Saint-Laurent's summer melancholy, India revisited by Louis Vuitton

It is said of flowers and butterflies that they reach the peak of beauty just a moment before they wither, or die. The poignant awareness of fragility makes the perception of aesthetic pleasure they give particularly intense. At the opening of Paris Fashion Week, moving to where desire and elegance are mixed in a way of dressing and a grammar of colours and materials, Anthony Vaccarello evokes a similar feeling at Saint-Laurent.

Lyrical and heated, tinged with a powerful yet light sensuality, the show represents a change of pace, in every respect. The setting of the Saint-Laurent man is no longer night, but an afternoon suspended between Paris and Fire Island; the dark colours give way to a lively, desaturated palette that pays homage to the drawings of Larry Stanton, an artist who was a prominent figure on the Fire Island scene on the crest of the 1970s and 1980s; the declared and gloomy sexuality dissolves into suffused carnality. Vaccarello sensitively captures the lightness of that coterie of men so free of schemes. He does so without replicating their unhinged looks - only four shorts in a fluctuating and very low-cut collection, in which everything vibrates but the shoulders are broad and firm - blocking in a sign of style the fragility of a moment of smug hedonism. Because those beautiful, desiring, light-hearted men all paid the price for their carefree attitude, part of a generation that, with biblical precision, was almost entirely mown down by AIDS. Vaccarello of course does not talk about all this, but his mention of that lost paradise charges his work with fluidity and levity, his idea of soft formality under the scorching sun, with a touching melancholy.

Pharrell Williams, from Louis Vuitton, tones down the tone and fanfare, as well as the bling bling and marked eclecticism of previous tests, but not the idea of a show on a giant scale -¬ the maison is still the largest in the world in the high-end segment, in terms of turnover -, and "occupies" the square in front of the Centre Pompidou with a sartorial parade of grey, livid and earthy shades. The collection notes speak of a homage to India, as well as various reflections on dandyism, glamping and softness, but apart from the trousers that move like saris and the decorative polychromy on the accessories, it is a filtered and non-literal India, which if on the one hand surprises for the sobriety of the expression, on the other leaves one perplexed by certain repetitive traits. One gets the impression that the clothes, with their square and not always flattering lines, are designed already looking at visual merchandising, centred on accessories that are not exactly sober and designed for an audience of new rich exhibitionists.

Ryota Iway, from Auralee, continues in the end to work on the idea of a never predictable but subtly normal everyday life. This season, his rambunctious and introverted characters seem to fight the uncertainties of the weather, the proverbial oddities of the weather that can put all the seasons together in a single day, with random and poetic layering, with saturated colour work that is new and adds depth.