The watchword is 'dress up' between pinstripes and tailcoats, but also liquid volumes

Dress up is the English way of defining dressing up for occasions that matter. Dressing up not only seems to indicate high situations, but also an upright, composed posture, and therefore sounds better than dressing up, which is frivolous in a silly way - frivolity in itself is a good thing. The fourth day of the Paris fashion shows opens in dress-up, inside a garage furnished to suggest the atmosphere of a jazz club, with Junya Watanabe's elegant men: some in coats and tailcoats, others in camel coats, still others in navy uniforms transformed into tailored coats, or with skimpy blazers covered in patches. It is a conservative vision only in appearance. Watanabe's signature, repeated identically collection after collection, lies precisely in the reinterpretation of the classics, subjected to millimetric upheavals, to subtle shifts, to the point of becoming, if not seditious, certainly unexpected. The Korean Juun J opens with a series of black tie looks of lustrous, nocturnal sophistication, before returning to the hybrids and dramatic oversize of always. The collection is flawless, but the aesthetic remains stuck in a formula that seems less and less au courant and which at this point should be renewed.

Usually prone to a certain laissez-faire, always ready to derail in the most improbable directions, Miharayasuhiro opens in dress-up banking - soft double-breasted mock-ups in shades of grey - and closes with the unbuttoned trousers, oversized jackets and grafts that are his bread and butter. Convinced that in the darkness of the present time, knowledge is important, Pierre Maheo chose L'Ecole Duperré, a well-known Parisian, public art school, for the Officine Generale fashion show. The collection, however, has nothing scholastic or preppy about it, but is an elevated iteration of Maheo's essentialism: a recipe of liquid volumes, beautiful fabrics, maniacal attention to detail that changes everything. The formula works, and the growing successes confirm it By Willy Chavarria the disproportionate scale of the show - the set of a criminal love story, filmed live with a cast of models, actors and singers that includes Mahmood - distracts from the paucity of clothes - pinstripe suits and Mexican street gang workwear - while highlighting how risky it is to quickly become the media's darling; priorities jump, and getting talked about at any cost becomes more important than producing something relevant. At Namacheko, Dilan Lurr imagines a dialogue between generations that is punkish rather than romantic. Parents' and grandparents' clothes, or rather the shapes and materials that evoke them, are sliced up, assembled, polished, studded with gentle fury and graphic taste.

In fine form, in the end, Rei Kawakubo, from Comme des Garçons, exhorts to come out of the black hole and shoots out a caliginous collection in which male belligerence - hockey helmets, tycoon tailoring - is contradicted, distorted, cancelled out by feminine softness and exuberance - a theory of schoolgirl or schoolgirl dresses, couture inflorescences, sculptural volumes. It is a typically Comme game of contrasts, with the difference that after some rather bitter years, Kawakubo opts for a lyrical, ineffable and dry tone that gets to the point with undeniable lightness, and with a precision of intent that is lacking in fashion today.