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, means that there is still plenty more to come before Louis Vuitton closes out the season on 1 October.
Most notably, Alessandro Michele will hold his much-anticipated debut runway show for Valentino, which marks a return to fashion for the Italian designer after exiting Gucci in November of 2022 following a critically acclaimed and commercially successful tenure. As for whether he will bring the eclectic, maximalist flair that defined his collections at Gucci to the Roman house remains to be seen, though the show will no doubt be heavy on romance and spectacle (look out too for the front row; at Gucci, he was famous for his coterie of starlets, which included Harry Styles and Lana Del Rey). The show will take place on the afternoon of 29 September.
On Wednesday, eyes were on Dries Van Noten – the brand hosted its first show since the departure of the eponymous designer – while later in the week, they will turn to Chanel, where a creative director is still yet to be announced (Givenchy is absent from the schedule; Sarah Burton will instead make her debut next year). Numerous other big names are showing alongside, including Loewe, where Jonathan Anderson staged a ‘radical act of reduction’ on Friday morning, while Hermès, Miu Miu, Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton are all still yet to show.
Here, reporting live from Paris, Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss picks the best of Paris Fashion Week S/S 2025, as it happens.
The best of Paris Fashion Week S/S 2025
Victoria Beckham
It was into the woods for Victoria Beckham, who chose to host her latest show in Château de Bagatelle, a royal folly in Bois de Boulogne, a vast forested park on Paris’ eastern reaches. It made for a dramatic setting: in the darkness of evening, guests wandered up to the showspace via a series of candlelit paths, while an enormous curved-roof tent had been erected in the grounds of the château (even the air was scented with 21:50 Rêverie, her latest fragrance, a heady reminiscence of an evening spent on the Indonesian island of Java). The evocative collection, which saw models descend from the château’s doorway and onto the runway, was an exploration of the ritual of dressing and undressing, said Beckham. ‘[Seeing] the wardrobe not only as a space in which we dress but where we undress, too… observing the physical relationship between skin and garment,’ the collection notes described. The opening looks saw fabric cast onto the skin as if doused with water, while later in the collection tailoring was sliced away and deconstructed to reveal the body beneath. A series of semi-sheer gowns, with architectural looping wires under their surface, was another intriguing proposition (and will no doubt have a few red carpet moments, judging by the evening’s starry guestlist). It is satisfying to see Beckham continue to experiment with the label – a gamble which so far seems to be paying off, with sales rising 52 per cent last year, and a Netflix documentary in the works. No doubt this runway show will play a starring role.
Loewe
An act of ‘radical reduction’ is how Jonathan Anderson described his latest Loewe collection, which was staged in a specially constructed white box on the grounds of the historic Château de Vincennes. Around its edges it was decorated with violin sonata sheet music, while inside, a tiny miniature bird stood in the centre of the circular space like a totem. The notes elucidated that it was a 2017 work by the British artist Tracey Emin: ‘caught in a moment of pause, she encourages us to imagine the bird’s imminent flight, and ultimately its freedom’. Of the hints to music – birdsong, sheet music, and later in the collection, rockstar-style merch adorned with the faces of Bach, Mozart and Chopin – Anderson said he was wondering: ‘is it possible to fill an empty white room, commanding attention, without shouting for space?’
Commanding a space is something that Anderson has little trouble doing. Here was another collection brimming with ideas: featherweight dresses were constructed over undulating cages that bounced and bobbed down the runway in perpetual movement (the inspiration was ‘some very strange pre-war American sets’ which he found in a vintage store, here made far lighter in construction), while glimmering structured jackets were decorated with shards of shell, evocative of the exteriors of lacquered boxes. Feathers, he said, were a nod to haute couture techniques (a fixation in recent collections), while tailoring came with twisting draping on the trousers for a louche, oversized silhouette. The latter was something the designer said he had been developing for several seasons: ‘historically, tailoring was something Loewe wasn’t good at for a long time, but I think we’ve been able to do it right, and come up with a kind of signature’.
Other pieces featured the paintings of Van Gogh, including Sunflowers and Irises, the artist’s most ubiquitous works. So ubiquitous, says Anderson, that when he is driving to work he sees them over and over, imprinted on tea towels and canvases on the stalls which line the River Seine. ‘We get so used to them that they become a kind of high-low culture… we burn out the image,’ he said. Situated here, they became a new proposition, painstakingly re-painted over feathers. ‘But still we are always magnetically drawn to them,’ he continued. ‘There's something that we want to be part of, something, even if we don't understand it.’ Anderson’s work at Loewe has a similar magnetism: sometimes strange, but always seductive. After the show, he said wanted to capture the feeling of stepping into a dark room before your eyes adjust: ‘it's the idea of the eye going into focus.’ Here was a vision sharper for Loewe that was sharper than ever – a fact not unnoticed by the audience, who rose to a rare standing ovation at the end of the show.
Issey Miyake
Satoshi Kondo’s latest outing for Issey Miyake saw the Kyoto-born designer look towards the ancient craft of creating washi paper, a traditional Japanese paper made from wood bark or hemp which is used for origami, decoration and bookmaking, even clothing, thanks to its relative durability. In a glass-box-like space situated in a lush green garden in eastern Paris, Kondo and his team created an all-white scene, the floor gently creased to evoke the appearance of washi paper, and dotted with stools made from rolls of paper leftover from the heat-pressing of the brand’s signature knife pleats (usually these are sent straight to recycling, but for the showspace they were sliced to size for guests to sit on). For the collection, Kondo and his team – in what took several months of experimentation – worked alongside artisans at the Awagami Factory in Tokushima Prefecture, south-west Japan to create garments in hemp washi paper, like a gently crinkled coat which, thanks to clever pattern-cutting, folds into an entirely flat rectangle. Elsewhere, washi yarn was cleverly woven with other fabrics, while the act of folding and manipulating paper led to intricate origami-like finishes on jackets and dresses. Meanwhile a sense of play was captured in the collection’s knitwear (one pair of trousers had ‘double legholes’, as if two people could wear them at once) or the paper-bag-style handbags which for the show had been stuffed with baguettes and flowers. Kondo also noted the inspiration of water – an abundance of water is needed to make washi paper – which emerged in fluid, draped silhouettes, some of which looped over the head like a veil.
Rick Owens
Guests were warned that the Rick Owens show, held on the outdoor forecourt of Paris’ Palais de Tokyo, would take place whatever the weather. The warning came after two days of constant rain, which – by small miracle – halted just as the show was scheduled to begin (the sun even momentarily emerged from the clouds). It was prophetic fallacy: titled Hollywood (like the menswear show held earlier this summer) this was a grasp for hope and community amid what Owens called the ‘peak intolerance we are experiencing in the world right now’. Like that menswear show, he drafted a cast of local art students to model the collection – a response, he said, to the intimacy of his previous womenswear outing, held in his Paris home – alongside underground icons like Alannah Starr and Kristina Nagel, evoking the ‘weirdos and freaks’ he found in Hollywood after escaping from small town Porterville, California to Los Angeles as a young person. ‘After showing in the house last season, I felt bad about making attendance so restricted so this time around I wanted to welcome everyone,’ he said. Here, his eclectic cast was clad in typically Owensian creations, from monastic draped gowns (some which scrunched sculpturally around the body) and operatic cloaks to tough zip-covered jackets and dramatic frilled capes he playfully called ‘megafrilled donut shrugs’. It ended with figures draped in black cloth dropping white confetti from high up on the Palais de Tokyo rooftop – a symbolic celebration of what Owens called ‘unity and reliance on one and other’.
Chloé
Chemena Kamali’s sophomore collection for Chloé was a continuation of the breezy, bohemian aesthetic which the German designer described at her debut earlier this year as one of ‘natural beauty, [a] sense of freedom and undone-ness… the glow, the radiance and the energy.’ It is a mood which lends itself well to the summer season, seeing Kamali conjuring an easy vision of warm-weather dressing in sheer puff-sleeve tops and body suits, billowing ruffled gowns and negligee dresses tied at the shoulder with bows. Romantic cuffs were gathered to created a floating volume, while a more sinuous line was struck in bodysuits evocative of Henley underwear, or contouring swimwear trimmed with the requisite Chloé ruffle. Colours felt bolder than last season: alongside hues of white, beige and apricot and were more vivid flushes of blue and raspberry. ‘What matters to me is the feeling and intuition that guides this very personal, intimate and sensual way of dressing,’ explained Kamali. ‘I wanted to capture that longing for summer and the way summer makes you feel – taking the essence of Chloé’s roots as a starting point, building new foundations and capturing that fantasy moment of the summer months when you reconnect with yourself.’
Acne Studios
Acne Studios’ latest show took place amid an assemblage of objects by the Philadelphia-based artist Jonathan Lyndon Chase, largely comprising soft sculptures of things you might find in a home – lamps, radios, even cats – alongside recycled sofas, cabinets and armchairs sourced from LeBonCoin and daubed with the artist’s dynamic, naive motifs (the artist told Wallpaper* that the ‘messy, complicated’ domestic scene was an attempt to explore ‘emotions and the body, and how they affect the space around you’). ‘The idea for this collection started from a twisted domestic scenery. I asked myself whether classic domestic codes could actually be translated into fashion,’ explained Jonny Johansson, Acne Studios’ creative director. Promising a surreal ‘glimpse between closed doors and curtains’ at once ‘domestic and alien’, the collection itself riffed on the materials of the home – tablecloths, curtains, upholstery – reimagined in the brand’s distinctly contemporary style, whether as the enormous bows on draped dresses, or the chintzy floral motifs which adorned peep-toe boots. Intriguing too were the collection’s proportions: tailoring appeared as if it had been inflated, while other garments were shrunken in size, or nibbled with holes, as if worn and washed for years. Meanwhile dresses, crafted from pile-ups of different fabrics like discarded clothing, conjured a strange glamour.
Rabanne
Speaking to Wallpaper* last year, Julien Dossena said that his collections begin with material, tasking his team to experiment with texture, fabric and embellishment before a single item of clothing is sketched or made. This, said Dossena, is the spirit of the house: in 1966, founder Paco Rabanne said he ‘defied anyone to design a hat, coat or dress that hasn’t been done before... the only new frontier left in fashion is the finding of new materials.’ Dossena’s latest collection, shown on a drizzly Paris afternoon, continued this approach, taking the mainstays of an everyday wardrobe – striped cotton shirts, cableknit sweaters, bomber jackets and lace-trimmed slip dresses – and reimagining them in new materials or treatments (for example the gleaming cable-knit was ‘frosted’ across its surface, while guipere lace was ‘foiled’ to otherworldly effect). Titled ‘Material Girls’, it captured what Dossena described as ‘an interplay of casual and decadent’.
Towards the end of the show were three versions of the chainmail 1969 handbag, which Paco Rabanne had originally based on the traditional steel aprons worn by butchers in France. Just as the couturier had elevated the humble into an object of desire – inspired, in part, by Marcel Duchamp’s readymades – Dossena undertook his own act of transformation. These were bags just about as precious as you could get: one was created from hand-blown Murano glass by Venice-based artisans Venini, the next from Astier de Villatte ceramics, and the final one by medal-makers Maison Arthus Bertrand. Crafted from gold and taking over 300 hours of labour, it was dubbed the ‘world’s most expensive bag’ – a tribute, said Dossena, to Paco Rabanne’s gold-and-diamond-covered ‘world’s most expensive dress’, created for house muse Françoise Hardy in 1968.
Dries Van Noten
The first collection since Dries Van Noten exited his eponymous brand in June of this year was a respectful outing from his Antwerp-based design team, which recalled hallmarks of the designer – an act of ‘assessing, admiring and reinterpreting,’ as the collection’s accompanying notes described. So there were lush, sequinned overcoats, diaphanous silk skirts and dresses, louche, mannish tailoring, and moments of romantic embellishment, while an opulent palette (spanning earthy browns to vivid shots of orange, lime green and turquoise, inspired by an archive S/S 1997 collection) met clashing prints, from rich florals to those evocative of animal skins. Described by the brand as ‘the freedom of wandering for a brief time’, this nonetheless satisfying collection couldn’t help but pique the interest of what’s next for the Belgian label – and whether a new designer is already waiting in the wings.
Courrèges
Nicolas Di Felice’s latest Courrèges show took place around an enormous tilting disk, over which thousands of tiny balls moved back and forth (in the early morning slot, its effect was akin to meditation). The designer said that he was interested this season in the idea of the ‘infinite loop’, an inspiration point hinted to by the show’s invitation, a Möbius band, cast in metal. ‘Repetition, revolution, renewal,’ the Belgian designer described, a maxim which was encapsulated in the show’s opening look, a hooded neoprene cocoon coat in which the model’s hands were encased inside. Its inspiration was a 1962 haute couture cape by Andre Courrèges, which here Di Felice channeled through the collection in garments which could be slipped on as a single garment, though appeared like two (a bandeau bra top and halterneck dress, for example). Elsewhere, the designer honed his sleek, sexy vision for Courrèges in bonded tailoring, sliced denim, and rectangular bra tops which seemed to hover magically across the models’ chest, an act of sartorial ‘architecture’ (as Di Felice described) which continued over the collection’s closing looks.
Saint Laurent
Anthony Vaccarello selected Saint Laurent’s Rue de Bellechasse headquarters on Paris’ Left Bank to stage his latest collection, a location he held his first-ever show for the house eight years prior – a full circle moment, and a relative lifetime in the merry-go-round of designers at fashion’s major houses. The runway was circular too: a monumental golden circle, open to the elements (drops of Paris rain drizzled through as the show took place) and hovering over a vivid blue runway. Vaccarello said he chose the colour to evoke the blue of the Yves Saint Laurent gardens in Marrakech, the house founder’s adopted home city.
It set the stage for a collection that saw Vaccarello pay ode to Yves Saint Laurent in his most direct manner yet, evoking the designer’s own personal uniform – a wide-cut, fluid tailored suit, usually double-breasted and worn with a tie – with a trail of gender-swapped Saint Laurent doppelgangers (Bella Hadid, who made a much-anticipated runway return after a two-year hiatus, even wore his signature glasses). Meanwhile, the other half of the collection sought to evoke the opulent Saint Laurent woman in her various guises: a boho ruffled dress slung with wooden beads, opulent jacquard blazers and flourishes of lace, all in rich, seductive tones as if plucked from a jewellery box. Eight years on, it made for one of Vaccarello’s most desirable collections yet: an exercise in tailleur and flou which saw the house’s past rewritten in the Belgian designer’s singular and sensual design vernacular.
‘No other house is as linked to a quintessential female archetype as Saint Laurent, whose ideal woman is more complex than the seductive perfection of classic muses,’ said Vaccarello via the collection notes. ‘As Yves Saint Laurent could have said: I am the Saint Laurent woman.’
Dior
The roots of Maria Grazia Chiuri’s latest ready-to-wear collection for Dior could be found in her A/W 2024 couture show, held earlier this summer in the grounds of Paris’ Musée Rodin (the location also served as the site of this afternoon’s show, a shift from its usual venue in the Tuileries). Back then, Paris was on the precipice of an Olympic summer, with Chiuri looking back to the classical roots of the games in Ancient Greece, riffing on the ‘peplos’, a garment from the era which is made from a singular piece of cloth and folded at the waist. For her S/S 2025 ready-to-wear collection – teased with a video of the designer being given a tour of the Louvre’s Roman Antiquities gallery – she looked once again to the ancient era, summoning the mythological Amazons, a tribe of female warriors who appeared in epic poems from the Argonautica to the Iliad (men were not allowed in the Amazons, while any sons born to them were handed back to their fathers). The link to the historic house was Christian Dior’s Amazone dress from his autumn-winter 1951-1952 collection, a cut that was inspired by a group of French female horseriders (‘Amazone’ derives from the Gallic word for ‘side saddle’). Chiuri said the dress is symbolic of ‘a strength of spirit, a reference point for the notion of an autonomous, courageous femininity’.
It was a thematic choice that fits well with Chiuri’s vision for the Parisian house, which is focused on creating clothing for – and inspired by – empowered women, nonetheless infused with moments of mythological grandeur and romance. The show began with an appearance from Sofia Ginevra Giannì, aka Sagg Napoli, a multidisciplinary Italian artist and archer, who, bow slung over her shoulder and wearing a riff on the gladiator’s uniform, walked the runway before setting up in a Perspex corridor and firing shots on an eye-shaped target (the artist had also created the show’s set). The looks that followed continued a sleek, sporty mood: there were criss-crossing asymmetric bodysuits and dresses, evocative of swimwear, elongated mesh dresses, lace-up boxing boots and sneakers, go-faster stripes and racing grid motifs, while later in the show utility nylon shirts and protective bodices recalled professional shooters and archers. Meanwhile nipped-waist tailoring – largely styled off the shoulder to reflect the collection’s asymmetric line – layers of sheer organza and tulle, plissé dresses and glimmering tassels added the requisite feeling of romance that remains at the heart of the house of Dior. The result, said Chiuri, was an exploration of the relationship between body, movement and dress, and in doing so provided a link to her first-ever collection for the house nearly a decade prior, in 2016, which was inspired by female fencers and their uniforms.
Stay tuned for more from Paris Fashion Week S/S 2025.
