From plagues to floods to black Tuesday, fashion continues

PARIS That the last day of Paris Fashion Week was also a Black Tuesday and a Black Tuesday, with massive protesters marching furiously through the Place de la Concorde to the National Assembly to protest the reform retreats seemed inevitable. Of course, there would be a revolt. There have been fires, plague, floods. How else could we have expected this baffling and busy fashion month to end?

The strangeness started with a strangely abandoned show program in New York, moved to London in the midst of Storm Dennis and crawled across Milan with the coronavirus. When Paris was driving, there were also face masks and extreme amounts of hand sanitizer.

The last show of the season took place at the Louvre with closed shutters: closed to tourists and art lovers due to staff fears about the virus, but apparently not for Louis Vuitton (at least not his lessons). In the crowds, fashion people scruffy as always, but the atmosphere was not the same as always. They walked past the dusty pyramid at sunset, of course, but also past groups of police in black riot gear with hinged leather armor and plastic shields, before dozens of slow-moving police vans near. Instead of the usual dazed relief as the fashion circus was almost over, there was barely restrained desire to flee. Get me out of here! We can now return to self-quarantine.

But you can't run away from it, said Sarah Burton backstage a day earlier at Alexander McQueen, just before a show, she called a love letter to other women, to my team, to our children, steeped in the history of Wales: its red houses, its poetry , its quilts, its landscapes, its conviviality.

You have to be there, said Burton. We have to be bold, even when we feel fragile. Or at least dress like we are. Ms. Burtons making gray and black lines intended to mimic a puffy quilting pattern that crossed the body with graphic details, often with a swallowtail hem on the back.

Her covered dresses draped in leather and wool, just like a shoulder; and her finely beaded dresses worn over smooth leather leggings and falling somewhere between the spiderweb and chainmail, and a little more: take a closer look and there were hearts encrusted in the embroidery. This is what fashion can give you: a way of being in the world. A way to get around during the day, but in a disturbing way, this day evolves because, well, it covers you.

Voluntary word game. A bit of humor is not a bad thing at the moment. Witness Glenn Martens from Y / Project, who is a bit good at tweaking the basics of everyday life to continually challenge what is revealed, what is hidden and what makes you blink and look again. Like jeans and other deep V-cut pants at the front, they seemed eternally unzipped, worn in a variety of combinations, like a form of perverse leggings. Now you see what exactly do you see?

One way to suggest that we have all undone, perhaps. And that despite all of that, you don't have to worry about falling off your pants. There is an internal belt. In the end, we understand it. I hope. Most.

Chitose Abe to Sacai usually does, fixing a puzzle each season to combine disparate and opposing elements into one big whole, then solve it. This time it was Chesterfields and tuxedos (male shots) and lingerie (female), and the result, which could easily have been lumpy, was rather elegantly released.

AT Miu Miu, Miuccia Prada may have avoided her usual press meeting after the show, but her run brooded for her in a very idiosyncratic game of silver screen covering: crushed silk sheaths in brilliant circuses, taffeta beanbags, 1940s matched with skirts split at the thigh; sliding pure crystal drops. As she said by email, the clothes not only impress others, but help to reframe a perception of the wearer in their own mind.

And at Chanel, Virginie Viard continued her ever-so-light relief from the legacy of Karl Lagerfeld. So far, her main innovation has been the pockets (this is not sarcasm; the pockets are great) but this time she has also given up the elaborate settings that Mr. Lagerfeld made famous in favor of a mirrored floor and some half-hearted smoke machines, through which his models wandered, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in threes, arguing, as if They had forgotten that they were on a track.