Women's fashion in Paris/1

The eclecticism of Dior in the Tuileries gardens, the double and seductive soul of Saint Laurent

The Paris fashion shows open with the stars of the industry. Dior's creative director, Anderson, amidst flowers, geometries and eighteenth-century flounces: 'I am in constant research'

by Angelo Flaccavento

4 March 2026

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

In Paris, after an initial half-day preamble dedicated to smaller, experimental brands such as the austere and disquieting Hodakova or the unruly Vaquera - not mere figures, but presences that give the city the unique character of a hub where everything is possible and fashionable knowledge is recapitulated in its infinite variety - the action immediately gets into full swing with Dior.

Almost a year after his appointment as creative director, now at his second women's ready-to-wear show and with enough evidence behind him to substantiate his aesthetic thinking, Jonathan Anderson's vision for the most Parisian fashion house there is still in the making, but clear: it is a meeting between the more flowery and feminine aspects of Monsieur Dior's code and Anderson's unhinged geometries and derailing eclecticism, with an unbalanced idea of the 18th century as the binding agent. Objectively it is a lot, and unevenness, which is also a desire to reach different types of women, is around the corner, but even in the mishmash this time Anderson speaks in a more comprehensible way.

It renounces the classics and accelerates on exuberance, clasps flowered baskets and draperies, hints of the masculine and explosions of flounces, counting on the extraordinary glance of the Jardin des Tuileries that acts as a theatre for the show, the latter imagined as a walk in the garden, where one goes to look in order to be looked at.

The poetry of the walkway around the hexagonal fountain is objectively touching, while the vision en plein air, under the glorious Parisian sun, smooths out the roughness as well as the abstractions, although there is still a lot of work to be done. Anderson himself admits this during a preview: 'I'm still looking for a hand, a way of doing things'. It is indeed the binder that is missing, the only one that could give meaning and substance to the infinite variety.

Anthony Vaccarello, from Saint-Laurent, is of the opposite, Cartesian thinking: his fashion shows are acts of supreme consistency even at the cost of hammering out a single message. Exactly sixty years after the aesthetic-social revolution of the tuxedos, this season Vaccarello returns to one of the maison's founding tropes: the dual but unequivocally seductive soul, expressed in men's dressing on the one hand and abandonment to the more discreet dressing of women on the other.

The collection is all here: suits and dinner jackets, or lace dresses and short, wrap-around furs. But not everything is as it seems: tailoring is treated as flou, while lace, glazed with silicone, is cut as tailoring and imagined as delicate protection. The result is taut, penetrating, but the message is not the detonating kind. Monotonous, rather: of a quiescent, passing season.

At Anrealage, Kunihiko Morinaga confirms himself as a unique creator, capable of uniting with a powerful lyrical afflatus romantic sensibility and the desire to make fashion through technology. His never static clothes are traversed by LEDs, change colour, become cyber extensions of the body, and this season are inspired by the mythical animated film Ghost in The Shell (1995). Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran, in art Matières Fécales, continue their path of gothicising couture forms - without a real atelier, so the clothes have a homely feel. Interesting is the reflection on the power of money through the archetypal Dior New Look, minus the use of banknotes as masks. Allegories in the time of memes: best avoided.