Louis Vuitton opens Paris with new tailoring, functional and futuristic

Clothes for life: Paris men's fashion week - long and dense, compared to Milan's meagre weekend - opens with this reflection. Obvious? Certainly: clothes are a fundamental element of existence, from a material as well as a symbolic point of view. Thinking about clothes for life in the dimension of the fashion show, however, has a certain weight, in the current congeries of show business society. It implies an idea of normality, of form that responds to function while avoiding the many, too many nonsenses that have prevailed lately.

This does not elide a certain grandeur, it has to be said, that at Louis Vuitton, for example, is customary. And yet, despite the gospel choir, the all-transparent house at the centre of the set - between Japan and California, more furniture shop than place to live - despite the profusion of trunks - some, in painted glass, genuinely sensational - even creative director Pharrell Williams seems to want to explore a quieter and more functional dimension of super-luxury for the super-rich. The notes of the collection, which is entitled Timeless, speak of thermoregulating fabrics, of futuristic luminosity. One reads ideas of uniformity and tailoring, in a neutral and beige palette that is indeed very Pharrell. The show is long and inevitably repetitive, but not particularly cohesive. Life, certainly, is not. What is striking, rather, is the feeling of a laboratory, mechanical operation, so that the clothes for life have very little life in them.

For Ryota Iwai, aka Auralee, the rejection of any garrulous exuberance is an identity trait. With a calm full of energy, he makes things that at first glance appear obvious - leather blousons, liquid coats, jeans, pullovers - but that when better observed reveal a rare ability to hold and facilitate gestures: a certain way of putting his hands in his pockets, of letting a pullover fall to his hips. Reality, with a touch of magic and a lot of subtlety. There is life here, without so much theatre.