Paris Fashion Week 2025, the world’s largest fashion show, is drawing to a close. Renowned designers and fashion houses presented their creations and their take on trends.
But what are we actually looking at here? Beyond the noise and the sheer, exhausting number of shows – 111 of them, apparently – what was the story this time?
The story, if you were paying attention, was anxiety.
You could feel it in the air. The press releases and the industry chatter are all full of the same nervous language: “global luxury slowdown,” “combating a pinch,” “maintaining relevancy.” It’s jargon, of course, but what it means on the ground is that the money is tight. The party, for now, is a little quieter. I remember a few years ago when every big show felt like a blockbuster movie premiere, a multi-million-pound spectacle. This season felt… smaller. More tense. Fewer seats, less elaborate sets. It feels like the entire industry is holding its breath.
And when people get nervous, they do one of two things. It’s like trying to have a serious conversation in a loud, crowded pub. You either decide to shout something shocking and outrageous to get noticed above the din. Or, you lean in very close and whisper something true, something so well-crafted and essential that the other person has to stop and listen.
This season, you saw both.
At first, I thought this was all about playing it safe. The whisperers. The ones leaning in. You saw it everywhere. This sudden, almost desperate return to the idea of just making beautiful, wearable clothes. The kind of things actual women might want to own. Pierpaolo Piccioli at Balenciaga, steering that ship away from ironic streetwear and back towards a kind of severe elegance. Michael Rider at Celine, talking about “timelessness and consistency.” His collection was full of good coats, mannish trousers, things that felt solid. He said backstage, “There’s a discretion at Celine that I really appreciate, and I think there’s a tension between that and being at Paris Fashion Week, which isn’t very discreet anymore.”
That feels like the key to everything right now. That tension.
He’s right. Fashion week isn’t discreet. It’s a circus. And in the middle of it, you have these designers like Rider, or Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski at Hermès, who are quietly, confidently just making… fantastic clothes. There’s a strength in that restraint. It’s a bet on quality over clicks. A belief that in uncertain times, people don’t want a gimmick; they want something that will last. Something real.
But then you have the other lot. The shouters.
If you can’t whisper, you scream. If you can’t sell them a perfect, timeless coat, you sell them a weird idea. You make them look. You make them talk. Look at what Matthieu Blazy did in his debut at Chanel. He took the most sacred of house codes – the tweed suit, the 2.55 bag – and messed with them. Skirts slung low on the hip, bags with wire in them so you can scrunch them up. It wasn’t a history lesson; it was a firecracker thrown into the archive. An attempt to breathe some life, some strangeness, back into the institution.
And Miuccia Prada. Always the smartest, most contrary person in the room. What does she do? She puts aprons on the runway. Styled over bikinis and heavy jumpers. The show notes talk about giving the humble apron “nobility and respect.” Is it a conversation about class? About women’s work? Or is she just having a laugh, knowing that a thousand think-pieces will follow? Who knows. But it gets a reaction. It cuts through the noise.
Actually, scrap that. The most telling moment of the whole week wasn’t at a blockbuster show. It was at Yohji Yamamoto. An 82-year-old master who has been doing his own thing for decades. On every seat, there was a note asking people to put their phones away. “Let the moment, the movement and the clothing speak to you.” In the middle of an event that now exists almost entirely to be digitally recorded, he was asking for the one thing that’s in shortest supply: presence. It felt less like a request and more like a quiet rebellion. A reminder that before fashion was content, it was just… clothes. In a room.
So what does it all mean?
It means the industry is at a crossroads. Faced with a nervous customer and an uncertain world, it’s splitting in two. One path is a retreat to safety, to beautifully made, reassuringly expensive clothes that whisper of quality and timelessness. The other is a lurch into the strange, the conceptual, the noisy. An attempt to jolt a jaded audience into paying attention.
The question is, which one will work? Will people want the perfect, discreet Celine coat, or the Miu Miu apron that makes them part of a conversation? Maybe both.
But the anxiety is real. You can see it in the frantic reinventions and the desperate clinging to a heritage that feels increasingly disconnected from the way people actually live. All this noise, all this whispering. It makes you wonder what they’re really afraid of.
