And so, after stops in Copenhagen, New York, London and Milan, Paris Fashion Week A/W 2024 marks the culmination of fashion month – a no doubt glittering nine-day finale which promises outings from the industry’s biggest names. These include Louis Vuitton, which closes the week on Tuesday evening, where creative director Nicolas Ghesquière will celebrate ten years at the storied Parisian house. As for whether the collection will be a greatest hits of his celebrated tenure remains to be seen – either way, expect a typically high-profile guest list and showstopping set. Elsewhere, Irish designer Seán McGirr will present his debut collection for Alexander McQueen, having taken over from Sarah Burton last September (teasers seem to signal a return to some of house founder Lee McQueen’s earliest work).
Yesterday, Dior began proceedings with a collection that looked back to the house’s first-ever ready-to-wear collection, Miss Dior, which was launched in 1967. Backdropped by the sculptures of Indian artist Shakuntala Kulkarni, creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri said she wanted the collection to capture the era’s liberated femininity. While at Saint Laurent, a sensually charged collection saw Anthony Vaccarello present an almost entirely sheer collection, inspired in part by Marilyn Monroe’s ‘naked dress’, which she wore for her final public appearance in 1962.
Here, Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss selects the shows to remember from Paris Fashion Week A/W 2024, as they happen.
The best of Paris Fashion Week A/W 2024
Saint Laurent
Anthony Vaccarello’s latest collection for Saint Laurent took place in two vast circular rooms, curtained around their exteriors in emerald green damask, recalling the draped windows of the house’s historic haute couture salons at 5 Avenue Marceau. The mood, the designer noted, was one of intimacy and that of a ‘boudoir’, providing an apt setting for a seductive, sensually charged show which riffed on the idea of transparency. ‘Anthony Vaccarello reminds us of what once was at the centre of fashion by rendering it invisible: clothes,’ said the house in collection notes, ‘minimising the distance between garment and skin so the two effectively meld and fabric evaporates like mist.’
As such, the nexus of the A/W 2024 collection was a series of sinuous, gauzy gowns recalling undergarments and hosiery, wrapped around the body in various ways (it followed Vaccarello’s clever tendency to riff on a singular silhouette, or idea). One inspiration, said the designer, was Marilyn Monroe’s notorious ‘naked’ dress, worn by the actress for her last appearance in public in 1962 (memorably, Kim Kardashian donned the dress for the 2022 Met Gala). Indeed, there was a nostalgic glamour to the flourishes of faux fur – like a series of jackets which were not worn but grasped in the hand – or the palette, which Vaccarello said recalled the powdery hues of make-up. And, if full-scale exposure is not your track, a series of perfectly crafted caban-style overcoats or fluid, wide-shouldered tailoring offered an elegant way to cover up – and perhaps a hint of where Vaccarello might be heading next.
Dior
Maria Grazia Chiuri looked back to the 1960s for her latest collection, an era which the designer said saw ‘fashion leave the atelier to conquer the world’. By this, she meant the advent of ready-to-wear, which allowed shoppers to purchase clothing from Parisian couture houses from the racks of a store, rather than the rarefied haute couture salon (where all clothing was made to measure, and thus the reserve of the uber-rich). Dior’s contribution to this change – led largely by former Dior creative director Yves Saint Laurent’s introduction of its Rive Gauche line in 1966 – was Miss Dior, a womenswear line launched by Marc Bohan in 1967, but entrusted to his assistant Philippe Guibourgé.
In the A/W 2024 collection, Chiuri used this as a jumping-off point to explore the era‘s liberated dress codes – here formulated in easy but elegant everyday silhouettes, like the various riffs on the classic trench coat that ran throughout. Other looks featured abbreviated skirts, nipped tailoring or clean-lined tabard-style tops, while expressions of the Dior atelier emerged in the collection’s closing looks (think: shimmering surface embellishment, metallic tassels, and crystal webbing). The mood, said Chiuri, was designed to evoke the liberation that the Miss Dior line came to represent: a way to fulfil house founder Christian Dior’s desire to dress all women, whatever the occasion. ‘I wanted a woman to be able to leave the boutique dressed by it from head to foot, even carrying a present,’ he is quoted as saying in the collection’s accompanying notes.
In the show itself, models circulated a series of sculptures conceived by Indian artist Shakuntala Kulkarni (it continues Chiuri’s ongoing collaboration with women artists on her evocative show sets). Evoking Kulkarni’s signature works, armature-like figures of women created from cane, they encapsulated a kind of juxtaposition – at once ‘clothing, protecting and transforming’ the body, while ’imprisoning it in a kind of cage’. It was symbiotic with Chiuri‘s interrogation of femininity, which has run throughout her tenure. Here, she noted how the Miss Dior collection became an emblem of a search for ‘a pluralistic, autonomous, and versatile femininity... a moment of creative freedom’ – a mood of liberation that permeated the collection itself.
Stay tuned for more from Paris Fashion Week A/W 2024
