VIP guests, including Sir Elton John and Kirsten Dunst, were guided through near-darkness to their “seats”: simple stools set against circular pods, each punctured by a small kinky-feeling viewing window.

When the show began, the blinds lifted; the classical music soundtrack cut by the sharp punctuation of barking dogs.

Inside the hubs, models appeared like mannequins behind glass — private viewing holes turned into a couture peep show.

Couture as show
The white, sterile-lit staging leaned into the idea of a curated gaze.

Each guest saw a slice, not always the whole: a face, a shoulder, a shimmer of fabric, then the next.

The set read like a sterilized, futuristic cell — clean, white, clinical — made more unsettling by the soundscape, which kept slipping from elegance into angry animal sounds.

It was a clever piece of showcraft: creative director Alessandro Michele, a maximalist by instinct, using restriction as a hook.

He didn’t flood the room with spectacle; he rationed it.

Spectacular set, restrained clothes
The often dazzling clothes, however, didn’t always match the set’s ambition.

Michele delivered disco sheen — sparkle, gems, bedazzled headwear and layered gold collars with a faint circus edge — but the couture itself felt comparatively restrained, even cautious.

There were strong flashes: bold sleeves that swelled toward leg-of-mutton proportions; sequined surfaces that caught the light with that Valentino polish; and occasional provocation in the way the body was framed.

The skirts of giant billowing dresses nicely overwhelmed the human form.

But for a designer known for excess, the collection often played it safe.

Stars and strobe stripes

Front row heat underlined the stakes.

The room pulled in a heavy mix of celebrity and brand power, from Dakota Johnson to Lily Allen and Tyla, plus global ambassadors and high-wattage fashion regulars.

The atmosphere said “event.”

The collection said “reset”: a designer calibrating his volume, testing how far he can bend Valentino’s couture codes without breaking them.

Michele can stage a show — that much is settled.

Fashion insiders remember Garavani

For Suzy Menkes, the emotion around this Valentino couture show was immediate.

Coming straight from Garavani’s funeral in Rome to Paris couture week, the fashion industry doyenne and former International Herald Tribune fashion critic said “people do feel emotional” because “it is an end of an era.”

She described a wider pattern, too: “one designer or elderly designer after another” has “gently disappeared.” But this, she suggested, felt like “a special one” — not only inside the industry, but beyond it.

Menkes said Valentino was “a designer that everybody could understand,” with “so many clients and famous people” that it wasn’t just “those who were contracted to fashion who knew of him.”

Asked about her own history with Valentino, she traced it back “about 45 years ago,” when she was a junior journalist — “he didn’t pay much attention” to her, she recalled, though he was “always polite,” surrounded by “an enormous number of people” from fashion and “social society.”

She acknowledged that “we’ve got some really good designers who are taking over and doing a terrific job,” but insisted the transition doesn’t feel identical: “it’s not the same character… it doesn’t seem to be the same person who was there before.”

AP

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Not just in fabric, but in attitude.

Even with major couture debuts at Chanel, Dior and Armani Privé — and a week shadowed by Valentino Garavani’s death in Rome — the strongest message on the runways was restraint with impact.

Clothes that looked miraculous up close, but less like museum pieces and more like something a woman could actually move in.

Sheer, weightless.

Transparency was the season’s easiest headline, but the point wasn’t nakedness: It was craft made to float.

Chanel opened Matthieu Blazy’s first couture collection with the powerhouse’s classic skirt suit rendered in blush organza: familiar, but ghosted.

In the front row, the message landed on celebrities too: Nicole Kidman arrived in black feathered Chanel with pearl accessories, proof that “lightness” doesn’t have to read fragile, while Gracie Abrams popped in a light, wispy fringed Chanel tweed in electric yellow.

The tailoring was strict; the fabric was airy.

At rival Dior, Jonathan Anderson pushed the same idea through contrast, pairing nearly sheer ribbed tanks with painstakingly embroidered evening skirts: a couture bottom with a real-life top.

Armani Privé, under Silvana Armani — who put on her first couture show since her uncle Giorgio Armani died in September — made lightness look expensive. Organza shirts and ties appeared alongside “mille-feuille” gowns that shimmered through layers of micro-crystals without turning heavy.

Elie Saab, the patron saint of red-carpet spectacle, chased breeziness too, making embroidery melt into tulle and fringe fall like liquid metal.

At Schiaparelli, Teyana Taylor amplified the season ’s see-through mood in a sheer lace dress layered with jewelry — lingerie-level exposure, couture-level intention.

Couture gets wearable

A second shift ran through the week: couture moving toward the daily wardrobe.

Blazy framed Chanel as “real-life couture” — clothes for work, for a play, for whatever — and the collection followed through with pieces that felt more relatable without losing the house’s polish.

Anderson argued that couture doesn’t require a corset to count. He used knit as couture structure, not comfort: spun, shaped and built into dresses and sweaters with tailoring rigor.

The best street-style evidence came from Dior’s own ambassador: Jennifer Lawrence showed up in a men’s Dior coat with oversized fuzzy cuffs, jeans and black shoes — a front-row look that mirrored the runway’s dressed-down direction.

Armani Privé led with relaxed suiting, softened tailoring and a more edited lineup. Fewer looks, more suits, calmer glamour — couture as something to live in, not merely survive.

Even Saab nodded to wearability with his tank-top-and-skirt silhouette, a red-carpet idea stripped down to a modern uniform.

Nature, but with teeth

Motifs leaned hard into nature, though designers treated it less as decoration and more as code: freedom, escape, transformation.

Chanel’s birds fluttered across seams and turned up in feather effects, buttons, and embroideries, giving the collection a dreamlike lift.

Dior’s starting point was cyclamen — oversized floral earrings that set a tone of reverence and reinvention at once.

But Schiaparelli refused the gentle version of nature. Designer Daniel Roseberry went full animal: wings, spikes, claws and scorpion tails that made the body look altered, almost dangerous.

Attending Schiaparelli, Lauren Sánchez Bezos leaned into pure signal color in a blood-red skirt suit, the kind of look that reads from the natural world like a warning sign.

Dakota Johnson rocked the Valentino show in a maximalist animal-print top with black lace micro shorts.

Dutch design duo Viktor & Rolf pushed the same instinct into metaphor, building their collection around flight and staging transformation through removable, colorful, kite-inspired elements that turned grounded black into something freer, stranger, brighter.

Engineered volume

For all the softness, couture also snapped back into structure.

Anderson opened Dior with hourglass volume built by hand — ruched, stitched, and shaped in tulle — creating silhouette without the usual armor.

French couturier Stéphane Rolland, in a circus venue, took geometry as gospel: balloon pants, jumpsuits and coats built from circular ideas and Cubist shapes, cut in gazar and satin, then finished with stones and sharp accessories.

Schiaparelli treated couture like sculpture, with protrusions and rigid forms that turned fashion into performance art.

Lebanese favorite Zuhair Murad doubled down on control: ribbed, architectural gowns, unapologetic mermaid lines and surface work so dense it never went quiet.

Soft palettes, sharp punches

On color, many houses sat in quiet tones — blush, pale pink, sand, celadon — and let texture carry the drama.

Armani Privé’s palette was all nuance: jade and soft pastels, controlled and clean. Even the guests played along: Kate Hudson arrived for Armani Privé in a collared baby-pink sequined top with black velvet pants, turning the pastel story into a paparazzi-ready uniform.

Chanel’s blush transparency made romance feel modern.

Saab leaned into metallic gradients — gold and silver sliding across dresses like moving light — a new kind of shimmer.

Then came the punctures: Rolland’s cooked tones — burgundy, caramel, strong reds — against stark black and white.

And Valentino, in a show by designer Alessandro Michele staged like a curated act of voyeurism, delivered the clearest exclamation point of the week. The final line landed in the simplest statement possible: Valentino red.

AP

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