Is Bourgeois Elegance Back?

In the end, the Paris shows were about the stuff you know. Your mom’s pearls, which you hated as a girl but now love. A chic coat and a full cotton skirt printed with giant flowers that reminds you of a poodle skirt (its creator died this week, in Mexico, at age 101). Miuccia Prada put those looks and more on the Miu Miu runway.

The same feeling piped through Chanel and Louis Vuitton, which closed the fall ready-to-wear season on Wednesday night with a multimillion-dollar show for 4,000 people in an enclosed courtyard at the Louvre. Nicolas Ghesquière was celebrating his tenth anniversary as Vuitton’s women’s creative director, and a lot of the looks had aged better than Proust’s madeleine. And they were not as sweet, either.

Were long, sweeping wool coats with military-style buttons a nod to a memorably fine collection Ghesquière showed at the museum in 2018? If so, he had scraped off the fancy trim and boiled down the new coats to a sharp, elegant line, with the lower half sliced into several wide panels that also looked mildly frayed at the edges. It was a newer way to sober up the feminine glamour underneath.

Ghesquière seemed to push himself with this collection, as if wanting to show how all fashion is a reinvention of something in history, including one’s own. The sheer and silvery embellished black dot dresses, over leggings, that opened the presentation were lovely, as were the closing gowns in fragments of feathered light blue chiffon. Tailoring was distinctively flat and strange, as if formed in a mold. And a couple of print dresses, their shape and details evoking a Vuitton trunk, seemed dedicated to the people who obsessively consume the brand — they can now be a walking piece of luggage — and, as well, to his own curiosity.

Not surprisingly, Louis Vuitton had the biggest celebrity turnout of the shows, notably Emma Stone, Saoirse Ronan, Jennifer Connelly, Cate Blanchett, and Sarah Paulson. Felix of Stray Kids walked the show, in a clingy white turtleneck and silver-gray track pants. But, apart from Felix, half the audience couldn’t see them. Like the airlines, the essentially box set was designed so that an elite group sat on the inside and the rest of us roosted and sulked on the outside, our view of VIPs blocked by the bleacher-style seating and security. Quel drag.

Chanel, at least, had Brad Pitt on a screen. In a reenactment of Claude Lelouch’s 1966 film A Man and a Woman, Pitt appeared with Penelope Cruz at the seaside in Deauville, France — where Coco Chanel started her fashion house in 1912. The short film, by Inez and Vinoodh, was played before the models walked. And, what with the enormous panoramic screen in the center of the room and scenes of the lovebirds strolling on a beach, you could be forgiven for thinking you were watching an Apple commercial.

Still, I bet Coco would have been tickled pink. “This story is very close to my heart,” the brand’s creative director, Virginie Viard, said in her show notes, referring to Chanel’s Deauville years and the revolutionary style that she launched through the 1920s. To Viard, the decade and the ’70s “cross paths and intertwine.” This was one of her more alluring collections, partly because the many belted tweed suits and pants outfits conveyed a languid vibe thanks to long coats in lightly contrasting colors. Beefed up by tough shearling coats, a black leather jumpsuit, and lots of slouchy knitwear, her sportier clothes also looked fresh.

Miu Miu didn’t quite have the charge it usually does. It seemed almost a soliloquy on a woman’s life, on aging and the contents of her closet. For the first time in a very long while, Prada’s cast included older women, like the actress Kristin Scott Thomas. In her first Prada show, in 1988, she had some older models. There were also some throwback styles — or so I thought — to earlier Miu Miu shows, like cute mini dresses adorned with faux jewels.

Still, this was a solid collection, loaded with bourgeois elegance — those straight-line Milanese coats, the plain cotton shirt dresses, the dark fake fur coats over sexy low-cut jeans and a cropped denim jacket — and its fascination will probably deepen in the coming months. The style of the show did hem and haw quite a bit between reserve and sex, propriety and freedom. Which was surely the point.

As Prada said, every morning she has to decide “if I am a 15-year-old girl or a lady near death.”

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