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The best moments from Paris Fashion Week

Paris is a big deal, home to the biggest, most illustrious names in the world
Paris is a big deal, home to the biggest, most illustrious names in the world

For a designer, showing in Paris is a big deal, as Victoria Beckham observed before her first catwalk outing there last Friday.

It isn’t that shows in Milan and London aren’t celebrity studded, or that New York doesn’t still provide an intoxicating rush to the head. But Paris is where the shows are still huge, sometimes ridiculous and occasionally provocative. This season it’s where Balenciaga dragged everyone out to a black cavernous box way beyond the reach of most public transport and showed dark clothes against landslides of mud.

It’s where Kanye West keeps trying to succeed as a designer. Having taken a few critical drubbings in the past, this time he invited a tiny hand-selected audience of “friendly” editors – and stole headlines by putting a picture of Pope Jean Paul II and the slogan White Lives Matter on T-shirts.

So yes, Paris is a big deal, home to Dior, Chanel, Saint Laurent, Hermes and Louis Vuitton, five of the biggest, most illustrious names in the world. And while the power of trends has waned – you can pretty much wear anything you want now, and look stylish, if you do it with conviction – the power of the brand is more potent than ever.

Brands like Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and Hermes still rule the roost
Brands like Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and Hermes still rule the roost

Louis Vuitton is a €17 billion-a-year (£15 billion) brand these days. Chanel is around €11 billion. Dior, headed creatively by Maria Grazia Chiuri, a woman who, although initially dismissed by many fashion critics, has in the six years she has been there nursed it from a €2 billion-a-year label to €7 billion.

I will never get tired of reflecting on this. Especially as she did it not by getting a Kardashian involved, or parading grotesque, TikTok friendly parodies of femininity on her catwalks, but by designing clothes and bags women really, really want – such as the ultimate white poet’s blouse and pleated skirt she showed this time.

So how could Beckham, whose label has yet to turn a profit, compete?

Victoria Beckham’s collection was full of variations of the long, pastel, silk, satin slip dress she wore to her wedding - Victor VIRGILE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Victoria Beckham’s collection was full of variations of the long, pastel, silk, satin slip dress she wore to her wedding - Victor VIRGILE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

At first, I thought it was a bit of a mistake for her to confine her catwalk collection on Friday mainly to slips of dresses, however beautifully made. Where was all that grown-up daywear she and her design team had become so good at? Will French women, famously such pragmatic and classic dressers, so fond of the LBT (little black tuxedo) for night time, and so loyal to French labels, give her the time of day?

Let’s leave that dangling while we ponder what else was on offer last week. At Hermes, wearable daywear abounded, in delectable shades of saffron, orange, cream and apricot. Wide silky trousers, more slip dresses and jumpsuits looked comfortable and luxurious. Of course almost no one can afford any of Hermes, but we can Pinterest the lot of it, and wait for Massimo Dutti to do its job.

Over at Valentino, creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli reeled back from the all-fuchsia collection he showed last season. Valentino’s corner boutique on the Rue Saint Honoré is also currently wrapped, Christo style, in pink fuchsia fabric, as were scores of influencers in the front row, including the Valkyrie, Christine, from Selling Sunset, head to mega-platformed toe.

Valentino really loves this colour. I’m not sure the part of the audience who weren’t being paid to wear the colour felt the same. Luckily the new collection is chocolate, black, taupe, yellow – anything but fuchsia. Sculpted mini dresses with spindly straps in duchesse satin, feather trimmed trenches and floaty cape dresses – this was Valentino back on planet chic. Almost. The mega platforms were back on the catwalks for another season and they’re a problem. If models couldn’t walk in them, nor can the rest of us, assuming we wanted to.

Saint Laurent came out strongly for slinky maxi dresses and strong-shouldered coats, while sneaking in some classic, impeccably pleated-front trousers.

More slip dresses at Stella McCartney, although she also had oversized tailoring, jumpsuits and my favourite look of the week, a man’s white shirt and slouchy jeans. But then Amber Valletta was wearing them and that helps.

Amber Valletta walks the runway during the Stella McCartney Womenswear Spring/Summer 2023 show - Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
Amber Valletta walks the runway during the Stella McCartney Womenswear Spring/Summer 2023 show - Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

In a time of financial turbulence, classics seem more appealing than ever. Chanel’s show, which played out against a back screen showing the 1961 art house classic, Last Year at Marienbad, which was costumed by Chanel. Would anything on the Chanel 2022 catwalk match the cape dress the actress Delphine Seyrig wears in the film? Yes, almost all of it, particularly the block-heeled slingbacks and the black beaded tweed suits.

And there you have the key items for spring: a poet’s blouse, slouchy denim, a deconstructed blazer and a drapy midi/maxi.

So maybe, after all, Victoria Beckham was onto something with her beautifully crafted bias cut dresses. Will French women buy from a non-French label? She has a French CEO, Marie Leblanc, who’s as Parisian in style as it gets. Plus there was the drama of seeing who from the Beckham family came to support her in the front row – all of them, it turned out, including her parents and Nicola Peltz Beckham, the daughter-in-law she was alleged to have fallen out with. It’s Paris. Where the magic happens.