Rosie Scott Blog about Women

Australian designers on their inspirations and favourite Paris haunts.

During fashion week, Paris is a whirlwind of activity – not only is it an arguable epicentre of the world’s most eagerly awaited fashion shows but numerous buyers flock to Paris for re-sees of collections that occurred elsewhere in the world. This year, I enlisted my dear friend Lindy Klim to help me find out what Australian designers love most about the city of love. We used the opportunity to visit their Parisian showrooms and choose our favourite pieces for a whirlwind shoot while picking their brains on their beautiful collections.

Dion Lee

Tell me a little bit about the inspiration behind the collection.

With this collection I wanted to explore evening wear silhouettes that felt grounded and relatable. The silhouettes were created through slashing into the fabric at different points and allowing the fabric to collapse around the body. We have worked with silk satin, triple viscose, leather and mohair; a mixture of contrasting, luxurious textures.

What do you love about Paris?

I love the sense of intimacy. You feel like you are in a small town, on a large scale.

Favourite spot in Paris?

Comptoir De L’Image on Rue de Sevigne; an incredible archive of photography monoliths and rare design books.

Christopher Esber

Tell me a little bit about the inspiration behind the collection.

Desert landscapes were a major notion in this season's collection, influencing the white chalky hues and burnt yellows through to the raffia textures and finer pleat details. I wanted to take a skewed approach on the classics, the essentials that every woman needs in her wardrobe.

What do you love about Paris?

All the doors and architecture.

Favourite spot in Paris?

Breizh Cáfe would have to be my favourite café.

Tome

What is the inspiration behind the collection? Which fabrics did you use and why?

This season we chose two female artists, Belgian dancer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and American designer Donna Karan. They both rose to prominence in the early 80s and their aesthetic involved feminising and sensualising traditionally masculine elements. We took on their love of jersey and leotards; from Ann we took her geometry and from Donna the business banker cotton shirting stripes, bias cut satin dresses, and love for animal print. Then we took animal print in different directions by distorting it and elevating it in printed tissue silk lame, embroidered organza and wool blend jacquard.

What do you love about Paris?

The food, the museums, the Bon Marche!

Favourite spot in Paris?

It's not so secret but my favorite place is the Brancusi Atelier just outside the Centre Pompidou.

Michael Lo Sordo

What is the inspiration behind the collection? Which fabrics did you use and why?

My inspiration would have to be the creative gathering of models, photographers and fashion designers in the early 70s in Paris mixed with a hint of romance. One thing I’ve always loved on a woman is a sexy dress that makes her not only feel beautiful but also empowered. The collection has a hint of softness with movement of the sheer pleats – chiffons in black, white and red with an undertone of relaxed and effortless dressing.

What do you love about Paris?

There is a certain buzz that hits Paris during fashion week. You can feel the spark all around from the Eiffel Tower to the Sacré-Cœur. It’s hard not be inspired on a daily basis - whether I’m in the car or walking the streets - you never know what might grab your attention.

Favourite spot in Paris?

Every time I go to Paris the first thing I do is attempt to make a reservation at Breizh Cáfe in the Marais which is impossible at times because they are booked out until like 2018 and even though you must make a reservation over the phone they never pick up. But without a doubt the best crepes you will EVER have.

Toni Maticevski

Tell me a little bit about the inspiration and fabrics in the collection.

It started out purely about the fabrics. I noticed they all have a papery feel - everything was a bit tone on tone and shade against shade. So then I worked on silhouettes and shapes to exaggerate that supple crispness. I wanted it to feel clean but the detail in the garment to be really structured. So the whole thing felt a little constrained and relaxed at the same time.

What do you love about Paris?

What's not to love! The pastry, the language, the people, the city. It really feels like my second home. Since living there over 10 years ago just being able to go down any street and still discover something amazing is exciting.

Favourite spot in Paris?

Hmmmm. I love the little gardens across the city. It's so nice to be able to sit for five minutes outdoors surrounded by beautiful buildings, watching kids play and perfectly manicured flowers blooming.

Kym Ellery

Tell me a little bit about the collection, which fabrics did you use and why?

Artist Egon Schiele’s expressionistic painting kicked off inspiration for the collection, and is the muse you can thank for the voluminous, twisted, sharp, soft and asymmetrical shapes which were strong throughout the showcase. Think flared pants which are more office-chic than 70s flower child and frilled criss-cross draping on layered shirting, both exuding a certain sophisticated and clean-cut femininity. When designing I tend to choose my fabrics first. I feel like they really set the mood for the collection. I love to source unique textiles from Switzerland, France and Italy and there is never any substitute for quality.

What do you love about Paris?

I love the culture and history that comes with Paris. The city has such a rich history with so many stories, I really feel that when I walk the streets there.

Favourite spot in Paris?

I love sitting on the grass in the garden at Place des Vosges. Watching the children play in the fountain's water is one of my favourite things to do on the weekend. The fountains are the closest things to being at the beach for Parisians and as an Australian it is so fascinating to watch.

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It was called the “monokini,” but it entered the culture, in 1964, as the “topless swimsuit.” It was not designed to titillate teenage boys but to express feminist freedom—to take the erogenous and make it androgynous. And it came to fame not on the runway but in a head-on photograph that is now immortal: The impossibly stylized model Peggy Moffitt, quiet as a classical nude, wears a black wool tank suit cropped just under the bust, her wet Vidal Sassoon haircut like a crow’s wing in the rain.

Fashion magazines wouldn’t touch the subject, so Women’s Wear Daily ran the photo—a global shock that was denounced by the Vatican. That shot, Ms. Moffitt said in 2012, “took 1/60th of a second to do. Now, imagine having to spend the rest of your life talking about it.” The man who designed the monokini, the fearlessly futuristic Rudi Gernreich, has likewise been distilled into that topless moment, which is also a bit of a shock. On the evidence of “The Total Look: The Creative Collaboration Between Rudi Gernreich, Peggy Moffitt and William Claxton”—an exhibition that was at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and has been remounted at the Cincinnati Art Museum—Gernreich was not just continuously original, he was frequently visionary.

John Fairchild, the former editor of WWD (who died last month at 87), called Gernreich “the greatest of the beatnik designers,” praise that shortchanges him historically but catches his outsider status. Gernreich (1922-1985) was born in Vienna and became acquainted with fashion in his aunt’s dress shop. When the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, he and his mother escaped to Los Angeles, where he would settle. In the 1940s, Gernreich vacillated between fashion and dance, apprenticing for a time with a clothing manufacturer on New York’s Seventh Avenue and then performing with Lester Horton’s modern dance troupe, for which he also designed costumes. Gernreich stopped dancing in 1952 and embraced fashion full time, designing knitwear and swimwear for various West Coast companies and his own line for the Beverly Hills boutique JAX. In 1960, just in time for the decade he would play a large part in defining, Gernreich founded his own company. Ignoring the elitist East Coast fashion establishment—too hidebound, too ladies-who-lunch—he was instead witty, arty and experimental. He chose to focus on the life inside the silhouette, the creature that needed to move au naturel.

The museum’s Curator of Fashion Arts and Textiles, Cynthia Amnéus, makes this point at the show’s entrance, with her grouping of “total look” ensembles from the mid-’60s. From head to toe to “glitten” (Gernreich’s mating of a glove and mitten), and with miniskirt suits and tunics in between, the many pieces of each ensemble—underwear as well—are all the same print or color. Tiger, giraffe, peacock—it’s as if these three leggy “grrrls” are stalking the savannah, looking for a discothèque. Always vocal about America’s joyless swing between puritanism and prurience, Gernreich saw human beings as part of the animal kingdom, a species like any other. A handful of his body-conscious imperatives are gathered in this grouping: flat shoes, always, because they allowed uninhibited locomotion; patterned tights matched to the dress, for a body unified; and fabrics with graphic impact, cut in simple shapes.

Gernreich’s most famous work was concentrated in the ’60s, but there are prescient early pieces in the exhibition. These possess the stiff structure that was de rigueur in ’50s couture and which American manufacturers demanded. Yet even while bowing to the trends of Paris, Gernreich was backing away. His Joan of Arc dress from 1955, a black wool shift quartered by a huge brown wool cross, foresees the bands of clear vinyl he would inset into dresses of the ’60s (a first). And the Trapeze dress, also from 1955—a sturdy little A-frame—predated Yves Saint Laurent’s Trapeze line for Dior (1958) by three years. Saint Laurent would get the credit for the Trapeze (as he would for the see-through blouse, which Gernreich showed four years before him), but by then Gernreich had moved on, done with stiff infrastructure and costly seam work. Gernreich wanted young people to wear his clothes. By equating simplicity and affordability with democracy he was commenting on all social structures that limited movement and freedom. He was, he said, “interested in clothes as sociological statements.”

Indeed, there’s something of the European naturist in Gernreich’s views on foundation garments—those postwar girdles and bullet bras—which he thought affronts to the female form. His No-Bra Bra of 1964, designed soon after the monokini and a big success, is a wisp of nylon and elastic—his humane answer to the boned and wired numbers that made a woman look, in his words, “like a Sherman tank.” The swimsuits in the exhibition, shorn of inner corseting, nod to Martha Graham’s woolen tubes of the ’30s even as they prophesy the braless ’70s to come. Gernreich understood, however, that figures change over the years. “If a body can no longer be accentuated,” he said, “it should be abstracted.” Hence his silk caftans—glamorous, minimalist, lightweight space capsules that put the focus on the face. Gernreich didn’t use women to express a grandiose personal aesthetic; he was attuned to them as equals.

His intense collaboration with Ms. Moffitt, which included her husband, William Claxton, the photographer who shot the monokini, speaks to a deep affinity built on equality. She animated Gernreich’s clothes, and in her heightened use of accessories and makeup (no one had fringier false eyelashes than Peggy) brought them to a plane of performance art. Gernreich and Ms. Moffitt were both alive to culture: he pulling Pop Art into his prints and color palette, suggesting the Wiener Werkstätte with his monochromatic stripes and checkerboards; she, intuitively theatrical, playing the Kabuki sorceress, Nijinsky’s faun, a Pierrot in silver paillettes. In fact, the exhibition lets us see Ms. Moffitt in action in a short film called “Basic Black.” It was created by Claxton, and features Ms. Moffitt and two other models prowling, prancing and dancing in many of the Gernreich pieces on exhibit. Made in 1967, 6:55 minutes of charm, “Basic Black” has a place in history, too, for no one had yet thought to make an art film that was only about fashion. Another first from the vivid world of Gernreich.

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Talking to Jenna Klein can feel a little confusing at first. She’s got that whole girl-next-door thing down pat; the relaxed charm, the sense of fun, the type of girl who you can picture sharing a beer (or two) with out at the bar. But then there is the whole matter of what she looks like: the transfixing, double-take provoking classic beauty with a tinge of otherworldliness, the wide blue eyes and too-cool-for-school septum piercing to boot. But just when you are about to get lost in the dreamy, wide-open planes of her face, she brings you back to earth with a Midwestern twang that reveals itself whenever she utters a chummy “You know?,” which she does often. And Klein comes by her all-American dream girl roots honestly, as a third generation General Motors worker who grew up in Flint, Michigan, a onetime automotive boomtown now synonymous with deterioration, bailouts, and its ranking among the most dangerous cities in the United States—a place where good luck can be hard to come by.

Which is why at age nineteen, with no real college plans in sight, Klein entered the workforce at the General Motors Lake Orion Assembly Plant on the factory floor. The plant eventually closed in 2009, and in 2010, Klein moved with her husband, also a General Motors worker, to another plant in Lordstown, Ohio. “I mostly worked in general assembly plants, where the entire car is pretty much built from the frame out. My first job was putting the battery tray in. It was bolting it down and hooking up a few connections for the headlight—and you do that four or five hundred times a night,” says Klein. “I used to put airbags and the backseat cushion in, too. There was a terrible job where I was putting all of the stuff in the trunk, the tool set, jack, and a spare tire. I was carrying tires every day, walking something like five miles a day. I didn’t mind it at first, but doing it every day destroys your body.”

The dream of modeling was never far from her thoughts. Growing up, Klein stacked her shelves with Teen Vogue and Victoria’s Secret catalogs. A few times she even dragged her mother to model searches at the local Holiday Inn. “It was corny. You had to look for it in the paper back then, too. It never worked out though,” says Klein. “My mom was like, ‘You’re not doing this. I’m not paying for this. It’s a scam!’” Coworkers at the GM plant became her cheering section. “They would say things like, ‘You need to remember us when you’re a famous model,’” says Klein. “And it was like, if you guys only knew, I would drop this in a second. But after being at GM for so long, the dream died.”

But a twist of fate—a friend of a friend who needed a roommate in Chicago—offered another chance. “We were ready to settle down and we were buying a house. I was like, Am I really ready? If I stay and we are together, I’m going to end up pregnant,” says Klein. “I was going to give myself one last chance.” From there, Klein signed with a model agency and shortly after joined the ranks at DNA Models in New York City. Since then, Klein has made the move to New York City (her husband will be joining her in a few months), and has scored a few runway shows, ranging from Timo Weiland and Jonathan Simkhai to Thom Browne. But there are bigger things that await the fresh face, who has already scored a denim campaign with Banana Republic, among others. And as for her past at General Motors and her pals back in Flint? “There are plenty of things to appreciate about it,” says Klein. “But if it isn’t what you want to to do, you aren’t going to be happy.” And taking the big risks to reap the big rewards—and what could be more of a big reward than chasing a childhood dream?—has made Jenna Klein something of a hometown hero, as well as what could very well be the next big thing.

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Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen, who has reigned supreme on runways for two decades, is retiring from the catwalk to spend more time with her NFL star quarterback husband and their children.

The 34-year-old blonde beauty – the world's highest-paid model who has strutted her stuff for many of the top labels in the business - will make her final sashay down the catwalk in Sao Paulo next month.

"Gisele will focus on special projects and also spending more time on her number one priority: her family," her sister and representative Patricia Bundchen said in a statement. "She is already cutting back on catwalk appearances and will bid adieu to shows in her own country during the Colcci brand presentation at Sao Paulo Fashion Week." Bundchen posted a message to her Facebook page, thanking fans for their support. "Thank you for all the love. A kiss in your heart and have a beautiful day!" she wrote.

Speculation about Bundchen's future had been rife since media reports emerged last week indicating she would make her final runway appearance at the April 13-17 Sao Paulo event (SPFW), where she has been a fixture throughout her career.

Bundchen - who Forbes says has been the world's highest-earning model for the past eight years, with $47 million in earnings last year - is expected to turn her focus to print ad campaigns.

Bundchen is married to New England Patriots star Tom Brady, with whom she has two young children, Benjamin and Vivian.

She has worked with the likes of Chanel, Valentino, Versace, Louis Vuitton, Alexander Wang, Balenciaga and Carolina Herrera. She has also many times been a Victoria's Secret "Angel." Bundchen said in a recent interview she wanted to spend more time with her U.S.-based family. The supermodel often publishes pictures on social media showing her with her children.

Bundchen started off her modeling career at the tender age of 14, and swiftly became a big name as major houses queued up to have her front their campaigns.

Only recently, she signed her largest ever contract - worth more than $25 million, according to Forbes - with U.S. sports apparel firm Under Armour.

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Any subscribers to the Daily Mail schools of 'thought' may have come across the 5:2 skin diet.

This diet has nothing to do with food, but borrows its name from that gimmicky brand of intermittent fasting that gripped fitness fanatics in 2013. You know – the one that had people binging for five days and with empty stomach breath for two, leading to a spike in light-headedness on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

This time, beauty gurus have adopted the 5:2 approach to apply to skincare, encouraging women everywhere to eschew makeup for two days a week – consecutive or non-consecutive – and go barefaced.

According to its spruikers, two thirds of women wear makeup seven days a week and 71 per cent have found themselves with skin problems as a result of excessive foundation. The solution, they say, is to let your skin breathe – a get-gorge technique we've heard about as many times as "drink more water".

An apparent authority on the matter, Dr Tijion Esho – whose cosmetic institute is called @lebeau_ideal (because, faux Franco-sophistication) and who tweets from the handle @IAMDRBEAUTIFUL – says, "Taking makeup breaks of one or two days a week will dramatically improve your skin health and appearance by allowing healthy skin cells to regenerate."

Are you sure about that, Dr Beautiful?

Just like its nutritional forbearer, there's a complete dearth of research to back up the supposed benefits of the 5:2 skin diet. When it comes down to it, the restrictive makeup regime isn't that effective, as it takes longer than two days for your skin to regenerate. (Cell turnover takes approximately 27 days, not two. Think of how long it took for those unsightly racer-back tan lines to fade.)

All this is, really, is another hype-driven scheme pushed upon us, urging women to overthink our beauty regimes instead of just doing what we feel is normal.

As a human in possession of a face, sometimes one just doesn't feel the need to slather it with products. And just as rightly, sometimes one wishes to channel makeup's magical power to amp up the hawtness and make us feel five times better about ourselves. Does timing really matter? Why must an explanation or justification be necessary?

Over the years, we've learned collectively as women that dabbing silverly highlighter in the corner of our eyes will instantly make us more 'alluring'. We've been hydration-shamed into drinking 12-plus glasses of water a day and have been taught that contouring is both the greatest thing ever and the biggest time-wasting con of our time. The beauty industry has taught us so many valuable lessons – but the 5:2 skin diet is not one of them.

Our main bugbear is this: Why turn something as joyful as makeup – something that's about personal expression, something that literally turns you into an 'artist' (however amateur), something done on a whim – into a timetabled monotonous routine?

Leading the revolt against the restrictive product practice is the Guardian UK's Victoria Coren Mitchell. Coren Mitchell despises the repetitive drudgery laid out by 5:2, saying, "I have to work quite hard to keep remembering not to be frightened by a beauty industry which threatens the total disintegration of my face and body due to my shameful failure to adopt a proper 'routine'." We certainly feel her pain, especially when reading up on the more onerous aspects of 5:2 dieting.

We always have an option – 7:0, 0:7, 4:3, 2:5 – whatever, it's totally up to us. We resent the fact that loaded language such as 'diet' and 'detoxify' is being used to change our relationship with makeup, to co-opt something every woman has been doing without much thought to begin with, to demonise foundation, and to make us feel guilty or embarrassed whenever we put it on our face.

The 5:2 skin diet is based on the suggestion that being a slave to your makeup bag could be ageing you prematurely, yet wasting good years on such rigid, inane, inflexible modes of thinking is certainly worse.

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France's government is likely to back a bill banning excessively thin fashion models as well as potentially fining the modelling agency or fashion house that hires them and sending the agents to jail, the health minister said on Monday.

Style-conscious France, with its fashion and luxury industries worth tens of billions of dollars, would join Italy, Spain and Israel which all adopted laws against too-thin models on catwalks or in advertising campaigns in early 2013.

"It's important for fashion models to say that they need to eat well and take care of their health, especially for young women who look to the models as an aesthetic ideal," health minister Marisol Touraine said on Monday.

With major health legislation coming up for debate in parliament on March 17, Touraine said the Socialist government was likely to back two amendments relating to models' weight.

The law would enforce regular weight checks and fines of up to 75,000 euros (NZ$107,000) for any breaches, with up to six months in jail for staff involved, Socialist lawmaker Olivier Veran, who wrote the amendments, told Le Parisien.

Models would have to present a medical certificate showing a Body Mass Index (BMI) of at least 18 and about 55 kilograms for a height of 1.75 metres (5.7 feet), before being hired for a job and for a few weeks afterwards, he said.

The bill's amendments also propose penalties for anything made public that could be seen as encouraging extreme thinness, notably pro-anorexia websites that glorify unhealthy lifestyles.

In 2007, Isabelle Caro, an anorexic 28-year-old former French fashion model, died after posing for a photographic campaign to raise awareness about the illness.

Some 30-40,000 people in France suffer from anorexia, most of them teenagers, said Veran, who is a doctor.

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No wives tales, just the hard facts.

Now that summer is officially over you probably have a bunch of shirts, tops and dresses with marks from fake tan, sunscreen and the odd ice-cream spill that you think might have seen their last days. They can be saved. Here's how.

1. When possible, act quickly. Prevention is key

The best way to keep your whites white is to look after them as you go, don't let them get to that awful, grey and sad stage. If you have dropped your dinner on your shirt, if appropriate, take it straight off and spray it with Preen stain remover/degreaser or Sard Wonder. For red wine use soda water.

2. Soak it

Place anything with a mark or stain (or something that is just a bit dirty) in a bucket with warm water and Napisan or Sard Wonder and leave it to soak overnight. If the stain is still there the following day, repeat steps one and two. Some washing machines have a soak cycle. If yours does, use it every time you wash your whites.

3. Always wash your whites with hot water

Cold water just won't get the stains out. Obviously be careful with garments that shrink - in that case warm water (around 30 degrees) is okay. Always add some Napisan or similar to the machine with your regular detergent.

4. Get your hands on some rainwater

Visit a friend in the country, stay at a beach house with a rainwater tank, or better still buy one for your own home. Rainwater is considered the "softest" type of water because it contains lower levels of calcium and magnesium than "hard" water which comes out of the taps in some cities. Lower levels of these minerals allow the soaps to work more efficiently and get things cleaner. Plus, it's better for your machine and feels great on your skin and hair.

5. Embrace the sun

Yes there is another reason for not using the dryer other than saving on your energy bills and it being better for the environment. Hanging your white shirts and bed sheets outside allows the ultraviolet light from the sun to bleach out any stubborn stains. Leave them out there for as long as it is sunny for maximum effect.

6. If all else fails

When nothing else has worked, use chemical bleach as a last resort on a 100% white garment. Dropping the item in a bucket with warm water and bleach diluted as per the instructions for a few minutes before washing will get rid of any nasty stains. Just be careful because bleach is not only bad for the environment, it is corrosive. Be careful what you're wearing when you use bleach as if you splash any on your black pants that's the end of them.

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Most models don't get a backstage visit from one of the most powerful people in the fashion industry before a show. But, Derek Zoolander and Hansel McDonald are not most models.

The Male Model of the Year winners were surprised by Vogue editor Anna Wintour before they walked in Valentino's Paris Fashion Week show on Tuesday.

Zoolander, who is on a first-name basis with "Anna" told her that he was "totally" ready for his appearance, explaining that he had made a slight modification to his normal runway strut.

"I'm going to keep it simple today," Zoolander, who bears a striking resemblance to Night at the Museum star Ben Stiller, said.

"Usually I go 'right, left, right, left, right, left' but today I'm going to start left, in honour of how the sun rotates."

McDonald, who has often been compared in appearance with Marley & Me star Owen Wilson, said he would be descending the runway with a conscience, opting to hover instead of completing a traditional walk.

"Environment," the 'so hot right now' model said. "It's the number one problem. But how do we reduce our footprint? Less walking."

The three fashion A-listers then posed for a "selfie stick selfie".

Valentino's show is the first time either model had walked for a designer since they prevented the assassination of the President of Malaysia at a Jacobim Mugatu show in 2001.

The president was the victim of a plot by a group of high-profile fashion designers, headed by Mugatu, who opposed his child labour reforms.

In recent years the pair have remained quiet on the fashion scene, spending their time working with underprivileged children at the Derek Zoolander Centre for Kids Who Can't Read Good and Who Want to Learn How to Do Other Stuff Good Too.

The models' appearance was to promote Stiller and Wilson's new comedy Zoolander 2, which is due to be released in early 2016.

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Compromise may be an art in both politics and business, but in fashion — or, to be fair, in a fashion show, which is (theoretically anyway) the purest expression of a designer’s idea of fashion — it can be poison.

There’s no place for wishy-washiness on the runway. Give away a sleeve here, a hemline there, and what have you got? Generic. If you expect people to buy your clothes, they need to buy your idea of them — the future them — first. The rest is translation.

But the “vision thing,” as George H.W. Bush once called it, is increasingly rare on the ground, especially when it comes to old names inherited by new designers. How do you even begin to negotiate with history? It’s a losing battle from the start.

Or so it seemed, anyway, judging from the relatively limp debut ready-to-wear collection by John Galliano at Maison Margiela. Mr. Galliano is, of course, dealing with two histories — his own as the ultimate fashion cautionary tale, the former celebrated Dior designer fallen from grace, and that of the cultlike brand he has assumed — so his task is twice as tough. In going through the motions of both, however, and trying to reconcile them into something transformative, he did justice to neither.

There was some classic Galliano here: bias-cut shredded sheer gowns, sweeping 1970s greatcoats, models scuttling along like urchins clutching paper bags in crazy orange wigs. Some familiar Margiela there: inside-out backwards gowns made from silk linings, tails of feathers flowing from a waist; Mr. Galliano’s decision to eschew the traditional designer bow at the end of the show and instead maintain a Garbo/Margiela-like silence (somewhat undercut by the existence of show notes — Mr. Margiela never explained). There were even some highly commercial bits throughout: cropped brocade trousers, a bunch of cute miniskirts.

But most of it has been seen before, and in more concentrated form; nowhere was there anything that suggested a new identity, or indeed any specific identity at all, for the brand or those who might buy it.

Once upon a time Mr. Galliano brought a wholly specific viewpoint to fashion, and presumably he feels he has more to say (otherwise why come back?), but it was unclear from this exactly what more he has in mind. Just as it was unclear from Guillaume Henry’s debut at Nina Ricci how he sees that brand.

As “a timeless wardrobe” anchored in “immediate reality” claimed the show notes, but ever since Nicolas Ghesquière’s debut at Louis Vuitton “timeless wardrobe” has become a hackneyed fashion term. These days everyone is paying lip service to the timeless wardrobe. It’s gotten to the point where you want to throw up your hands and shout, “Gimme a fad!”

In any case, Mr. Henry did not. He provided instead perfectly accessible pieces with a whiff of gardenia: lace tees and matching pencil skirts, or sequined versions of the same; oversize pea coats; navy sailor pants and cropped camel jean jackets; cream multi-textured coats and princess pumps.

It was not remotely controversial, despite being held at the Centre Pompidou with all the radical revisionism that implies. Even a sheer lace dress with thigh-high stretch leather boots under a boucle coat just seemed like ersatz belle du jour. As a result, while it might have been l’air du temps, it was not l’air du demain.

At least at Balenciaga, the designer Alexander Wang is visibly struggling to balance what was with what he wants, though he has not, as yet, found an equilibrium. If last season was largely a statement of his intent, this time he swung too far the other way, with Balenciaga-referential (and reverential) cocoon coats and balloon hobble skirts dominating sportier graffiti-sprayed jacquard jackets and wrap skirts.

They were cooled-up, unquestionably, via hard-edged industrial decoration such as a row of staples up the side of a tuxedo pant, little pearls of metal forming the raised collar of a rounded coat and evening T-shirts of articulated steel paired with floral brocades.

But the problem (aside from the hobble skirts, which simply have no place on a contemporary runway) was that in paying obeisance to the shapes of the past Mr. Wang lost sight of the point of the past, which was single-minded allegiance to a precise idea of how women should look. That’s the underlying legacy of the house.

It’s the ethos, anyway, of Phoebe Philo at Céline, who effectively shrugged off any inheritance in favor of her own weltanschauung when she arrived in 2008 and has been refining her lens ever since. Witness the “tatty glamour” of this season, as reflected in black and white boiled wool lace trousers and dresses, flowers punched out at random like moth-eaten holes; backless ribbed knits (sometimes with trompe l’oeil built-in bras) held together with a strap at the spine over undervests; leather coats with drawstring waists; and tritone silk slipdresses, a chain of fur snowballs tossed over a shoulder.

“I hadn’t done it before,” shrugged the designer backstage when asked why. “It’s one of the ways I question myself as a woman, and a designer.”

Her name may not be on the label, but it’s her house, and she is building it — just as a designer such as Haider Ackermann took his signature Byronic romance a step further for fall by mixing in a clash of prints (tweed and leopard and dots and race car checks) as well as visible stitching like scars across slouchy black trousers, and asymmetric pleated skirts, the threads left to dangle in the wind.

Ditto Junya Watanabe, whose schtick is a unique ability to combine the basics of fashion (the white shirt, the easy man’s trouser, capes) with technical experimentation on the far edge: outerwear transformed via pyramid folds, honeycombed pleats and accordion layers into something resembling a child’s paper fortune-teller or a sea urchin’s spikes; slithery leathers that looked like the carapace of a giant squid; capes like fishermen’s nets, the woman caught underneath, and millefeuilles of hemlines or necklines on simple T-shirt dresses that expanded and contracted with a step.

What was it exactly? Who knows. The metaphor is in the eye of the beholder. Besides, it doesn’t matter: The appeal goes straight to the head.

And while it sounds outré it was, in fact, perfectly engineered, not just in its geometry, but in the counterpoise between the familiar (the sequin jeans are a no-brainer) and the exotic. As was Jun Takahashi’s meditation on transformation and mutation at Undercover, where men’s overcoats had hemlines so long they spilled over the raised runway to sweep the floor, and baseball jackets had the graceful drape of a sac dress.

Denim came veiled in white; lab coats were embroidered with a dagger to the heart, and backed in shrouded rose print (complete with thorns); Renaissance faces and figures enlarged and overlaid on a chiaroscuro of skirts and shirts; and blood-red broken glass decorated a white tuxedo at the end.

The clothes, splicing different sartorial species and aesthetics into one, dared the viewer to face (literally, in case of those portraits) the contemporary quest for perfection and the pain involved. It’s not a comfortable challenge, but it was too elegantly posed to ignore.

Arguably, Mr. Ackermann, Mr. Watanabe and Mr. Takahashi have the advantage of being forced from the beginning to articulate their own identities. They don’t have founder-separation anxiety to negotiate.

And yet, as Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Garçons showed, on some level breaking away — how to do it — is a topic with which everyone contends.

“The ceremony of separation” was Ms. Kawakubo’s gnomic explanation for the shrouds of bulbous white cotton that transformed the wearers into figures leaving home with their possessions on their back (and front, and sides, and head), the black lace lumps and bumps of wrapped limbs, as though part had been cut off, the layers upon layer of white lace dresses, sometimes with a doll-size shape disappearing into the folds, sometimes with black helmet-like appendages expanding outwards, the black cagelike shroud that seemed to imprison in isolation.

While the expression of her subject may have been singular, however, in its extremity — its unwillingness to sacrifice its point on the altar of wearability (that happens in the showroom, where the derivations go all the way to T-shirt level) — the show described a universal idea.

It was no coincidence it was held in the Galerie de Minéralogie at the Natural History Museum, surrounded by the remains of former eras. Everyone has to deal with letting go: of people, jobs, the past.

This is no easy process — witness the contortions at Margiela, Ricci et. al. to hang on to a vestigial form — but there is beauty in acceptance. It comes with the chance to move on. To advance.

We could use that, right about now.

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Every woman is made of her own experiences, thoughts, background (cultural or not) and the lessons that she’s taught herself. Coming from some great personalities, here is a list of quotes, some by woman and some for them, that are inspiring, fierce and thought provoking.

1. The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me. -Ayn Rand

2. Women hold up half the sky. -Mao Zedong

3. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you are from. The ability to triumph begins with you. Always. -Oprah Winfrey

4. A woman is like a tea bag: you cannot tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water. -Eleanor Roosevelt

5. In our society, the women who break down barriers are those who ignore limits. -Arnold Schwarzenegger

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6. The biggest coward is a man who awakens the love of a woman with no intentions of loving her. -Bob Marley

7. Some women are lost in the fire, some are built from it. -Michelle K Some

8. I am my own woman. -Evita Peron

9. We realise the importance of your voice when we are silenced. -Malala Yousafzai

10. I do not wish women have power over men; but over themselves. -Mary Shelley

11. I raise up my voice not so that I can should but for those without a voice can be heard. -Malala Yousafzai

12. She made broken look beautiful and strong look invincible. She walked with the Universe on her shoulders at made it look like a pair of wings. -Ariana

13. I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it. -Maya Angelou

14. If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun. -Katherine Hepburn

15. If you don’t like being a doormat then get off the floor. -Al Anon

16. A lot of people are afraid to say what they want, that’s why they don’t get what they want. -Madonna

17. Success feeds confidence. -Beryl Markham

18. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained. -Marie Curie

19. Courage is like a muscle. We strengthen it by use. -Ruth Gordon

20. Taking joy in living is a woman’s best cosmetic. -Rosalin Russell

21. One is not born but rather becomes a woman. -Simone de Beauvoir

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