PARIS (AP) — Mild streamed by way of the stained glass of the Institut de France onto a surreal stage: a lone cellist taking part in a melancholy air, subsequent to an upside-down umbrella and a rotating tableau of dying sunflowers. It was a theatrical overture for Saturday’s Paris Style Week. This was spring — Vivienne Westwood type.
Andreas Kronthaler, who has helmed the home since Westwood’s dying in 2022 and whose identify joined the label in 2016, leaned exhausting into the madhat power that made the model a legend. Leopard-print males’s underwear sat alongside sheer, ribbed tunics with a medieval air. Punk flashed in a jeweled veil and glittered lapels. Fashions strode in floppy, swashbuckling ’70s boots that turned the grand tutorial setting right into a carnival.
The lineup spoke fluent Westwood: draped and deconstructed silhouettes, gathered clothes with double skirts, tailoring minimize simply off stability. Colours clashed on goal, with bitter greens close to reds — till the attention adjusted and chaos clicked into order. One jeweled necklace made it literal: “CHAOS.”
Westwood made her identify on King’s Highway within the Nineteen Seventies, wiring tartan, corsetry and ripped tees into the grammar of punk. That outsider spirit nonetheless drives the home, whilst its attain has gone mainstream. Since Sarah Jessica Parker’s iconic Westwood bridal robe in “ Sex and the City,” the label’s marriage ceremony enterprise has boomed — a degree underscored by the tons of of noisy followers thronging the Institut de France on Saturday, jostling for a glimpse.
Kronthaler has lengthy thrived on turning bourgeois classics inside out — warping jackets, loading corsetry into knits, twisting tartan into punk romance. That maximalist urge can tip into extra, but additionally it is the home’s lifeblood, retaining Westwood’s language loud and elastic reasonably than embalmed.
A lot of Westwood’s energy has traditionally come from mining and mutating the archive — the ’80s corset legacy, Napoleonic swagger, Shakespearean drama. Since Westwood’s passing, Kronthaler has shifted from cautious custodian to provocateur, forging new hybrids as a substitute of merely quoting the previous. Saturday’s present superior that shift: historic tunics, technical materials and second-skin underwear collided by design, not accident.
The finale gave the gathering a human punch. Heidi Klum closed the runway to loud cheers. Kronthaler stepped out with a bouquet of sunflowers so heavy he needed to relaxation it on the ground earlier than handing it over — a wry echo of the revolving sunflower nonetheless life and a young nod to the home’s cussed romanticism.
If the gathering lacked order, it didn’t lack conviction. Few labels flip visible discord into persuasive magnificence. Westwood nonetheless can — below stained glass and that glinting necklace, it did.
