Ghesquière's new vision for Louis Vuitton and Chanel's subtle revolution

The final days in Paris are slower in pace but heavier on names.

Nature is a recurring theme, at least in the layouts. Moss everywhere. At Louis Vuitton it is synthetic, covering parallelepipeds and prisms designed by artist Jeremy Hindle as an abstraction of the natural. Nicolas Ghesquière's new vision manifests itself in this scene: a collage of folk tropes made completely abstract by the exaggeration of volumes. by the extension of references, and by the melange that synthesises and sutures distances. Ghesquière starts with an interesting assumption: traditional clothes are a response to confrontation with the elements. This softens the robotic edges of his aesthetic, warming it up. So here are the Azerbaijani shepherds' cloaks - portable homes - that become desert or galactic capes; here are the conical headdresses, the Mongolian, Coptic, Byzantine echoes that mingle in an anti-historical, non-localising, authentically transversal vision. It is a lot to digest, but it convinces. At times, Danilo Donati's work for the mythical Pasolini comes to mind.

The moss at Miu Miu is true, but the walls of the room alternate floral brocade on a red background with large mirrors: the forest is inside a palace. It is an environment suspended between nature and artifice, accommodating small bodies, on which the clothes, washed and battered, at times resigned but always full of dignity, rest as if they were too big, too short, the trousers always too long. Miuccia Prada finds grace and strength in the smallness of the relationship between the human and the vastness of nature. Metaphorically, even the renunciation of decoration, limited to details or resting on hats with ear flaps, as a young marmot, is an emanation of this feeling of smallness. In the meantime, from wild needling to raw lingerie, Mrs Prada runs through her repertoire. It is not her best rehearsal, but there is the usual depth.

At Chanel, Matthieu Blazy continues the subtle revolution, under the banner of freshness and multiplicity, that has brought the brand back to the centre of fashionable desire, as confirmed by the queues of ravenous customers in the boutique, where his debut collection has just arrived. This second test is a new instalment in an ongoing dialogue with the founder, Gabrielle Chanel. Blazy works around two ideas that are not opposed, but complementary: function and fiction, caterpillar and butterfly - iconic definitions of the spirit of the maison that Gabrielle Chanel gave in the 1950s in Le Figaro. It opens with the suit, simplified as much as possible, and closes, as in a loop ready to start again, with a little black dress, but in between there are all the possible transitions from the caterpillar worker and chthonic to the iridescent and airy butterfly, some successful, others less so, all pervaded by a lightness that is first and foremost one of thought: the desire to create beautiful clothes that make women beautiful. Clothes, not concepts. That is all.