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All week, the Twitterverse has been asking, what's Lindsay Lohan doing at Dior? At Viktor & Rolf? At John Galliano? Shouldn't she be putting the final touches on her second Emanuel Ungaro outing? Today, before the show, the house gave us all an answer: Sorry, paparazzi, but the omnipresent starlet actually had nothing to do with the Fall collection.

Estrella Archs took her bow solo, but just because Lohan and the heart-shaped spangled pasties that got so much attention last season are out of the picture doesn't mean that the pressure is off. On the whole, the collection of draped and ruched party dresses, scattered here and there with tailored jackets in menswear fabrics, was an improvement, if not necessarily made with the same joie de vivre or finesse as Ungaro's originals. But with the eighties moment fast disappearing in fashion's rearview mirror, Archs has new challenges ahead of her should she remain at the label. Now that everyone's talking about minimalism again, the first order of business will be finding a way to make the house codes relevant again. As difficult as it's no doubt been for Archs at Ungaro, it's not yet clear that she has skills adequate to the task.
—Nicole Phelps
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Question: If all the camel coats in all the Fall collections were laid end to end, how many people would be able to tell them apart? Giambattista Valli added one of his own to the long line of beige show-openers: a cocoon-ish shape balanced on kitten-heel slingbacks. The shoes were a key to the slightly sixties theme he was working. It's another trend of the season, of course, but it's also a decade this designer frequently uses as a starting point for his unashamedly feminine, slightly frothy approach—which was soon to break out in tufted 3-D ribbon embroideries, variously deployed on shifts and gowns.

Whatever Valli does—cute day suits, short cocktail, or over-the-top statement gowns—it has the knack of charming the wealthy, social customers who are his loyal friends. The Valli girls, including Brooke Shields, Coco Brandolini, Dr. Lisa Airan, and Andrea Dellal's shoe-designer daughter, Charlotte, were there in force this time to show solidarity with the designer, as well as to shop. Like several other Italian labels recently, Valli's has caught the fallout from the financial catastrophes that have been sinking fashion conglomerates in his home country. Mariella Burani Fashion Group, which manufactures his collections, went bankrupt last month and is being liquidated. An announcement released just before the show stated he is taking production into his own hands.

Valli's fans will find a lot to like among his Fall offerings, which eschewed plainness and sobriety for mostly short, swingy dresses with elaborate surfaces and sheer panels (perhaps the through-views to the panties will somehow be obscured in reality). Some of the tuxedo looks over wisps of chiffon—an homage to the Saint Laurent retrospective about to open in Paris—might well (again, with the underwear issues sorted out) appeal to the brigade of chic mothers Valli also serves. Considering the crisis conditions under which this collection was designed, it was a respectable show from one of fashion's more resolutely optimistic survivors. Could the fact that there was an oligarch in the front row be a sign of hope? Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB agent who is a British newspaper proprietor, was scanning the show with his son Evgeny, a sponsor of the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund.
—Sarah Mower
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With its bricolage of classic men's fabrics and sumptuous decorative elements, Antonio Marras' own collection in Milan was one-of-a-kind poetry. A "laboratorio," he called it. It was a genuine pleasure to see some of the results of his experiments filter down to the Kenzo catwalk, in the languid interplay between feminine and masculine; the magpie trove of paillettes, buttons, and beads that decorated sober gray flannel; and the combinations of leopard and pinstripe. But these signatures were actually so compatible with Kenzo Takada's own aesthetic that it was hardly necessary to draw any clear distinction. The design of the runway said it all: willow branches woven into a spreading canopy of trees, representing the evolution of the Kenzo ideal under its current creative director.

Marras is a free spirit, untouched by passing trends, which makes him one of the few designers who can get away with claiming a quest for liberty as the reason for his collection. Freedom here meant the loosest, easiest of shapes—usually layered—in fabrics that were a patchwork of florals, plaids, embroidery, and appliqué. The pursuit of ease yielded an unfortunate jumpsuit or two, but the mood was otherwise very much the casual hippie- and vintage-influenced chic of the seventies style icons that Marras name-checked—women like Tina Chow, Marisa Berenson, Florinda Bolkan, even Farrah Fawcett, some of whom undoubtedly wore Kenzo the first time around. Toss a pinstriped jacket over a patchworked smock dress and you get the point. The hair—a tangle of pretty curls, often topped with a man's fedora—underlined it. With his own collection, at least, it's hard not to feel that Marras is radically underrated. The crowd at Kenzo today included the omnipresent Lindsay Lohan, who seemed much more agreeable than she's been the rest of the week. That possibly suggests the tide of attention may be turning Marras' way.
—Tim Blanks
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It's not usually a good sign when a designer opens up with a knit leotard with a cutout at one hip worn over a pair of clingy exercise shorts and heavy tights. Where, for example, might a young woman sport such an outfit, outside of the ballet studio? But there was more to this Vanessa Bruno show than the opening suggested. Dance, or more precisely, the layered and wrapped outfits that dancers wear to rehearse, provided Bruno with an organizing theme for her Fall collection. And if it's hard to picture that first look hanging in the window of her Rue de Castiglione store, her outerwear, starting with a long, icy gray shearling knitted at the hem, will have them lining up.

Already own a trench? Bruno's given her fans a reason to buy a new one in the form of a drop-waist camel leather version or another in tweed with a leather storm flap. She also made some smart moves with her tailoring. Adding a strap to a blazer so it stays on when you wear it tossed over your shoulders isn't a new idea—Helmut Lang did it a decade ago or more—but it's probably new to her girls. As for the season's must-have mixed-media jacket, hers combined crisp gray flannel with a deep leather hem and a ribbed knit back.

There were other things to like here as well, including a ribbed cardigan with leather elbow patches, the floaty printed chiffon dresses, and Bruno's patchwork stacked-heel boots with fur trim. All in all, a strong show from this well-priced Paris favorite.
—Nicole Phelps
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Stella McCartney's show began with a fake recording of Tiger Woods' alleged call to his mistress, the one in which he asks her to remove her name from her voicemail because his wife has found her number on his phone. Things ended, as usual, with a Beatles song; this season it was "Mother Nature's Son." They made for perplexing, if thought-provoking, bookends to a collection of daywear that for the most part looked tailor-made not for celebrity groupies but for the smart, powerful businesswoman. It was clean, polished, and chic—three buzzwords of the season.

An unfettered charcoal coat, a notched lapel its only decoration, opened the show, and was followed by streamlined, hip-grazing tunics. When they were worn with narrow, tapering trousers or even stirrup pants, along with pointy kitten heels, they looked like modern, easy answers to the much maligned boardroom pantsuit. Just as often, though, they came without bottoms, which meant that there was a lot of leg on McCartney's runway. Plenty sexy, but perhaps not so user-friendly as a sleeveless coat-dress in camel or her beautifully spare double-breasted white coat.

For evening, the designer experimented with sheer organza overlays (a motif that also turned up at Givenchy). She draped them on top of a one-shoulder iridescent paillette dress or a nude bustier number embroidered with scarlet roses. In other words, they were quite a bit trickier than her fabulously minimal daywear.
—Nicole Phelps
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Stefano Pilati categorically denied there was any religious symbolism in his Fall show. Nevertheless, the sober caped black forms, wimplelike head coverings, starched white cotton, hoods, and heavy chain pendants gave a nunlike impression. Granted, it wasn't literal, but there was something of the Catholic convent in the high white dog collar on a suit, the yoked white blouse with full sleeves, the prim and modest mid-calf dresses—and the way a cardinal purple cape made an appearance at one point. Even when a sheer black dress came out, there was a cross to bare beneath it: underwear formed as a cruciform bodysuit.

But that wasn't the gloss Pilati put on it at all. "It's about protection," he said after the show, explaining the plastic film he put over coats and inserted in patches in jackets. "And partly, an homage to YSL and the rigorous tailleur." As for the figures dangling on the gold chains that swung and bumped on the lower body as the models walked? He said he'd taken those from silhouettes of Saint Laurent fashion photos he'd cut out of seventies magazines.

Still, this collection was sometimes tricky to fathom. It was best in the simplest and strongest pieces: seventies-influenced shapes, like the high-waist flared trousers, capes, mid-calf skirts; the smart slash-sleeved jacket; and the jumpsuits—all ideas that look timely in the context of this season's trends.

But perhaps a more explanatory perspective would be the one taken from the Petit Palais, just opposite the YSL show venue, where a major retrospective of the work of the late Yves Saint Laurent is about to open. Thus far, Pilati has avoided creating comparisons to the master's archive, striving instead to make statements of his own about redefining the wardrobe for the twenty-first century. Oddly enough, if he relaxed more into channeling the way Saint Laurent nailed how the working woman wanted to dress in the Parisian seventies—as so many other designers are now—it might be an easier path.
—Sarah Mower
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"Modern is for today," Karl Lagerfeld said before his show, emphasizing his in-the-moment view of fashion, but the collection he showed under his own name impressively encompassed past, present, and future. Though the designer also featured a swingy A-line shape (in winter white, say, with silver piping and zip), the silhouette that mattered was streamlined to the nth. It was composed of a rigorously tailored jacket, its front folded back to create a kind of angular peplum, worn over a second-skin skirt-and-pants combination in a new kind of patent leather that had a flawless vinyl finish (in brown, it looked unsettlingly like chocolate). The patent was also used to line lapels or those folded jacket fronts. But equally, many of Lagerfeld's details harked back to history, like the corset detailing on one jacket or the buttons that ran up to the elbow on the sleeve of another. One navy jacket with a little stand-up collar was piped in red like a vintage military uniform. The puff of black netting on a one-shouldered silk dress added a fin de siècle touch, of old Vienna perhaps. The beaded or pleated chiffons that made up the finale had that same feel, even when worn over patent pants. The bands that held hair high off the forehead added inches of height to models who were already towering. Backstage, they set Lagerfeld to thinking about the Na'vi and Avatar and maybe even a collection of KL in 3-D eyewear.
—Tim Blanks
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The return of minimalism may be setting the agenda elsewhere, but you didn't expect Andrew Gn to abandon his signature embellishments, did you? Inspired by a Louis XV commode in his Paris apartment, part of his collection of antique furniture, and a Montesquieu book, Lettres Persanes, Gn's Fall collection had an eighteenth-century look, albeit with a twenty-first-century spin. He called it "modern rococo."

The rococo element came through in the form of narrow jackets with stand-up collars and double rows of silver buttons marching up the front. It was also present in a re-embroidered cut velvet coat with passementerie trimming at the cuffs and in a bustier gown made in a re-edition of a vibrant teal and violet floral velour de sable. Then there was all the embroidered leather scrollwork at the necklines of dresses and shoulders of coats, the oversize silver belt buckles, the densely beaded belts. As for the modern touches? Those included Gn's technical fabrics and innovative techniques—a microfiber satin that resists wrinkles for a ruffled lapel, and leather smocking trimming the edge of a cropped jacket. But the most obvious twenty-first-century element was the ultrashort length of the ruched jersey cocktail dresses. All that leg, not to mention the cutouts under the bust, would surely have made a lady of the court blush.

If those looked like tough sells with the designer's own ladylike clientele, there were plenty of other frills to seduce his customers in a collection that mostly stayed within their—and Gn's—comfort zone.
—Nicole Phelps
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Picking up where his smart pre-collection left off, Albert Kriemler's Fall lineup was focused on languid, seventies-ish tailoring and outerwear with a sportif sensibility. The lean, spare silhouette of his suits—elongated jacket, high-waisted flared trousers—provided an opportunity to showcase the fine fabrics that Akris' St. Gallen mills specialize in: Prince of Wales checks, houndstooths, tweeds, and plaids, all in the supplest cashmere. And it doesn't get any more luxe than Kriemler's long-sleeved blouse in a taupey-gray sheared astrakhan. As subtle as that fur and those menswear cashmeres were, his leathers were vibrant: a trim, to-the-body sleeveless dress in cassis, a fitted double-breasted coat in plum. As for the sportier fare, you're never going to see a straight-up down parka here. Kriemler's came in camel hair with drawstrings on the sleeves and across the torso and back to adjust the fit.

Ornamentation only entered the picture for evening, but it remained understated: Trapezoidal black crystals adorned the sheer shoulders of a black double-face long dress; the bodice of a strapless cocktail number was stitched with smooth feathers.

If Kriemler got carried away, it was with his bags—not with the totes themselves, which are as finely made as they were when they debuted last season, but in the sheer number of them on the runway. In the end, though, they didn't detract from this well-considered, elegant collection.
—Nicole Phelps
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Ah, Costume National: the label where hems must be high and leather isn't so much an option as a staple. There is nothing wrong with this kind of molto-sexy-with-a-tough-edge signature style—after all, it's far better than the brand having no style at all. But you sometimes suspect that designer Ennio Capasa and his label would be better served by showing the collection at home in molto sexy Milano as opposed to très chic Paris, where the show can come across like a thigh-high boot accidentally placed in the kitten-heel section of a shoe store.

Yet perhaps the city is rubbing off a little on Capasa, because this was a relatively toned-down collection. Sure, the hems were still up around the hip-bone area, but the clothes themselves came in soft grays and browns, wool and mohair—a cleansing effect after last season's leather short shorts. There were some very good trouser suits that achieved Costume's necessary sexy quotient, thanks to the excellent fit. The cleverly morphed thicker materials of the short dresses—that wool and mohair—almost seemed designed to distract the eye from the models' upper thighs, although perhaps that only works on fashion editors as opposed to, say, footballers.

Quite how any of this fit in with Capasa's surprising source of inspiration, Henry David Thoreau's Walden, a nineteenth-century book about self-imposed isolation and self-discovery, is anyone's guess. Maybe it just suggests that Capasa is beginning to resist the Italian nightclub scene, staying home instead with a good book and a cup of cocoa. Well, a good book and a glass of Champagne.
—Hadley Freeman
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If you felt like you'd seen it all before at John Galliano, it's because you did. At least in some ways: A year ago, he sent out a parade of Russian/Balkan folkloric princesses; this season, as his program explained, "a tribe of adventuring nomads" trekked "through a mountainous terrain, crossing imaginary borders in search of a new land." Last March, there was fake snow; today, his bronzed, bewigged, and behatted models walked through a blizzard of silver glitter. There were some striking similarities between the two collections' clothes, too, starting with the very first pannier-skirted caban coat.

Of course, Galliano's workmanship was, as ever, top-notch. And the imaginative melding of cultures and eras into single outfits—a popular theme this weekend, with Jean Paul Gaultier exploring similar territory—was something to marvel at, too, especially near the end, when bias-cut gowns aswirl with yak fur (not as strange as it sounds) made their grand entrance.

However, now, even more than a year ago, there is a rather glaring disconnect between this spectacle of a show and the bigger fashion picture, with its new focus on simplicity. The fireworks (yes, fireworks) that accompanied Galliano's bow only threw that disparity into higher relief.
—Nicole Phelps
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After two seasons of shows at her Boulevard Saint-Germain boutique, Sonia Rykiel returned to a larger space today. Just as you can count on her models smiling and slapping high fives, you can be sure that if it's Fall, there will be plenty of knits. A trio in colorful stripes evoked not only vintage Rykiel, but also her recent collection for H&M. Smart move: Lure them with fast fashion and hook them with the real thing. Also mingling on the runway were cardigan dresses, both fitted and slouchy; a frock that looked as if it were made from a pair of sweaters, one wrapped around the waist, the other around the bust; and some familiar trompe l'oeil faux-layered numbers.

What looked different for Rykiel, and like a nod to the current moment, were the oversize takes on classic menswear: a big, boxy suit with rolled cuffs (a bit too big, actually), a long red trench fastened with a giant safety pin, and baggy knit cargos held up by suspenders. By the finale, we were back in familiar territory, with models not yet born when the tune came out singing Nirvana's "Come as You Are" as they traipsed down the catwalk in coquettish ostrich-feather tanks, tunics, and coats. All in all, it was a bit predictable, but still loads of fun.
—Nicole Phelps
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In these days of reduced budgets and the pressure to sell clothes, the art of the fashion show as theater—which Hussein Chalayan and Alexander McQueen both pushed to a pinnacle of creativity in London in the nineties—has, much to the detriment of audience fulfillment, been shoved to the back of the agenda. Now meanings and messages are often delivered only aurally, but in some hands they can still be powerfully affecting. Such was Chalayan's voice-over preface, a tribute to McQueen, in which he honored his peer as a man whose work probed a raw, dark beauty and through his work became a mythical hero himself.

Sound was also the guide to understanding Chalayan's theme for Fall: a car engine firing up, followed by snatches of radio-station music and weather reports gleaned from across the U.S.A. He was on a road trip. Once you tuned in, it was clear he was setting off from New York, with a clever observation of the urban mix of tailored coats, jeans, hoodies, and sneakers that has become a city street uniform since the nineties. Soon, we were heading through Pennsylvania and Amish land, as the hoods took on the structure of bonnets, and the modern world was briefly silenced. From there, Chalayan took a turn south, making glitter-sleeved, formfitting dresses with diagonal necklines suggesting beauty-pageant sashes. Then it was out through hurricane country: Steel gray pleated twister dresses whipped around the body, then up and over the head, accompanied by emergency on-the-spot updates from a radio reporter.

In a way, this narrative is too literal an explanation for either Chalayan's thinking, or the fact that the clothes followed a completely wearable, on-track route for Fall. On one level, the collection traced the concerns with landscape, history, environmental crisis, ethnography, and culture that have always informed his work. On the other, Chalayan's American explorations allowed him to tick off trends and stop by every category needed in the span of a day-to-evening, casual-to-formal collection. Somewhere in Utah, he brought up a shearling coat with matching binoculars and a camel poncho. Later on, he worked through sportswear in gray sweats and then, maybe on the West Coast, arrived at a place where sinuously glamorous full-length gowns (beaded in dégradé patterns suggesting headlight flashes at night on a dark freeway) made complete sense.
—Sarah Mower
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There could almost have been a Celine convention going on in the tennis club where Phoebe Philo showed her second collection for the label. Up and down the ranks, dozens of women were proudly displaying their Celine allegiance in camel coats, tux jackets, wide-legged high-waist pants, silk blouses, leather T-shirts, silver-heeled boots, and sandals. Almost the entire Spring collection was there somewhere, save for the sheer trousers (and it's a fair bet someone has those at home).

That the above bears noting is a gauge of the huge significance of Philo's comeback. What she accomplished in restoring the status of rational, classy daywear last season has finally shattered the personal-purchasing moratorium that set in with the recession. Now women have seen what they want, impulse buying is back, and the atmosphere in the house was strumming with the collective will that Philo would follow up with more to keep the spending valves open.

She did so in wave after wave of clothes that fed the pent-up desire for grown-up, flattering, simple but sexy dressing. In her own words: "Strong. Powerful. Reduced." Narrow navy funnel-necked coats and dresses, slim cropped-at-the-ankle kick flares, A-line skirts, and cream silk blouses started it off—all styled in a no-fuss manner with sheer black tights, riding boots, or high-heeled loafers. At a stroke, it carried the wholeness, simplicity, and confidence of a definitive look, perfectly judged and attainable.

Part of the genius is the way Philo has reframed the sullied term "luxury" by harnessing the DNA of Celine—a Parisian bourgeois sportswear label that was at peak fashionability in the seventies. Her skillful deployment of leather is part of that. She did it with her placement of deep, smooth patch pockets on the sides of shifts and peacoats, as well as in her Helmut Newton-esque black patent wrap skirts and a black double-breasted military trench, belted with a domed brass buckle.

The variety of Philo's outerwear was amazing—spanning a chic-casual navy hooded parka-coat hybrid, slim three-quarter jacket-coats, and a stunning cream teddy-bear shearling cape. Alongside that, a plethora of daywear options focused on separates—a refreshing breakaway from the dress obsession that has stuck fashion in a rut for too long. For evening, she sustained that sense of practical reserve in a cutaway pantsuit with a tunic fluttering beneath it, and two outfits with sculpted black paillettes. None of it was body-baring, none of it showy. Yet it still exuded the calm sense of assured sexuality that adult women have been waiting for since Helmut Lang left the runway. The fact that Philo chose to stage this show in the very venue in which he presented his final collection can't have been a coincidence. In her own feminine way, she is picking up the cause for women exactly where he left off.
—Sarah Mower
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Australian designer Martin Grant has made a modest but steady name for himself, proving that stylish and practical need not be separate entities when it comes to women's fashion. His very consistent collections have always been quietly chic and eminently wearable, and this show displayed his USP nicely. It also demonstrated, though, why he would be best advised to stay within those restrained but effective parameters.

Shown as a presentation in the gorgeous École des Beaux-Arts, the collection began with a dress that was a good example of Grant's modus operandi, being a seemingly simple mid-length black dress with demi sleeves. But look a little closer (and this is one reason why the designer has been wise in rejecting shows for presentations in the past year, as they allow onlookers to appreciate his careful handiwork better), and his skills are more apparent. Witness how he cut the bottom of the dress to blossom out into a small bubble, but stitched it in such a way so as not to bulk out the wearer. Similarly, a simple pair of black trousers had an interesting drape effect on the hips, which actually made the model look even more sylphlike. A beautiful oak-colored leather minidress included some pockets carefully cut into the side, lightening up the material's potentially heavy effect.

Aside from detailing, Grant is also known for his ladylike aesthetic and, true to form, the only cleavage on show was on the models' toes, thanks to some particularly beautiful brightly colored round-toed high heels—cut away, rather saucily, just over the models' mid-toe joints. Less appealing, though, was the end section, in which Grant had included the ubiquitous big-shoulder trend—a misguided effort that brought to mind a normally dignified uncle getting down to some hip-hop at his niece's wedding. Grant works better when he sways gently to his own refined tune.
—Hadley Freeman
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