Hang around the fashion industry for all of, oh, five minutes, and you’ll start to hear the term “classics with a twist.”
Designers say it, writers use it, marketing execs cite it. What they mean, typically, is something familiar, bent just enough to feel fresh — stylistically, and, of course, commercially.
Is it trite? Certainly. But I’ve been thinking about this cliché in recent days, as it applies so well to the best of what I’ve seen trudging through Paris Fashion Week: the clothes and outfits that contort the conventional just enough to make me lean in and say, “What’s going on there … and do I need it?”
It’s what I thought of when I saw the Yankees hat that Sigurd Bank, a forthright Dane who designs Mfpen, a Copenhagen label, was wearing when we met for coffee on Friday morning.
The hat looked like a kindergarten art project set upon by a hammerhead. Its faded brim was cleaved in half, a logo on the side had been stitched over by his daughter and the “NY” logo on the front had been covered with a swatch of plaid fabric held on by a safety pin.
He wasn’t taking a shot at New York in particular, but he did mention that there was “kind of an anti-U.S. thing going on in Europe” that compelled him to make his hat look less American.
I’ve seen tens of thousands of Yankees hats before, but none like Mr. Bank’s.
I’d also never seen an olive military jacket like the one Andre 3000 wore as he slithered into the Kenzo show just before the music kicked in. Here was the rarest creature at fashion week: a celebrity in the front row wearing his own clothes. What a concept.
The jacket was ragged and shredded. On the back, the musician had screen-printed a photo of his son. The most winning clothes are, as ever, the most personal.
Not that great style can’t be bought. On Friday, I visited the Avenue Montaigne store of Loewe, a brand that is skipping the runway this season as rumors circulate about the future of its creative director, Jonathan Anderson.
There I found a pair of pebble-grain penny loafers upgraded in a Kermit green so “aaoogah” eye-popping that it almost made me pay the roughly $1,000 price. The right twist can be budgetarily devastating.
If I was thinking more than usual about how much clothes should be tweaked this week, it was because I’d witnessed so much that felt overindulgent, if not borderline silly.
I saw, at Kenzo, bunny suits worn with underwear, an outfit suited only for a deleted scene in a Harmony Korine film. I saw, at Hodakova, a woman “dressed” in a stringless cello that nearly rendered her incapable of walking. At Vivienne Westwood, I saw ties the length of XXL lassos. (Designers, please stop trying to make the tie anything more than it is.)
Before these designers are given the keys to their venues, someone should remind them that a little adjustment can do a lot.
At least a few designers got the memo.
In a continuation of the paring-it-all-back approach he took in January for his men’s show, Rick Owens presented his version of wardrobe building blocks for women.
“Every once in a while we have to pull it back a bit,” Mr. Owens said backstage. He pulled it back just enough.
I’m not going to say that what Junya Watanabe presented wasn’t out there — moto jackets with sleeves made of boots are only for double-black, diamond-level dressers. But the flared snakeskin-like pants? The black coat made in geometric panels? The leather jacket that looked as if it had swallowed a hula hoop? All classic designs nudged along toward something new.
As for Matières Fécales, a label making its runway debut in Paris, the name almost kept me away. (It translates to fecal matter.) That would’ve been a mistake.
With the backing of Dover Street Market’s brand incubator, this was a sure-footed planting of the flag from the designers Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran. The pair, who are personalities in Mr. Owens’s extended universe, met in design school in Montreal a decade ago but are largely known for their own alien way of dressing. (Backstage after the show, Mr. Bhaskaran described their style as “posthuman.”) They are probably the only fledgling designers I can think of to already have 175,000 Instagram followers.
A flighty influencer brand this is not. Their debut, which owed a significant debt to the work of Mr. Owens as well as that of Alexander McQueen, flashed some true chops.
Hourglass blazers brandished shoulders peaked enough to recall the letter M. Sweaters were distressed with care, and leather jackets featured fecund sprouts of shearling at the collar and sleeve hem.
Models wore theatrical white makeup and witchy heels, but the nearly all black palette of the clothes themselves made the collection go down easily. They were classics. Twisted classics, but classics nonetheless.
