a creative laboratory like Chitose Abe or consider it as a means of “spread joy” Marine Serre style, women designers are there. And we can count on them to renew this still very masculine sector.