Chanel, Valentino, Saint Laurent, Balenciaga: How the Paris fashion reduces femininity

When he appears in public, he wears a bomber jacket or hoodie. When he was awarded to him in January by the French Minister of Culture of the Order of Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the award simply down on a limp t-shirt. But when he is in the backstage of the Balenciaga show on Sunday evening, Demna is wearing a suit.

I'm sorry, what? The high priest of the fantastic bad taste, the heretics of formlessness, the inventor of the handbags in chip bag look-in a suit? Yes, Demna (who as a designer does not require a surname) let him tailor it in autumn. He can hardly believe it himself: “Finally I also wear a suit – after 43 years!” In his fashionable coming-of-age story, he learned a lot: “It is easy to put a chair upside down and say: This is portable art,” he says with a laugh. “But tailoring a good suit is probably the most difficult in fashion at all.”

How funny! Because on Thursday evening, the Kering Group surprisingly announced that Demna switched from Balenciaga to Gucci. He will now be able to design many, many suits in Milan.

In addition to urban, street and sports swear, you can also see normal men's suits and beautiful evening dresses on his last Balenciaga running bridge. No more Kanye West, which bravely trudges through the mud, no more shower figures that fight against a snowstorm in oversized jackets with garbage bags in their hand. Demna, who comes from Georgia and fled to Germany with his family, may have already experienced enough wars and crises, already fought enough against persecution and disregard. Now he has to put up with all his strength to struggle against an almost invisible enemy: against weak sales. That was already difficult with Balenciaga. At Gucci it becomes even more difficult for him.

How can you revive the fluid consumption? Most fashion brands at the prêt-à-porter in Paris are wondering. Demna still has a few final ideas for Balenciaga. He built a long catwalk, which runs through a large hall in a narrow track like in a maze. So every viewer has a place in the front row, so it feels flattered; Nothing is more annoying than just seeing the heads of the models from the fourth row. And because most guests also film (and beautiful films) when they sit at the very front, the social media impact, i.e. the marketing range, is much larger than usual.

Through the Jammal valley of poor income, the path should quickly lead to the customer. Therefore, some fashion brands now invite “very important clients” to the view. In the past, it was particularly like this in the haute couture: the customers sit in the front row, write down the number of their dream dress, go to the studio the next day and be adapted. Above all, buyers come to the prêt-à-porter, because the clothing fashion is sold through boutiques and department stores. But now more and more customers are sitting in the front row because they spend more and more money on luxury goods, often more than 100,000 euros per year with a single brand, and because their share in brand sales is growing. This is not good news for fashion editors: First, the influencers have sometimes replaced them from the front row, and now there are also customers. When an important critic has to sit in the second row at the Valentino show, you can hear his contemptuous snort in the first.

But the most blatant trend in the collections for autumn and winter 2025 is hard to believe: it is suddenly about the woman! The men see that too. Alessandro Michele, who shows his second prêt-à-porter collection for Valentino, has dimmed the dramatic sample variety of the first collection, which is peppered with historical references. It is about “the intimate relationship with a dress,” he says after the show, for which he conceived a club -like set from a wall of toilet doors in red light. His fashion should “enable women to be themselves as close to their truth as possible,” says the fashion designer, who is worshiped with his relaxed style and his Jesus beard in Italian fashion like a guru. Next week his book “The Life of Forms. A philosophy of re -accepting ”, which he wrote with the philosopher Emanuele Coccia. In it, he will explain his approach to combine temporal and atmospheric opposites and to experience the present in fashion. However, in the case of the current collection, the bridge of delicate clothes with a lot of lace, silk and tulle to the rough “Berghain” ambience is quite long.

The designers therefore measure the needs of women. “This is probably one of the most portable collections I've ever done,” says Demna backstage, and he was now at Balenciaga for ten years. “I now have problems with costumes. I'm now the Demna version 2.0. ” This is dangerous for the collection: it can look banal. The cooperation with Puma looks good at the Sneaker Balenciaga X Puma Speedcat Ultrasoft. But the clothing collection made with Puma quickly reminds you on the catwalk, well: training suits.

To observe the needs of women, that is, to accept their bodies – and to accentuate. For a long time it was about “Skinny” or “Bulky”, that is, very narrow or vast silhouettes. Typical the cushions of the Garçons Commy in the most impossible places or the huge overlapping shoulders, which can still be seen in the current collection of Saint Laurent. But the designer Anthony Vaccarello there girts the coats and jackets (unlike Vetements and Balenciaga) so that they emphasize the female forms instead of simply hiding them.

And so it is a look at the show about the female body: Albert Kriemler enhances his acris designs with dazzling cyanotype prints by the artist Alyson Shotz; At Chanel there are classics from tweed costume to wide top skirts, garnished with black silk loops, the camellia as a typical accessory and oversized pearl chains, with which Coco Chanel is confirmed and at the same time led to absurdity; Hermès even shows mini skirts made of structured leather and tight -fitting tops; Ottolinger captivates again with Knallenger avant -garde; And the collection of the emerging Dutch designer Duran Lantink becomes a single body fun, which spreads all forms with relish.

The female body is pointed in every sense of the word at Miu Miu. Designer Miuccia Prada gives women Tradwife's appearance with fifties bouffant hairstyles. She takes her typical echoes of military and school uniforms back in favor of exhibited femininity with falling shoulders and visible bra carriers. The small highlights: pointed bras, called “Bullet Bras” in English. Of course, this is a small allusion to Jean-Paul Gaultier's cone bra for Madonna, but in these times also to understand that women “at difficult moments, dangerous times”, which Miuccia Prada mentions after the show, must know how to defend. “All models are enthusiastic about it,” says Prada about her “Bullet Bras”, as if she could hardly believe it herself. Such little tricks, the phenomenal Lotta-Volkova styling and the overall look-Miu Miu is once again the most spectacular collection of the season that ended on Wednesday after hundreds in New York, London, Milan and Paris.

Delayed dangers – the many black leather jackets and the terrifying leather coats that walk over the catwalks also want that. The first danger that autumn and winter bring for women is the cold. In an airy dress of the Australian brand Zimmermann, who soon opened a shop in Hamburg after the shop in Munich, you should not stroll to the Elbphilharmonie in November. Therefore, there are now coats and thick jackets: “The larger our market, the more variable our offer,” says designer Nicky Zimmermann, who founded her label with her sister Simone in 1991 in Sydney. You already know the weather in the north: In 1954, her father Erich moved to the Australian coast with his mother from Hamburg. Maybe he will come to the opening of the business.