From Kim Jones’s Vuitton Goodbye to Hedi Slimane’s Céline Surprise, All the Highlights From the Paris Men’s Shows

With the haute couture shows underway, Vogue Runway’s writers are sharing their parting thoughts on Paris’s Fall 2018 menswear collections.

Sarah Mower

It’s been a week memorable for its major comings and goings. Kim Jones’s Louis Vuitton exit made for an emotional beginning, and then came the unexpected announcement yesterday that Hedi Slimane will be starting at Céline in 12 days’ time. The fevered speed of change in the fashion industry shows no sign of abating, or of displaying any collective logic about where it’s going—unless I’m being very dumb about it. I personally get upset by the here-today-gone-tomorrow-ness of the way designers are treated now, and the endless gossip storms it generates around jobs and reputations. Surely, the harder it is to keep up, the less the public will end up caring about who’s at which brand? I don’t want the status of creative people to be ground down. That said, with personalities as big as Kim Jones and Hedi Slimane, there’s a chance that their tribes will biblically rise up and follow them. It’s unknown where Jones is going so far, but Slimane’s arrival is good news for the expansion of menswear—for the first time ever, Céline will be selling it.

With all this change and uncertainty sloshing around, I’m finding it harder than ever to say this or that is a definite thing that’s happening in menswear. The thing-iest thing I think I noticed was the hybridization of previously separated genres of clothing, whether in the what-goes-with-what sense, the actual bolting-together of garments à la John Galliano at Maison Margiela, or, as at Vetements, the piling on of layer after layer until it’s actually impossible to distinguish what the bloke’s wearing. Bearing all this in mind, Chitose Abe’s Sacai hybridization of sportswear had never looked so normalized, or as convincing.

Men still seem to want to moan about wearing suits (I never understand this, as I love suits), so designers like Lucas Ossendriver at Lanvin, Sarah Burton (Alexander McQueen), and Pierpaolo Piccioli (Valentino) seemed to be working up ways of disguising them with layered or grafted-on casualwear. They’re saying it’s okay for a grown-up to wear track pants with tailoring. Me, I’d just go for an actual suit (fascinating: both Kris Van Assche and John Galliano smoothed Dior Bar jacket–like cutting into the waists of their jackets). Or, were I a rugged bloke, just about anything from that genius grafter-together of preexisting brands, Junya Watanabe. Anything you felt inspired by, Luke?

Luke Leitch

Oh Sarah, I can totally see you in a luxury-technical Junya x North Face jacket. That la-di-da couture crowd wouldn’t know what to make of it! And I do also see how the observation that a track pant—or at least a tailored track pant in a luxury material—can be worn by men with a tailored jacket might seem a little bit prosaic. Yet for many men of a certain age and background the suit represents obligation—the obligation to dress in a certain garment to conform to gender norms. And right now it seems useful to encourage a reevaluation of the canon of clothing, the better to facilitate a shift in those norms. That’s why the Lanvin show was so very interesting: a hard grapple with what was and could be in tailoring and beyond.

There is no doubt that tailoring, as Paul Smith discussed at his show, is so not hot right now. Even he slipped in a zipped-at-the-ankle biker-meets-track pant into his collection, a telling contingency against the pulsating suits that were its mainstay. There were other brand-defined, tailoring-led holdouts, too: Freshly relaunched Brioni took an extremely considered and unstintingly luxurious take on its métier. Berluti was full of dreamy tailoring for men with fantasy bank accounts. McQueen’s new suits were wider in the shoulder, “exploded,” as Sarah Burton put it, and judiciously mixed with many-layered outerwear. Both Dunhill and Wooyoungmi put their men into oversize jackets, as if they were waiting for their customers to grow into them.

My favorite observation of the week was from Rick Owens: “It’s funny how sneakers became the male corsage of this contemporary culture.” Certainly you can see in the ongoing emphasis in elaborateness of product from sportswear- and technical-led fashion brands that peacockery is moving away from its Pitti-driven roots to streetwear. It’s not the loudest voice in Paris, but I thought Issey Miyake this season presented a realistically hybridized wardrobe in which the traditional shapes of suiting are softened, reduced, and given equal prominence in the wardrobe to sportswear pieces. Tailoring is no longer the thing, but just a thing—and because we don’t need to wear it anymore it has to be brilliant to make us want to. Amy, we barely saw each other, how was this week for you?

Amy Verner

It’s true, Luke; I think the only time all four of us were under the same roof was at Vuitton. You couldn’t help wonder how exactly Kim would say goodbye and whether it would be felt in some way other than deep respect—I’m thinking sentimentality or nostalgia. The cameos from Naomi and Kate made for a super-fun finale, and if I could only have read his mind as he took that final tour. I thought the fashion tone of this swan song was pitch-perfect: It emerged from a personal place, played into an extreme travel experience, and exuded high-octane luxe. To me, the generally sandy/stony palette felt like Vuitton’s refined response to the blank page soon to be written anew.

Among the shows I actually reviewed, it was impossible to not read into the pendulum swinging between a valorization of casual as at Off-White and Julien David, and a certain vulnerability that arose at OAMC, Yohji Yamamoto, and Ann Demeulemeester. Of the latter grouping, I am referring less to an androgynous look then the studied approach taken by Luke Meier, Glenn Martens, and Sébastien Meunier, who, from entirely different directions, were giving men options to express a different side of themselves—one they might not have known existed. Designers will always find a way to get us wanting a new pair of jeans or bomber jacket; but to actually question what it would take to shift into another style register or identity intrigues me.

Otherwise, I was curious whether we would see any direct reaction to #MeToo in the shows, if not the collections. We didn’t, and I haven’t decided whether this simply means that a movement need not always be immediately reflected in fashion, or that men’s designers weren’t sure whether it would seem opportunistic, rather than supportive, to do so. That said, perhaps we shouldn’t have been so surprised to see two nods to The New York Times from Sacai and Études—as though, when so much else is in flux, this becomes a reference of reliability. All the news fit to print, indeed!

Lastly, as usual, I am inclined to single out Officine Generale’s Pierre Mahéo, who passionately told me how much he is against the concept of normalization. If I remember correctly, he said, “How can we desire this when we’re all different—and clothes should reflect this.” What makes his clothes so desirable is not that they look normal, but that you can wear them normally. Clothes that don’t ask too much of you always win.

Nick Remsen

Paris, for me, finally brought some spark back to my relationship with men’s fashion. We’d been a little distanced. I suspect this freshened magnetism is due to a potent mixture of nostalgia, narrative, and no-holds-barred commentary.

With nostalgia: Popular culture overall seems to be having a moment with nostalgia, particularly the sort that tangles with all the emotion and elation of adolescence. (For me, the main gravity centers here, outside the catwalk tents, are the Netflix program Stranger Things (one and two) and the film Call Me by Your Name.) No less than three very separate designers told me they were thinking about teenager-dom and its awkwardness—but also its wide-world-ahead potential—this season: Hiromichi Ochiai at Facetasm, Saif Bakir and Emma Hedlund at CMMN SWDN, and Junichi Abe at Kolor. To someone who recently turned 30, and who finds himself thinking longingly of a more analog era, when imagination (and not Instagram) ruled, a chord was struck.

As for narrative, search no further than Palomo Spain. Alejandro Gómez Palomo’s anecdote for Fall was called “Hunting,” serving up a double entendre of physically going out in the woods and looking for quail or dove or deer to shoot, but also . . . well, physically going out in the woods and looking for intimacy. He tells stories from a unique and sensitive and magnificent perspective; that his almost-regal clothing appears better made this season renders him all the more promising.

And lastly, there’s commentary. GmbH took a strong, but evenly calibrated, position on senses of otherness; of immigrants, perhaps feeling unwelcome even in countries that hold in their heritage a message of open arms for all. Likewise, Chitose Abe’s New York Times “Truth” campaign hoodie, much-posted on social media, made its point loud and clear. One of its lines summed up my overall takeaway: “The truth,” like the fashion with conviction that I saw in Paris, “is necessary.”