Victoria Beckham, Issey Miyake, Kenzo, and Róisín Pierce

One ranged from a gilded embassy or under the Louvre to an elegant brand HQ and a dusty, disused building to witness shows by Victoria Beckham, Issey Miyake, Kenzo, and Róisín Pierce—reminders of why Paris remains the ultimate altar of fashion.

Victoria Beckham quietly conquers Paris

 
Three years ago, “The Daily Mail” was chuckling with schadenfreude about Victoria Beckham’s company losses. Today, Victoria just staged one of the half-dozen hottest shows of the international season.

 
The air of expectancy and enthusiasm was enormous as one took one’s place inside a former electric supply building in the 9th arrondissement. Scores of tall beauties showed up in Beckham’s key creation, the long, lean silk evening gown—the more décolleté, the better.
 
Since moving to show in Paris, Beckham has been peripatetic, shifting from Karl Lagerfeld‘s former mansion to the Bagatelle Gardens to this dusty, disused building with an empty elevator shaft and rickety banisters. Known for hosting small wannabe labels, the space has since welcomed successful brands like Chloé and Dries Van Noten. No one has used the space with such aplomb as Beckham, with a wide beige carpet, subtle lighting, and an ace rockin’ operatic soundtrack courtesy of DJ Michel Gaubert.

Above all, this was a focused collection with some very fine tailoring—elongated blazers, smoking jackets, and long, fluid dusters. A splendid tuxedo shirt dress was enticing, as was a white cashmere dressing gown cut like an opera coat. At the same time, you could see La Spice’s scores of leggy clients zealously admiring the latest long evening columns.

 
A series of felt wool coats with scrolled trim initially looked chic before their over-repetition made them look a little dull. And the final look—a white terylene-style top—looked oddly grubby. However, overall, this was a standout display by Beckham. You could tell that from the front row—not the visiting Brits but the locals.
 
You know the way the French are sometimes regarded as tricky? Well, you can only imagine how problematic French fashion critics can be. And they, one could tell, universally loved this collection for its zest, brave femininity, and first-rate color palette.
 
So, dear “Daily Mail” reader, the news is in. Victoria Beckham has really managed to conquer Paris Fashion Week. Eat your heart out.

Issey Miyake: Friday’s biggest applause

Always a good acid test in fashion, the applause at the end of a show. The brand that garnered the noisiest ovation was Issey Miyake when Satoshi Kondo took an extended tour of the runway.

The location—the Carrousel du Louvre—has been the site of many memorable Miyake shows. This was one of the best. Curiously, the large and extremely well-lit Carrousel, built in the early ’90s to house French fashion spectaculars, has been avoided for years by all major Parisian brands. LVMH only comes here for its annual shareholders’ meetings.

On the other hand, the house of Miyake worked the space with cool cunning, positioning two large statues of giant mannequins in multiple jerseys amidst a collection whose key theme was inventive knitwear.

A half-dozen dancers wandered pre-show about the pristine catwalk—the size of four tennis courts—before gradually getting dressed from small piles of clothes left on mini podiums. They posed inside inverted knits in a neat Surrealist display that Magritte would have loved, suggesting that each look could be a garment or a sculpture.

Practically every passage in this collection had a visual trick. Opening with white cotton T-shirt dresses that looked invaded by red ribbed knits, or plissé cocktails twisted into exotic swirls—suggesting they had lives of their own.

Before Kondo began marrying mannish blazers with beautifully inverted shirts, their sleeves falling before the waist. Famed for his fabric innovation, founder Issey would surely have loved the paper and polyurethane V-shaped blazers that hugged the waist and bloomed at the shoulders.

It was all part of a commentary on rampant consumerism from a house that has long led the search for recycled materials. Miyake was the first designer to create fashionable raincoats out of recycled plastic bottles, devoting a whole boutique in Tokyo to the concept two decades ago.

So, the audience loved the insider joke of several models dressed in cloth shopping bags made into eccentric tops, printed with the show’s title: “Abstract, Concrete, and In-Between.”

The cast marched in new Camper x Issey Miyake Peu Form shoes, sculpted from swatches of leather wrapped around the foot. Then, at the finale, the show went into overdrive, with blends of alpaca and thermoplastic synthetic fibers producing gargantuan rigid coats in fantasy folds and silhouettes.
 
One explanation of Kondo’s rather epic show was, “[N]either [N]or is a portrayal of ambiguity as an attempt to connect contrasting binaries in materiality, form, and meaning.”
 
He took his bow, beaming with pride—and rightfully so. He and his team had put on an excellent fashion performance.

Kenzo: Svelte chic and bunny rabbits

Kenzo welcomed guests into the brand’s rather swish HQ, a mansion on rue Vivienne, providing champagne and huge bowls of sweets to guests at this cocktail-hour show.

Judging by the huge hordes of fans outside, the brand still packs a real punch with a youthful fan base. Inside, guests perched on an elegant series of mid-century chairs and couches.

“It’s halfway between a tearoom and a nightclub,” smiled CEO Sylvain Blanc.

The cast then toured around the space, visiting a series of rooms on a couple of floors, galvanized by a raunchy soundtrack—from Mobb Deep’s anthem “Survival of the Fittest” to Johnny Rotten laying into “Public Image.”

Once, Kenzo was a famous supplier of natty tailoring. This season, it is again, from the mannish matinee idol tuxedos for svelte Parisians to the silk redingotes with truncated shawl collars. All of them looked excellent. Pairing the jackets, silk blouses, and some neat short sweaters with semi-sheer harem pants looked very hip, especially on a cast with bedraggled hair.

Graffiti parkas, jerkins, and ripped-up tanks will surely appeal to Kenzo’s young audience, as will the cool mini duffle coats that cut off halfway down the torso.

That said, the show essentially lost the audience in the final six looks with all sorts of absurdist bunny rabbit ensembles that were daft and overly Disney.
 

Róisín Pierce: Dreamy in the Hôtel de Breteuil

​A moment of grace and poetry at Róisín Pierce, who staged three intimate shows in the gilded elegance of the Hôtel de Breteuil, otherwise known as the Irish Embassy in Paris.

Guests were enthroned on Louis XIV chairs as the cast glided gently over the parquet floors to the soft sounds of “Into Dust” by Mazzy Star. Pierce’s fashion is a delicate meeting of cotton spirals, snowflake cotton, whisper-light embroidery, and feathery tulle. It has a dreamlike quality, rarely more so than in this excellent collection that confirms Róisín as one of the most important young contemporary designers.

The show also celebrated two key new collaborations for Dublin-born Pierce—a very appealing linkup with the hit handbag label Polène, resulting in a limited-edition series of box and spherical bags finished in tiny looped bows, seen wrapped around the wrists of many models with delicate straps.

Róisín also showed off some great hats by Stephen Jones—a significant compliment, seeing that Jones has worked with multiple designers at Dior, as well as throughout Paris and Milan.

But what remained in one’s mind upon leaving was the sense of refinement and rarefied beauty—a designer seeking out a genuinely new and different path to fashionable elegance. And doing it with skill in Paris.