Where Are the Beautiful Clothes?

Paris Fashion Week just ended. What a dark week it was.

In today’s issue:

• Thoughts on Valentino, Dior, Chanel, Chloé, and more from Paris Fashion Week.

• Since when did the “art girl” become the ultimate chic archetype?

• Loose Threads, including Mark Zuckerberg’s new glasses, LVMH sells Off White, and more.

Valentino.

The spring 2025 shows wrapped in Paris Tuesday and what happened at Valentino seemed like an unfortunate commentary on the season.

The Chosen Ones who had been invited whipped their phones out to make reels of the finale, with captions like, “The most anticipated show of the season.” And what we saw were… models wearing bows, sad ruffles, textured colored tights, and boxy jackets walking in a poorly lit venue decorated with big white drapes, as though a grand dame had died and these were ghosts haunting her estate sale in the clothes she should have donated decades earlier. Some models had two purses dangling from their hands out of grotesque marketing desperation.

This was Alessandro Michele’s first live runway show for Valentino, and now we know that what he really designs is Alessandro Michele. He can throw in a “V” or a “G” on a bag or hat to let us know which label currently employs him, but if his vision really sells, he should just have his own label and do the best possible version of this look.

Michele was hardly alone in putting on a disappointing show. Alexander McQueen showed a great finale dress made from strands of sparkles — arguably the dress of the season — but the rest of the show was bogged down by collars that alternated between medieval and Handmaid’s Tale, tailoring that just didn’t look quite right, and strange midriff cutouts accented with ruffles.

One pale lemon dress resembled nearly exactly the Chloé dress Gwyneth Paltrow wore to the Met Gala in 2019.