While Paris Fashion Week might mark the final stop on fashion’s world tour – with shows in New York, London and Milan already wrapped up for the season – its comprehensive nine-day schedule, featuring some of fashion’s most well-known names, meant that there was still plenty to digest before it closed yesterday evening with an exuberant show from Nicolas Ghesquière at Louis Vuitton. Exploring the idea of ‘soft power', it unfolded at the Louvre in front of an audience which included French First Lady Brigitte Macron.
Elsewhere, notable moments have included Alessandro Michele’s debut runway show for Rome-based house Valentino, which took place on Sunday afternoon on the outskirts of Paris. It marked a return to fashion for the Italian designer after exiting Gucci in November of 2022 following a critically acclaimed and commercially successful tenure in which he became one of fashion’s most well-known figures. A musing on the power of beauty, it was an evolution of the romantic, eclectic design codes he honed at Gucci, here rewritten with nods to the Valentino archive and the Roman street. ‘When I say beauty, I am clearly not referring to its universalistic, dogmatic and normative mythologisation,’ said Michele. ‘I rather allude to that unique capability to deeply feel and connect with something.’
