Paris Fashion Week 2025 drew to a close on 6 October after 111 shows – more than any other fashion capital managed this season – and the story it told was not the one the industry wanted to hear. The story was anxiety.
The language was unmistakable: “global luxury slowdown,” “maintaining relevancy,” “combining a pinch.” The money is tight, the customer is cautious, and the old playbook of spectacle and heritage nostalgia is wearing thin.
According to Bain & Company’s January 2026 report, China’s mainland luxury market shrank by 3–5 per cent in 2025, recovering only slightly from the 17–19 per cent decline in 2024. LVMH – owner of Louis Vuitton, Dior and Celine – posted full-year revenue of €80.8 billion, down from €84.7 billion. Its Fashion & Leather Goods division fell 5 per cent organically, with profit dropping 13 per cent. The party is quieter.
When people get nervous, they do one of two things. It is like a loud, crowded pub. You either shout something outrageous to get noticed, or you lean in very close and whisper something true, something so well-crafted the other person has to stop and listen.
This season, you saw both.
The Whisperers: Quiet Confidence in a Loud Room
At first glance, the dominant mood seemed to be one of retreat – a desperate, almost religious return to the idea of making beautiful, wearable clothes. Not gimmicks, not content, not a meme-worthy moment for Instagram, but garments that actual women might want to own and wear for years.
Pierpaolo Piccioli at Balenciaga steered that storied house away from ironic streetwear and towards a severe, sculptural elegance. Michael Rider at Celine – the house’s first creative director since Hedi Slimane’s controversial departure – talked openly about “timelessness and consistency.” His collection was full of good coats, mannish trousers and things that felt solid, rooted, real. Backstage, he offered what might be the season’s most quotable line: “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 tension – between discretion and spectacle, craft and content – is the key to everything right now.
Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski at Hermès embodied the same philosophy with quiet authority. Her Spring/Summer 2026 collection was a study in liberated movement: clean lines, unfettered gazes, and leather craftsmanship that reminded the audience why Hermès remains the gold standard for material luxury. As she told El País earlier in 2024: “Silent luxury is marketing. We’re not silent here, we’re something more.” There is a strength in that restraint – a bet on quality over clicks, on permanence over virality.
The whisperers are making a wager: in uncertain times, people do not want a gimmick. They want something that will last. Something real.
The Shouters: Screaming for Attention
But the whisperers were not alone. If you cannot whisper, you scream. If you cannot sell them a perfect, timeless coat, you sell them a strange idea. You make them look. You make them talk.
Matthieu Blazy’s debut at Chanel – the hottest ticket in town, staged at the Grand Palais with massive planets suspended from the vaulted glass ceiling – was precisely this kind of provocation. He took the most sacred of house codes, the tweed suit and the 2.55 bag, and remixed them with an almost playful irreverence. Skirts slung low on the hip, bags with wire so you could scrunch them up, voluminous fringe skirts swaying alongside draped dresses with meticulously placed floral appliqués. It was not a history lesson. It was, as Vogue‘s critics observed, “a galaxy beyond the expectations for Chanel.”
“This first Chanel show, I wanted to do something quite universal, like a dream, something outside of time,” Blazy wrote on Instagram after the show. “We all observe the same sky, and I think it provokes the same emotions in us.”
The audience reacted with something close to euphoria. Maya Rudolph, seated front row, told Interview magazine: “I’m the beaded red all the way. That first beaded red look that came slinking down that runway – I’m her. Give it to me!” Lauren Santo Domingo captured the generational sweep: “I was early Chanel, and then I saw my past, my present, and my future.”
By the time Blazy’s debut collection hit shelves in early 2026, the frenzy had escalated. The New York Times reported on the phenomenon, with one interviewee likening the mood on the shop floor to The Hunger Games. Pieces were already turning up on the front row of his sophomore show before they had been publicly released.
Jonathan Anderson’s debut at Dior was another shout. The 41-year-old Northern Irish designer, previously at Loewe, was appointed sole creative director in spring 2025 – the first person to oversee womenswear, menswear, haute couture and the spirit of the house since Christian Dior himself.
“Well, Dior is drama,” Anderson shrugged backstage, as reported by The Guardian. He re-cut the Bar jacket – loosening its waist, swelling its back – and mined the archives with surgical precision. “I looked at everyone. Hedi, Raf, Marc Bohan, John. I studied the house through their eyes,” he said. As the last model exited, Anderson stood still, eyes glistening with tears – a rare moment of sincerity in fashion’s theatre.
Then there was Miuccia Prada. Always the smartest, most contrary person in the room. What did she do? She put aprons on the runway at Miu Miu. Styled over bikinis and heavy jumpers, the apron became, in her own words, “a symbol of work that can express multiple messages… a symbol of the effort and hardship of women.” As the Associated Press reported, actor Richard E. Grant strode out in a black sheeny leather apron that read like a kinky chef’s uniform. Milla Jovovich followed in a softer riff frilled with black lace. The show notes spoke of giving the humble apron “nobility and respect.”
Is it a conversation about class? About women’s work? Or is Prada simply having a laugh, knowing that a thousand think-pieces will follow? Perhaps both. But it cuts through the noise.
The Phone Ban: Yamamoto’s Quiet Rebellion
The most telling moment of the whole week, however, did not take place at a blockbuster show. It was at Yohji Yamamoto. An 82-year-old master who has been doing his own thing for decades – his debut in Tokyo came in 1977, in Paris in 1981 – placed a note on every seat asking attendees 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, to be clipped, shared and turned into content, Yamamoto was asking for the one thing in shortest supply: presence.
As the Associated Press reported from the show, Yamamoto “pared back to essentials” – monochrome, urban, fluid silhouettes, touched with flashes of colour. “In an era of constant reinvention, Yamamoto’s refusal to chase novelty reads as radical. His clothes remain unmistakably his: esoteric, emotional, and enduringly chic.”
The phone ban 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.
The Numbers Behind the Nervousness
The anxiety is financial, structural and accelerating. McKinsey’s State of Fashion 2026 report noted that “challenging” had overtaken “uncertainty” as the word executives used most to describe the industry, with US tariffs cited as the number-one hurdle. The consultancy projects low single-digit global growth for 2026, with luxury seeing only “modest improvements” after “a difficult 2025.”
LVMH’s profit from recurring operations fell 9 per cent overall in 2025. Europe declined in the second half, Japan fell back after a tourist-spending boost in 2024, and Asia ex-Japan remained sluggish. Kering has 23 per cent revenue exposure from US-facing exports, facing potential tariffs. Twelve brands showcased new creative directors this season – a staggering rate of turnover that speaks less to confidence than to crisis. France itself was in political turmoil during the shows, the government unravelling in another episode of instability. Business carried on regardless, the cogs of luxury turning while the state wobbled.
Crossroads: Which Path Survives?
So what does it all mean? The industry is at a genuine crossroads, splitting into two distinct camps.
One path is retreat to safety – beautifully made, reassuringly expensive clothes that whisper of quality and timelessness. The Celine coat, the Hermès bag, the quietly excellent Balenciaga dress. Bets on permanence.
The other is a lurch into the strange, the conceptual, the noisy. Blazy’s cosmic Chanel, Anderson’s dramatic Dior, Prada’s subversive aprons. Attempts to jolt a jaded audience into paying attention.
Both paths are haunted by the same question: who is the customer now? McKinsey notes consumers are “rethinking their spending, seeking value and devoting more of their budgets to well-being and longevity.” They are becoming more like the whisperers – but the whisperers cannot grow on discretion alone.
The anxiety is real. You see it in the frantic reinventions, the desperate clinging to heritage that feels increasingly disconnected from how people actually live, the 111 shows packed into a single week as if quantity might substitute for conviction.
Perhaps the answer lies in Yamamoto’s phone ban. Not in the rejection of technology – that is naive – but in the insistence that fashion must still be felt, not merely documented. That a garment on a body in a room, moving through space and time, remains the fundamental transaction. Everything else – the content, the commerce, the culture wars – is noise.
And in a season defined by noise, the quietest gesture may have been the most radical.
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