Valentino Holds Black Tie Paris Show, Lanvin Goes Simple

Models wear creations as part of the Lanvin Fall/Winter 2023-2024 ready-to-wear collection presented Sunday, March 5, 2023 in Paris. (AP)
Models wear creations as part of the Lanvin Fall/Winter 2023-2024 ready-to-wear collection presented Sunday, March 5, 2023 in Paris. (AP)
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Valentino Holds Black Tie Paris Show, Lanvin Goes Simple

Models wear creations as part of the Lanvin Fall/Winter 2023-2024 ready-to-wear collection presented Sunday, March 5, 2023 in Paris. (AP)
Models wear creations as part of the Lanvin Fall/Winter 2023-2024 ready-to-wear collection presented Sunday, March 5, 2023 in Paris. (AP)

Cars snaked for blocks dropping off countless VIPs for Valentino’s “black tie” show at Paris Fashion Week as the evening Paris lights bathed the nearby Arc de Triomphe. Its designer Pierpaolo Piccioli put on a star-studded collection that deconstructed the suit amid androgyny and sartorial plays.

Meanwhile at Lanvin, stars such as Avril Lavigne sat beneath the Gothic-style arches to view the oldest couture house’s latest designs, which subtly evoked history.

Here are some highlights of Sunday’s ready-to-wear displays.

Valentino’s black tie

Brooklyn Beckham and Nicole Peltz soaked up photographers’ flashes inside the ornate Hotel Salomon de Rothschild in the moment of calm before the storm. Then as 8pm approached, hordes of fashion insiders wrestled for their places at one of the Paris season’s hotly anticipated shows.

This fall, Piccioli captured the gender fluid zeitgeist with a display that dissected the suit – with black ties, flashes of punk and gold earrings.

Sheer black blouses sported big white polka dots. A white shirt and black tie became an all-enveloping floor sweeping gown. Myriad plumes poked out deftly from a statement black and white striped feather coat.

Thin black ties – the theme of the show -- were abundant, as were takes on the white shirt, which at times caught echoes of Celine’s Hedi Slimane.

Yet the monochromatic musing was handled with subtlety, and balanced with bursts of on-trend eye-popping color – such as a long wool citrine coat or an emerald green leather poncho-jacket.

The art of the invitation

The age of email and rising environmental awareness doesn’t seem to have left much of a mark on the fashion industry’s antiquated system of invitations. Season after season, gasoline-guzzling couriers crisscross Paris to personally deliver ever-elaborate, often handmade, invites – sometimes even for shows touting ecological awareness!

Top houses vie for the wackiest or most imaginative idea that often bears a clue as to the theme of the runway collection.

Balenciaga’s invite was a toile blazer set against a plain background that fashion insiders interpreted as signaling a fresh start for the embattled designer Demna Gvasalia. Balenciaga apologized last year after harsh industry-wide criticism of its ads featuring child abuse papers and bondage bears.

Gvasalia has told media that he was now going back to his roots of making jackets as that is where he began as a designer, acknowledging with humility that fashion was not about “buzz.”

Givenchy sent out a giant patent black croc purse containing the details of the show that moved in a glamorous direction.

While, was Chloe’s invitation box of Alain Ducasse designer cacao chocolates aimed at sweetening guests after a spate of middling reviews?

Lanvin is simple

References to the 1940s, 1980s, the 18th century, the medieval and the Renaissance mingled together inside the historic arches of Paris’ thirteenth century College of Bernardins. Yet despite these myriad styles, this fall-winter collection remained a pared down affair -- simply chic, and intentionally lacking in adornments and embellishments.

There were some nice touches. Stud-like polka-dots adorning shirts, slit skirt-suits and coats provided a lift. Elsewhere, a pink 1940s coat with sloping shoulders became a statement piece in textured pink. A black satine gown featured a diagonal dynamic cleverly matching the angle of the stone arches in the decor behind.

The show’s simplicity belied the inner passion of Lanvin’s designer Bruno Sialelli. The house quoted the Swedish-American Sculptor Claes Oldenburg, who died last year, as saying: “Making things. What fun! And things being made, Go away!”

Alexander McQueen’s orchid

Designer Sarah Burton said she was drawn to the orchid, the leitmotif of her gothic-tinged fall collection for Alexander McQueen, because of its strange beauty and adaptability.

“It thrives in the air, resists being rooted and grows in the wild,” she said. “The orchid mimics both predator and prey.”

The anatomy of the orchid – and of human flesh – was this dissected in this original display that turned the beauty of the one of the world’s most common flowers into something almost threatening, sinister and provocative.

The inside orchid featured as a blown up white image on the skirt of a black billowing Asiatic look. Taken from above, the flower’s lips and column resembled a fierce creature, mouth open, ready to feed.

A sublime sheath in torch red had Giger-like tendrils creeping round the bust and hips evoking the myriad orchid roots.

Front row stars Eddie Redmayne and Elle Fanning admired and applauded.



Indigenous Fashion Week in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Explores Heritage in Silk and Hides

A model wears a design by Lauren Good Day on the runway at the 2025 Native Fashion Show, Friday, May 9, 2025, in Santa Fe, N.M. (AP Photo/Roberto E. Rosales)
A model wears a design by Lauren Good Day on the runway at the 2025 Native Fashion Show, Friday, May 9, 2025, in Santa Fe, N.M. (AP Photo/Roberto E. Rosales)
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Indigenous Fashion Week in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Explores Heritage in Silk and Hides

A model wears a design by Lauren Good Day on the runway at the 2025 Native Fashion Show, Friday, May 9, 2025, in Santa Fe, N.M. (AP Photo/Roberto E. Rosales)
A model wears a design by Lauren Good Day on the runway at the 2025 Native Fashion Show, Friday, May 9, 2025, in Santa Fe, N.M. (AP Photo/Roberto E. Rosales)

Fashion designers from across North America are bringing together inspiration from their Indigenous heritage, culture and everyday lives to three days of runway modeling that started Friday in a leading creative hub and marketplace for Indigenous art.
A fashion show affiliated with the century-old Santa Fe Indian Market is collaborating this year with a counterpart from Vancouver, Canada, in a spirit of Indigenous solidarity and artistic freedom. A second, independent runway show at a rail yard district in the city has nearly doubled the bustle of models, makeup and final fittings.
Elements of Friday's collections from six Native designers ran the gamut from silk parasols to a quilted hoodie, knee-high fur boots and suede leather earrings that dangled to the waste. Models on the Santa Fe catwalks include professionals, dancers and Indigenous celebrities from TV and the political sphere, The Associated Press said.
Clothing and accessories rely on materials ranging from of wool trade cloth to animal hides, featuring traditional beadwork, ribbons and jewelry with some contemporary twists that include digitally rendered designs and urban Native American streetwear from Phoenix.
“Native fashion, it’s telling a story about our understanding of who we are individually and then within our communities,” said Taos Pueblo fashion designer Patricia Michaels, of “Project Runway” reality TV fame. “You’re getting designers from North America that are here to express a lot of what inspires them from their own heritage and culture.”
Santa Fe style
The stand-alone spring fashion week for Indigenous design is a recent outgrowth of haute couture at the summer Santa Fe Indian Market, where teeming crowds flock to outdoor displays by individual sculptors, potters, jewelers and painters.
Designer Sage Mountainflower remembers playing in the streets at Indian Market as a child in the 1980s while her artist parents sold paintings and beadwork. She forged a different career in environmental administration, but the world of high fashion called to her as she sewed tribal regalia for her children at home and, eventually, brought international recognition.
At age 50, Mountainflower on Friday presented her “Taandi” collection — the Tewa word for “Spring” — grounded in satin and chiffon fabric that includes embroidery patterns that invoke her personal and family heritage at the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo in the Upper Rio Grande Valley.
“I pay attention to trends, but a lot of it’s just what I like,” said Mountainflower, who also traces her heritage to Taos Pueblo and the Navajo Nation. “This year it’s actually just looking at springtime and how it’s evolving. ... It’s going to be a colorful collection."
More than 20 designers are presenting at the invitation of the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts.
Fashion plays a prominent part in Santa Fe's renowned arts ecosystem, with Native American vendors each day selling jewelry in the central plaza, while the Institute for American Indian Arts delivers fashion-related college degrees in May.
This week, a gala at the New Mexico governor’s mansion welcomed fashion designers to town, along with social mixers at local galleries and bookstores and plans for pop-up fashion stores to sell clothes fresh off the fashion runway.
International vision
A full-scale collaboration with Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week is bringing a northern, First Nations flair to the gathering this year with many designers crossing into the US from Canada.
Secwépemc artist and fashion designer Randi Nelson traveled to Santa Fe from the city of Whitehorse in the Canadian Yukon to present collections forged from fur and traditionally cured hides — she uses primarily elk and caribou. The leather is tanned by hand without chemicals using inherited techniques and tools.
“We’re all so different,” said Nelson, a member of the Bonaparte/St’uxwtéws First Nation who started her career in jewelry assembled from quills, shells and beads. “There’s not one pan-Indigenous theme or pan-Indigenous look. We’re all taking from our individual nations, our individual teachings, the things from our family, but then also recreating them in a new and modern way.”
April Allen, an Inuk designer from the Nunatsiavut community on the Labrador coast of Canada, presented a mesh dress of blue water droplets. Her work delves into themes of nature and social advocacy for access to clean drinking water.
Vocal music accompanied the collection — layers of wordless, primal sound from musician and runway model Beatrice Deer, who is Inuit and Mohawk.
Urban Indian couture Phoenix-based jeweler and designer Jeremy Donavan Arviso said the runway shows in Santa Fe are attempting to break out of the strictly Southwest fashion mold and become a global venue for Native design and collaboration. A panel discussion Thursday dwelled on the threat of new tariffs and prices for fashion supplies — and tensions between disposable fast fashion and Indigenous ideals.
Arviso is bringing a street-smart aesthetic to two shows at the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts runway and a warehouse venue organized by Amber-Dawn Bear Robe, from the Siksika Nation.
“My work is definitely contemporary, I don’t choose a whole lot of ceremonial or ancestral practices in my work,” said Arviso, who is Diné, Hopi, Akimel O’odham and Tohono O’odham, and grew up in Phoenix. “I didn’t grow up like that. ... I grew up on the streets.”
Arviso said his approach to fashion resembles music sampling by early rap musicians as he draws on themes from major fashion brands and elements of his own tribal cultures. He invited Toronto-based ballet dancer Madison Noon for a “beautiful and biting” performance to introduce his collection titled Vision Quest.
Santa Fe runway models will include former US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland of Laguna Pueblo, adorned with clothing from Michaels and jewelry by Zuni Pueblo silversmith Veronica Poblano.