Key takeaways from Paris Fashion Week Men’s

Among the smaller brands, buyers and editors praised Japanese brands Undercover and Auralee, Paris-based label Meta Campania Collective, and Kidsuper, which collaborated this season with Cirque du Soleil. “It was obvious [Kidsuper founder Dillane] Colm put a lot of effort into the fashion. The clothes were great,” says fashion consultant Julie Gilhart of the Kidsuper show.

Menswear eschews formality

Casual menswear dominated this season, including at Dior and Hermès. “If you’re an Hermès customer, there’s a sort of a sense that casualness is almost more luxurious than dressing up. If you’re at that level of the market, you can wear what you like,” Sullivan notes. Casual dominated off the runway too. “I’ve seen two ties this week, and [Michael Sebastian] has been wearing both of them,” he adds. (Fashion week goers favoured sneakers to walk between metro stations or take a Lime bike and avoid disruption across the city.)

“With the summer approaching, being more casual is a good thing,” says Mytheresa’s Johnson. “You kind of want to mix and match items. When we buy for the winter season, you’ve got September, back to the office, pre-festive events, more occasions to buy tailored dressed-up pieces. Summer is lighter, easier, so casual is a good thing because it’s what people want to buy at this point.”

There were inevitable nods to sports this season, as fashion week collided with the Euros and Paris counts down to the Olympics and Paralympics. Y-3, a collaboration between Yohji Yamamoto and sportswear brand Adidas, returned to the Paris schedule and presented the Japanese Football Association’s jersey. Emeric Tchatchoua’s label 3.Paradis presented a collaboration with the NBA, while Louis-Gabriel Nouchi collaborated with Puma on sneakers with “a radical mule design”.

The blokecore trend, inspired by football culture, continued. It was notably visible in the Louis Vuitton collection, which included football shirts and a bomber jacket.

Reflecting the world or escaping it?

A few designers addressed the political situation directly. In his show notes, Walter Van Beirendonck wrote, “In today’s world, everything feels endlessly dramatic. Extremes everywhere, extremists getting the last laugh.” In the collection, Van Beirendonck “explored extremes in his proportions”, wrote Vogue Runway’s José Criales-Unzueta.