For the last several days, our fashion reporter Jacob Gallagher has been in Paris for the men’s fashion shows. Here, a recap of his reviews of the shows to know, which were previously published in The Fashions newsletter. If you haven’t subscribed, do so now to get Jacob’s takes early. There’s more from Paris on the way.
Was that Missy Elliott on the runway at Rick Owens?
Come on, how could I not have thought of Missy Elliott bouncing around in her exploded garbage bag suit when Rick Owens’s models came out in their balloony black Adidas tracksuits? As they passed, I could make out the petite fans stitched to the backside working overtime. I envied their wearable A/C units as I sat wilting on one of Paris’s hottest days on record.
As for the Missy Elliott allusions in Owens’s new Adidas collaboration, it wasn’t just the blowup ensembles that rendered those models like well-nourished sumo wrestlers. Elliott was, after all, the first female rapper to have a sneaker deal with Adidas. This must have been a nod to her, right?
Not so, Owens said backstage. The suits were an idea he excavated while spelunking through the Adidas archives. They were designed, originally, for runners to cool off. When he saw them, they tickled his taste for the stupefying.
“I’m all about making things exaggerated and grotesque, but it’s also functional and technical,” Owens said.
In those terms, the collection was sort of split. There were plenty of triple-striped Adidas tracksuits with petite “Owenscorp” embossing and springy running sneakers. (Contrary to many designer shoe collabs, Owens said those would not be limited and would be priced affordably.)
The other component was Owens, in complete control of his extrava-goth image. Jackets with dramatic Dracula collars, stilt-like platform boots, coats with shoulders as angular as the set of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.”
Backstage, Owens, with sweat pouring down his temples, was in a giddy doomer mood. He was feeling impotent against the passing of time, against the ills of the world. We were, he reminded this reviewer, all going to die eventually. Heavy stuff to hear after just, you know, taking in some tracksuits and leathers.
“All I can do is my best,” Owens said, smirking all the while. “Contribute something, put one foot in front of the other, until I die.”
Yet isn’t it also a message about how we dress? For his entire career Owens has been evangelizing that you’ve got to wear the wild thing — the coat with alpine-peak shoulders, the three-foot-tall boots, even just that leather jacket you didn’t think you could pull off — because, hey, life is fleeting.
“I’m not saving something for special occasions,” Owens said. “This is all for normal life.” So go ahead, wear that inflated trackie to 7-Eleven.
When Jonathan Anderson is at his best
Jonathan Anderson is a pants designer.
That is to say, there are designers who work from the top down, those for whom jackets, sweaters are what you remember. Their pants? Plain, standard. But the tops? Wild, fecund, alluring. Anderson, who is now a year into his run at Dior, is the other sort — a designer whose pants are the point.
His latest collection at Dior stuck to this standard. We got nubbly jeans, like a denim teddy bear after a few spin cycles; sequined gold and silver trousers, like a shattered disco ball glued to the legs of one’s pants. Those were the descendants of the glittery, high-waist trousers that Anderson ran off in his spring 2024 show at Loewe, which remains, to me, his high-water mark.
There were derelict jeans with silver threads suspended through their holes, a continuation from Dior’s resort show in Los Angeles last month. Twill shorts had legs as broad as basketball hoops, and a set of pink pants shared DNA with designs from his first collection for Dior a year ago.
It wasn’t just pants that impress. It was tailcoats fit for an 18th-century marquis and tweedy Bar jackets contorted into blazers with hourglass waists. Bulbous-toe shoes and bow ties worn casually. And it was models dressed as if they’d taken a champagne-enhanced romp through the wardrobe department of the Paris Opera.
“Something is changing,” Anderson said. “You know, kids are dressing up, they’re mixing things.” His thinking, he said, was partly informed by walking along the Seine at 7 in the morning.
The new stabs that made an impact included a trio of sagging, see-through suits with not a whiff of structure to them, an olive work jacket with matching pants, which I guess were either pajamas or a suit, depending on your lifestyle. Maybe both! But what I will remember more were the gold shorts he wore with it.
Louis Vuitton surfs where many have surfed before
I’ve always believed that whenever a luxury brand sends out a collection inspired by surfing, it’s a flashing red flag. Sabato De Sarno’s final Gucci show was a ride of random surfing tropes. He was shown the door soon after. I’ve sat through a handful of these now, and the artifice always overwhelms. Plainly, there remains something cringe about watching a shoeless model cart a surfboard down the runway.
And yet, on Tuesday evening, Louis Vuitton became the latest company to return to surfing. Some of Vuitton’s latest looks were caught in the riptide of surfer clichés: a parka with wave embellishments, palm tree prints in shadowy hues and shearling boots with fur linings, an upscale take on après-surf Uggs. The backdrop was a three-story wave in perpetual motion, and there were — loud sigh — models with monogrammed surfboards tucked under their arms.
(A member of the design team noted that these surfboards were not artificial playthings; they could actually be ridden. Additionally, the monogrammed wet suits were made by a wet suit supplier in the south of France.)
A lighter hand on the surf seasoning would have allowed the clothes to go down better. As I’ve said before, I think Louis Vuitton’s clothes are often more thought out and are more aligned with what men wear on the rues and avenues right now than those of its luxury competitors.
This was again the case. Brush the sand out of your eyes and you could make out smart ideas, like a burnished denim field jacket with its chest pockets turned horizontally, the better to tuck your hands into them, or the shaved-down zip-up cardigan, like a Cowichan sweater on a diet.
I even liked the not-quite-Vans sneakers, with their wonky toe shape. Ditto the jeans, with a dusting of chirpy patches. On the whole, this collection was lighter on the gaudy, “Look at how much I spent!” frivolities than what Vuitton has pumped out in the past.
OK, so there was a hand-painted crocodile leather jacket. Those exotic indulgences are a wave that we can’t anticipate the brand, under Williams, to hop off any time soon.
