First Impressions

Paris Fashion Week's much-touted roster of debuts unfolds like a couture coming-out ball, with new names at the helm at Chanel, Balenciaga, Dior, and Gaultier. Their collections shimmer with the language of renewal, but also offer important lessons about fashion's fraught present and future.

- By ARUSHI SINHA

Few things in fashion are as compelling as a strong narrative, and at Paris Fashion Week, this season's narrative thread was tethered to ideas of rebirths, reimaginings, and proverbial new chapters.

It's a continuation of the theme that has dominated fashion headlines over the last year, with resignations and new appointments arriving on the regular, and speculation and anticipation steadily on the rise. Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, Pierpaolo Piccioli at Balenciaga, Dior under Jonathan Anderson, Duran Lantink's Jean Paul Gaultier ready-to-wear—the story practically writes itself. A flurry of Creative Director debuts clustered over a handful of days, each accompanied by the whispered suggestion that the fate of a storied fashion house hangs delicately in the balance. Yet, this season comes at a time when reports outline a slowdown in consumer spending and an uptick in price sensitivity, which might explain why, for all the backstage chatter and front-row frenzy, the runways in Paris spoke more to thoughtful calibration with an eye towards commercial metrics than they did rupture and rebellion.