Richard Avedon got his first assignment from Harper’s Bazaar in 1944, when he was 21 years old. For the next six decades, his coverage of fashion, fame and cultural revolutions created a peerless iconography. His work has been recognized over the years in huge museum retrospectives, so much so that you might have expected the centenary of his birth on May 15 to occasion a massive institutional blowout from the likes of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The Met, and dozens of other institutions in the US, did acknowledge the anniversary in their own lowkey ways: the joint initiative was called Avedon Across America, and on his actual birthday, the Avedon Foundation posted a fabulous video of Dick doing the Twist (rather incongruously to T.Rex’s 70s glam anthem “Born to Boogie”) inside his first solo exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Art and Industries Building in November 1962.

But it fell to Avedon’s New York gallerist Larry Gagosian to truly celebrate the life and work of the man whose visual record of the late 20th century will shape the way the future sees us. “A mythology of the everyday” was Chloe Sevigny’s memorable description of Avedon’s output. Why, just this week alone, Avedon’s portrait of Tina Turner in full cry re-emerged in the wake of her death as possibly the definitive document of her incandescence.

Gagosian’s approach was smart. Instead of a selection of the pictures we know so well, co-curator Derek Blasberg and Laura Avedon, Dick’s daughter-in-law and head of his foundation, selected people — designers, models, artists, musicians, writers, friends and colleagues, more than 150 in all — and charged each of them with choosing a single image that expressed their connection with or affection for the photographer, or clarified what they considered to be his genius. That’s how “Avedon 100″ became the cultural sensation of the spring in New York, with an opening night turn-out the likes of which the art world hasn’t seen for a while, thanks in part to Blasberg’s formidable address book.

The concept also sparked a sort of party game. Who chose what? The psychology of it all! Well, first, there were the people who picked portraits of themselves, like Tom Ford and Hilary Clinton. I mean, wouldn’t you, if Richard Avedon took your picture? Likewise the models who’d worked with him: Pat Cleveland, Claudia Schiffer, Lauren Hutton (showing up opening night in the fisherman’s hat she was wearing in the 70s pic she chose) and Linda Evangelista, who opted for a simple, utterly ravishing headshot from an old Versace ad.

Of course, the pictures we know so well inevitably made their way into the Gagosian show. That is the nature of an iconic image. It resonates for all time with all people. So who chose Avedon’s most famous pictures? François Pinault picked the 1957 portrait of Marilyn Monroe, the so-called “Sad Marilyn,” which gains an awe-inspiring prescience with the passage of time. Marta Ortega Perez, non-executive chair of the Inditex fashion empire (spell that Zara), chose “Dovima with Elephants,” possibly the most lauded fashion image ever, from a Harper’s Bazaar shoot in September 1955. Stella McCartney unsurprisingly went for Avedon’s psychedelic tetraptych of the Beatles. Avedon’s 1962 sequence of photographs with model Suzy Parker and director Mike Nichols re-enacting Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s frantic interaction with the paparazzi — my own favourite fashion shoot — was selected by photographer Ethan James Green, who singled it out as the birth of narrative in fashion editorial. And Blasberg opted for Avedon’s 1969 triptych of Andy Warhol with his bare-all Factory superstars.

Blasberg first saw it in hometown St Louis, Missouri, where penises, leather jackets and bike boots were rocket fuel to the imagination of a Middle American teen. How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen the Factory? Learning how much work went into the seemingly casual composition of the triptych — “Nine months, multiple shots and meticulous decisions on casting and composition” — surely contributed to Blasberg’s appreciation of Avedon. But he also related to the sense of gay community, the family you create for yourself.

Avedon came back to the idea of the family a few times, most famously with a 1976 portfolio for Rolling Stone, actually called The Family (chosen for Avedon 100 by novelist and collaborator Renata Adler). It was a photographic record of America’s political establishment two years after the trauma of Watergate resulted in Richard Nixon’s resignation: George Bush as head of the CIA, Ronald Reagan as governor of California, a couple of Kennedys, you get the drift. “If Richard Avedon had not been such a great photographer, he could have been an incredible casting agent,” says Blasberg. “He had a real eye for people.”

One portrait from The Family spectacularly claims a wall in the show celebrating Avedon’s centenary at London’s Hamiltons Gallery. It’s a picture of stately matriarch Rose Kennedy, printed in a rare oversize. A wall away is a 1958 portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy. Next to it is a 1953 image of Gloria Vanderbilt. That very same photograph is propped up on the side table in the picture that Anderson Cooper chose of his mother for the Gagosian show. Such synchronicities — the artful exhibition hangings aside — are testament to the intricacies of Avedon’s engagement with all levels of society. So are Hamiltons’ rarely seen photos of a Black cotillion ball in New Orleans in 1963, which indirectly speak to his profound engagement with the civil rights movement in the 60s.

Hamiltons’ director Tim Jefferies titled his show “Glamorous,” a significant distinction from “glamour” which he feels had a specifically fashion connotation. “Glamorous” in his eyes, runs the gamut of Avedon’s work, with its ability to gloss the quotidian with extraordinary power. So his show spans congressman Adam Clayton Powell (1964), starlet Ingrid Boulting, and a particularly telling 1961 portrait of the Asian model China Machado, surrounded by agitated members of the French press. When Avedon photographed Machado for Harper’s Bazaar in 1958, he was told to reshoot on a white model. He refused to re-sign his contract if the magazine didn’t use her. So China Machado was the first non-white model in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, not because the magazine got woke but because Richard Avedon insisted.

Jefferies’ choice for Gagosian — Avedon’s notorious portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor — similarly highlights the photographer’s edgy pragmatism. Just before he took their picture, Avedon told the canine-crazed couple that his car had run over a dog on his way to meet them at the Waldorf Astoria. “It shows Avedon’s slightly wicked and humorous nature,” Jefferies explains. “He didn’t feel he was getting what he wanted so he dropped the doggie bomb. Their faces are etched with horror.”

The intrusion of his own inescapable vision on the ideal construct we all attempt to make of our lives might actually be Avedon’s signature. Not precisely warts and all, but definitely skull beneath the skin. “A portrait is not a likeness,” the photographer once claimed. “The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph, it is no longer a fact but an opinion. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. I’m not interested in the truth.”

In his staging of the Gagosian show, set designer Stefan Beckman created a visual paradigm that you imagine Avedon himself would have relished. As a blizzard of cultural, political and show business figures swirls around the outer walls, the gallery space is steadily centred on a dark quiet core, a room painted black which houses images from “In the American West.” It was commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth in 1979, and it took six years, 752 subjects and a final choice of 124 portraits for Avedon to honour that commission. Controversial at the time — shortsighted critics slammed it as a victory of style over content, unable to accept that the eye of a New Yorker as urbane and sophisticated as Richard Avedon could ever truly do justice to the hardscrabble lives of the “real” Americans who lived west of the Mississippi — it is now, according to Jeffries, “one of the most important bodies of work ever created photographically.”

On a personal level, it was also a stunning expression of Avedon’s growing disillusionment with the sentimental myth-making of the American Dream. Here was the gap between that dream and harsh reality rendered in relentlessly stark life-size portraits. And, if the Gagosian show is any reflection, this is work that resonates deeply with the fashion industry.

Vogue editor Edward Enninful chose an image of a trucker from “In the American West.” Raf Simons selected a drifter. Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte opted for the Avedon portrait of Ronald Fischer, beekeeper. Chloe Sevigny picked an image of Russell Laird and Tammy Baker, seventeen-year-olds from Sweetwater, Texas. “It’s romance and we all want that,” she reasoned, “especially when I was 20 years old, looking at these images and falling in love for the first time.”

Miuccia Prada chose “Boyd Fortin, thirteen-year-old rattlesnake skinner, Sweetwater, Texas, March 10, 1979.” When Blasberg gave Prada, in town for the Met Gala, a private tour of the show, he proudly showed her the giant print that Avedon himself had made of Dovima and the Elephants, thinking this iconic fashion image would impress her, but she couldn’t have cared less. “And then I remembered the image she chose was of a young boy in a bloodied apron holding a headless snake,” Blasberg recounts. “I think that, to her, is the epitome of fashion. It’s not Dovima in an evening gown with those beautiful pachyderms, waving their trunks in the air.” I get it. The perverse beauty of the Fortin portrait is more attuned to the Prada aesthetic, never mind that the boy also looks like he could have stepped off the set of a Pasolini movie. Miuccia is judging Avedon as an artist rather than a fashion photographer.

He himself undoubtedly preferred that. In his 1994 retrospective at the Whitney in New York, just 15 of the 183 photos were fashion images. In 1995, a couple of years after Tina Brown hired him as staff photographer at The New Yorker, Avedon photographed an audacious 25-page “fable” called “In Memory of the Late Mr and Mrs Comfort.” It featured model Nadja Auermann interacting throughout with a skeleton. Technically a fashion shoot — she is wearing a full gamut of the new season’s looks — Avedon also intended it as an obituary for his career in fashion. “In many ways the fashion-photographer moniker became a psychological hindrance,” writes Blasberg in his introduction to the “Avedon 100″ catalogue. But how do you fight destiny? That Dovima photo, the one with the elephants that Blasberg wanted to show Miuccia Prada, might well be the single most celebrated fashion image of all time. Valuable, too. A vintage print from 1955 sold for $1,148,910 at Christies in 2010. That’s the kind of number experts would use to assert fashion’s primacy in the history of the photographic medium.

One of my favourite finds in the Gagosian show is much more humble. Chosen by photographer Tyler Mitchell, it’s a snap Avedon took in 1946, in Harlem, of himself and his high school buddy James Baldwin reflected in a mirror. A proto-selfie in other words. It underscores how much more there is still to discover about Avedon. In that, he reminds me of creators like Picasso, Warhol and Bowie, whose careers were so protean that you could winkle any number of themes out of their work to build a show around. “These guys worked every single day,” says Tim Jefferies. “They never bloody stopped.” The appropriate response is, ultimately, awe.

Jack Davison recalls a conversation with his mother years ago when he was being negative about something, which was unusual enough in itself that she pulled him up short. “The thing that was really exciting about you as a child was that you were always full of awe at everything. Don’t stop being excited by stuff.” He bowed to maternal wisdom.

Growing up in a small village in Essex, northeast of London, Davison was always rapt in nature, always easily excited by everything around him. He wanted to be Jacques Cousteau when he grew up. “I’m very close with my sisters and we spent a lot of time just playing in the garden. Dad’s a builder, and he and Mum were very good at telling us to go and make a teepee, or create something.” And then Jack would want to photograph it or draw it.

Nothing’s changed in the decades since. Davison is the kind of sunny soul whose enthusiasm is contagious. He took on a personal trainer last year in readiness for Selma, he and wife Aggie’s second child. “Basically, I want to be strong because carrying children is a back killer.” Now, broad of chest, rosy of cheek, Davison is the very vision of a robust country boy. Unsurprisingly, he likes getting his hands dirty. He rhapsodises about the six months he spent working as a labourer, not really taking any pictures. Best time ever. Now he’s in the process of turning his backyard into a working garden. There’s even a large frog pond, waiting for the frogs to take.

Small wonder his mother was taken aback by that flicker of negativity. Davison insists he is untroubled by self-doubt, nor is there any darkness in his nature. It lives in his work though. He has become famous for his portraiture. Its signature is often an intense chiaroscuro, with shadows so deep they swallow light. The first time I saw his pictures, I was staggered. Who on earth was this person? What time? What place?

Davison is happy he has that effect. “It just gives you so much more freedom. I always loved the idea that someone finds a sheaf of photographs of mine without any labels. I could be long dead. Maybe there’s no record. I mean, it’s probably easier with technology now, but the fact that you could have thought, ‘Oh actually, I don’t know when this is from or who this was…’ Even when I was on Flickr, people used to think I was some 50-year-old Spanish or Russian photographer.” (For the record, he just turned 32.)

Davison is self-taught. He was a Flickr baby. “I started when I was 13 or 14, posting online. And I found really quickly what I was drawn to, maybe through some of the art I’d seen as a kid… the 1920s, the early Modernists, the Surrealists… and then the photographers.” The only photography book he remembers in the family home was Bert Stern’s last sitting with Marilyn Monroe — “and I only looked at that because I was a horny teen and there were boobs.” So Flickr was invaluable because it was an education. “Just images, presented in white space. It wasn’t conflated with the idea of the self and the present.”

Through Flickr, he discovered kindred spirits, none more important than photographer Brett Walker. “I found people who he knew, who he taught, and we all had this similar love of things that felt out of time and weird. What united a lot of us was not necessarily wanting to take photographs that felt like they were happening now.” Walker was a name in the 1980s and 90s, when magazines like i-D and The Face created new venues for deeply personal, experimental work. Dark, troubled, he was everything Davison wasn’t.

He considers Walker his mentor. “When I started studying with Brett, his work definitely shaped me. The close cropping, the love of the street. Brett would always say, ‘Crop everything out of your photo until it’s clear.’ It was always about making singular images, which is not necessarily taught that often. I didn’t do a university course but I know a lot of the time the kids I mentor who are at university are always told to plan a body of work. It has to have an intense meaning behind it. What I’m trying to do is get people to just take pictures, and then think about it after.”

“Lots of photographers want their photographs to be timeless,” wrote Kathy Ryan, the legendary Director of Photography for The New York Times Magazine, in the catalogue for Davison’s show at the Cob Gallery in London last October. “Jack wants literally to remove time from his work. His work features no fashions, logos, cars or other signifiers that will anchor the photo forever to its time.” Ryan makes careers and Davison’s professional breakthrough probably came when she selected him to photograph the annual Great Performers portfolio for The New York Times Magazine in 2016. Its title, L.A. Noir, nailed his interplay of light and shadow.

He likes hard, bright sunlight for his shoots, precisely the light that originally made Hollywood the hub of the movie industry. That might explain why his work is often described as cinematic. Or that it occasionally echoes early movies in its chiaroscuro intensity. It took a while. He was a year into his career before he realised that he got good stuff when it was sunny. “It’s funny, at first I thought that everyone loved really hard sunlight then I realised people prefer the golden hour, the softer light. But I like that there’s just no hiding. It can be very stark, throw way more shadows into the space or begin to add abstraction.”

So that first “Great Performers” portfolio was a perfect storm for him. “It combined so many things I like. The classical styling of 1950s noir, the hard light… I wasn’t allowed a studio, so I was outside in a parking lot, and there was none of the faff which I don’t like in studios there. And then I was just left to my own devices. People would get ready inside and they’d walk out into this parking lot and be a bit confused, which was great because they were kind of off their stride. And then we’d make pictures together.” One consummate Jack moment: Emma Stone, batting away a perfectly surreal shower of fedoras. She’s never looked better.

In 2019, Ryan commissioned Davison for a second “Great Performers” portfolio. “The original pitch was they wanted to essentially do nudes of famous people, or very revealing photographs. But they didn’t do any of the legwork with the people beforehand. So that kind of came down to me. Brian Malloy was doing the styling at the time and we had to have these conversations on set, and I ended up saying, ‘Look, I’m not going to sit down with Robert De Niro and be, like, pants off! There’s no way in hell you’re gonna get anyone to sign off on this.’ JLo didn’t wear much but that was kind of her M.O.”

Both portfolios are easy to find online. They make an ideal introduction to the portraiture that has established Davison as a natural heir to the grand masters Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. That’s because it’s even easier to appreciate the subversive, entrancing impact of his work when you’re looking at pictures of people whose faces you’re familiar with from a hundred other photo shoots. Suddenly, they’re less familiar.

“When I was coming up, I looked at those Avedon and Penn pictures where there’s a real rawness,” says Davison. “They’re getting to someone and there’s a real emotion to it. And I was wondering why no one was using this opportunity, to do something radical or make something weird, and push these people.” He brings up the famous Avedon portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, where, just before the photographer pushed the button, he told the pug-crazed duo his taxi had run over a small dog en route to the shoot. Or so the story goes. Their unhappy faces in that picture came to define how the rest of the world imagined they must feel about their blighted lives. “That’s not the space I want to put people into,” Davison clarifies quickly. “It’s just that I go, ‘Why wouldn’t we make something weird and expressive, and try to do something that isn’t just gonna be another picture of you?’”

His recent sitting with Cate Blanchett, again for The New York Times, is a golden example. “I’d already photographed her for Vogue and we got on really well, but it was kind of a missed opportunity because she was playing herself and it felt a bit celebrity-portrait-y. But I figured Cate was probably a bit like Tilda, who will just go for something if you say, ‘I’ve got this really good idea.’ So I did lots of mood boarding and I told her, ‘I think we should turn you into this weird Bauhaus puppet.’ And she was, like, ‘Yeah!’ But when she turned up, I was still a bit ‘Are you gonna go for it?’ And then obviously, she was just amazing.” When I mention that Blanchett is almost unrecognisable as “a weird Bauhaus puppet,” Davison is pleased. “Good, that’s what I wanted. Actually, I got in trouble for that with W Magazine because I did a shoot with Zendaya and they were, like, ‘She’s not recognisable enough’. And I said, ‘She’s Zendaya, she’s one of the most famous people in the world.’ She actually messaged me. The picture she loved most was the one I got in trouble for because you can’t see her. She wanted a print. She said, ‘It doesn’t feel like me, and I like it.’”

So Zendaya was happy, but I have to ask, “What did Cate say afterwards?”

“That’s always the sad thing, I didn’t hear from her afterwards.” In fact, he rarely hears from anyone. “It’s probably just ego. You’re expecting someone to be like, ‘Oh, I love this photo!’ I don’t know, you just hope that someone is either rattled by it because they’ve never seen themselves like that, or hopefully they just feel like there was something that was worth their day.”

I get the feeling that Davison has a somewhat ambiguous attitude towards photographing the famous. “It’s kind of fun,” he concedes, “if you have that revulsion and attraction of being intrigued by those people. With “Great Performers” and jobs like that, you have to sign in and you don’t have the list but you know there’s gonna be good people on it. But when people ask me to photograph a particular person, my rule generally is: if they were just someone in the street, would I cross the road and ask them to sit for me? I do that, if there’s someone who really grasps me. I nearly did it today actually. I was walking up to Olive’s nursery, it was raining and there was this lady in a headscarf, running late. And I was basically too shy at that point. My aim this year is to do more of that. I used to do it a lot when I was a teenager. I was a bit more spontaneous. But having a baby with me, I now feel it’s less of a threatening thing. So I’m, like, ‘Look, I’ve got a child.’” And, as of February, there are two kidlings to soften the Davison approach.

He does keep a list of people he’d like to photograph. “RuPaul I would love to do. I’d really like to shoot him out of drag. But then there are your Ian McKellens, your classic actorly old faces. He’s someone I’ve actually pursued for five years and got nowhere with.” He’s done well with those faces in the past. His favourite-ever cover for The New York Times Magazine is Glenda Jackson.

He photographed her in his living room, where we’re currently sitting. It’s a favourite location too, because of the way the sunlight moves so fast across the wall. “It’s often the thing that I don’t plan, maybe a bus goes past and hits a bit of light that I didn’t see, or the sitter drops something, or they sneeze. So the picture of Glenda that The New York Times ended up using on the cover, she was going to wipe her nose essentially, and it was just this moment. That’s not what you see it as.” True enough. You see straining hands, eyes sealed shut in utter anguish. An entire emotional meltdown, in fact. It’s that thing Davison was talking about earlier. “I have that disconnect where I don’t feel I’m a particularly intense person. And I don’t have those demons that people expect me to have. They expect me to be quite dark and brooding. And I’m not. So I don’t know how that gets to here. But I do know that I want photos to be emotional and emotive. That’s why I struggle with a lot of portrait photography.”

He says it’s the same with one of his “classic” images, the lunging dog. It was his mum’s Labrador, reaching for some ham. “But it looks like it’s going to bite your throat out. It’s those moments that you have no control over that are the most exciting for me. And now it’s even funnier because Stephen King put it on the front of Cujo. So I messaged the publisher and told him my mum will think it’s the funniest thing that her stupid Labrador is the face of the most evil dog.”

In a way, the lunging dog embodies the essence Kathy Ryan defined in her catalogue: “The transcendence to be found in the everyday.” There’s another “classic” image which stays with me for the same reason. It’s superficially a picture of the back of a man in a rain-spattered coat at a racecourse in Scotland, deciding on his next bet. For me, and clearly for Davison, it’s a lot more. “It’s just one of those pictures which is distilling something to its most sculptural form. It’s so obviously a man’s back in the rain and the dog picture is so obviously a dog and I’m not actually showing you that much of either. But you’re still getting all of that.” And it’s the essential “that” which makes his images so powerful.

It may be clearest in his personal work, particularly the life’s project he has embarked on with his and Aggie’s families, because that is such a long-term emotional commitment. He imagines publishing it in 20 years. The idea originated from an approach by Double Magazine, which wanted a Christmas story. He immediately thought of his family, which he describes as a big, loving Italianate situation. And then he put his 74-year-old grandmother in front of the camera. “When you slick her hair back, something miraculous happens. She doesn’t necessarily mean to do the poses she’s doing, but it’s just like she’s been a ballerina her whole life. What she looks like normally is so far removed from the pictures I take of her, but the transformative power of shooting her is why I will always come back to portraiture.”

And now it’s an ongoing situation, one which will record the births, the inevitable deaths. That makes me wonder if Jack ever gets sad when he takes a photograph. It is, after all, the record of a moment that can never come again. “I don’t necessarily think about it in that way,” he replies. “Part of it is that at least it’s being documented and there’s a record of it. I’ve got this relationship with my grandmother, there’s a series of really special pictures that we made, and then my wider family becomes part of the project and I’ll be able to show Olive and Selma those pictures of their great grandma and how amazing she was at this point. And that’s just exciting to me. Though I’m sure it will be sad at some point.”

The family photos are an extraordinary synthesis of the various strands of Davison’s work: intimate, fantastical, transformative. It’s enough to make me wonder how he sees himself. Artist? Portraitist? Documentarian? “I always used to call myself a documentary photographer, but I’m not honest enough for that because I do too many surreal-y things. And I feel it’s a bit big-headed to call myself an artist, because I’m a Catholic boy and I can’t be too big-headed. It makes me stressed. So I thought maybe I’m a portrait photographer. But thankfully, the term ‘photographer’ is vague enough that you can be everything.”

“For me, it’s just trying to capture an in-between moment. I think that’s why I shifted away from calling myself ‘documentary’ because it’s more than that for me. It’s like taking what you have in front of you and twisting it or shaping it, so that it’s something that only you could see or you could find. So ‘photographer’ is good. But I don’t know. I still like the fact that you have to ask the question. You don’t necessarily go, ‘Oh, he’s this photographer or he’s that photographer.’ A lot of it is about subverting expectations of what I might do next.”

In his exhibition last year, Davison reproduced some of his best-known images as photographic etchings. The etching process appealed to him as a physical antidote to sitting at his laptop, or drawing. You don’t see it much in photography, but Davison was excited by the texture of etched pictures, especially the blacks you can get into them. “The dark room doesn’t really appeal to me. It’s really hard to find a print process that will take the amount of black that I want in a picture, but there’s something about churning out a print on an old press. With etching, you simply can’t add too much ink, and it really holds it.”

And he liked the randomness of the result. “I did a print course but I’m not a talented printer, so I made mistakes, which makes interesting things. Each print is different.” The effect was obvious in the Davison “classics”: the lunging dog now even more aggressive because of those inky blacks; the huge, hulking man viewed from behind, the drops of rain on his coat now almost three-dimensional in their stark definition. “I’m always chasing texture, it’s something you want to hold and interact with.”

It’s worth a reminder in the midst of all this that Davison has a fashion profile: commissions from brands like Hermès, Burberry and Moncler; collaborations with Craig Green, Marni and Alexander McQueen; editorial for a handful of Vogues and fashion bi-annuals. He likes doing fashion photography. “I think there’s a creative space and you can make it whatever you want, it really lends itself to surreal things. I sometimes really feel like it’s the only space to make certain images. Though I don’t have a love for clothing necessarily, I like what clothing can do and I like structural things. But a lot of my favourite pictures of clothes are just shapes, or they’re black spaces. So what I’ve found is some stylists might be scared that they won’t see any of the work they’ve done, which I completely understand.” One stylist who isn’t scared is Ibrahim Kamara. Davison and he worked together for the first time last year for Luncheon magazine, and again for Dazed, which Kamara edits.

The thought of future collaborations between such protean talents is one of fashion’s more exciting prospects. So, as a closing salvo, I would like to suggest a shoot inspired by Davison’s obsession with Salvador Dali. He acquired it during his childhood visits to the Dali museum in Figueres, Spain, just across the border from his grandmother’s caravan in the South of France. For an imaginative kid, the sight of a giant red castle covered with eggs and croissants was thrillingly nuts. “I was thinking I’ve never actually done a shoot that’s informed by Dali,” Davison muses. What Jack does next? Ib, let it be so.

PARIS — Backstage after her shows, Rei Kawakubo usually dispenses a nod,  or at most a tentative handshake, to acknowledge a congratulatory comment, but following Saturday’s presentation, she seemed happy to elaborate on the typically gnomic statement that was offered as the show’s manifesto.  Which was this:  “A feeling of wanting to go back to the starting point.” Everyone assumed that meant Kawakubo was returning to the Ground Zero of Comme des Garçons. The rest of the manifesto certainly suggested as much.  “Working with free patterns” and “Using basic materials.” So we all parsed the show for signifiers of CDG collections past. They were there: the 2-D, the bulbous lumps, the surreal frills and furbelows, the blood roses, the hoops and harnesses, the extravagant upending of silhouette… in other words, all the trials that Kawakubo has set herself since Spring/Summer 2014 when she decided she would no longer try to make “clothes.” You might even label this list a greatest bits of CDG Mk.II.

But oh, how wrong you’d be! When Kawakubo talked starting points, she apparently meant nothing more than a restart for the whole human race. I couldn’t agree more. Reflect on the parlous state into which we’ve plunged Planet Earth and the urge to rip it up and start again overwhelms. But imagine a slate that blank in terms of fashion. If that was what Kawakubo was offering, her show was a little disappointing. Basic materials are too familiar for a restart on a planetary scale.

My colleague Cathy Horyn suggested to Kawakubo that her collection was happy. The designer was taken aback. “Not happy,” she muttered. But there was definitely an odd almost-cheeriness in the stop/start bursts of music that accompanied the mini-passages of Kawakubo’s challenges. A prime punk blast of Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees was followed by jazzy piano, a tinkling spinet, Satie-like piano, big band vibes, Can’s “Vitamin C”, and a closing grungey gust of L7′s “Bad Things”.  I get it: all forms of human life were there. But again, that’s familiar. To reset the world, I want coruscating, disorienting strangeness.

Sign in please, Kei Ninomiya of Noir.  His manifesto promised us “an exploration of a new dimension”. After his fabulous, flummoxing presentation, his backstage grilling by eager-to-understand journos elicited not much more than the fact he was steadfastly uninfluenced by art, science, nature, any of the things that designers are usually happy to concede as guiding lights in their creativity. That liberated us to free-associate. If new dimensions immediately evoke space, a giant mirrored ball flashing light like a multi-faceted diamond did suggest a visitation from the Great Beyond. On the soundtrack, the Cocteau Twins sounded like they were broadcasting from Alpha Centauri. The radical ceramicist Takuro Kuwata once more contributed headdresses, some of them reminiscent of Asteroid 2011 AG5, which passed over the earth in January.

There were explosions of flowers stitched together — eruptions of mutant life — and undulating metallic arcs, like Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim transmogrified into items of clothing. If you were looking for a uniting principle, the idea of networks seemed appropriate. Neural networks in the twisty, intricate nature of the outfits. Or maybe mycelium, whose potential to connect and destroy has been brilliantly, alarmingly illuminated by “The Last of Us.” Makeup artist Amazing Jiro’s facial modifications looked like spreading spores. The scintillating light of the organism that closed the show might have been the phosphorescence of a deep sea creature. Or perhaps it was the O Mind of the Multiverse. It seemed to vibrate in time to the soundtrack, like the music of the spheres.

Remarkably, there were artfully real clothes underpinning Noir’s ultradimensional fantasia. A blanket skirt, a dress over shorts, a boucle officer’s coat, the gothic/noir clothing component of the collection. There is ultimately always a pragmatism to the fabulous avant-garderie of Japan’s fashion talents. Nobody understands this better than Junya Watanabe. It’s been a year since he showed his last collection inspired by motorcycle jackets. That was in a video beamed in from Tokyo. Even though he insists he doesn’t actually like motorbikes,  he’s given a lot of love to the look over the years (check out Autumn/Winter 2007 for men and Autumn/Winter 2011 for women). Each time, the take is radically different. On Saturday, he offered biker nomads, inspired by Led Zeppelin’s imperial classic “Kashmir.” Watanabe’s sole comment about the show? “It is an homage to the lyrics and the feeling of desert travel.” (Though Robert Plant actually wrote the lyrics about a long, dusty drive through the south of Morocco. There aren’t any deserts in Kashmir.)

It’s not the first time Watanabe has used Led Zeppelin in a show. It should happen more often. Soundtrackist Michel Gaubert winkled out a distorted snatch of “Whole Lotta Love” before plunging the audience into the symphonic splendour of “Kashmir”, via a live version recorded in 2007. The O2 Arena audience’s ecstatic reaction artfully amplified the reaction of Watanabe’s audience at show’s end.

Before that, six sentinel figures claimed the elevated catwalk like high priestesses in a ritual, faces masked with chains. And then the travelers began their steady march to Led Zepp’s pomp, wrapped, bonded, ringed, tied, zipped and Gore-tex-ed. In a reductive world, people might talk about the high-fashion apotheosis of gorp-core. Here, I was more taken by the notion of Furiosa and her harpies, hellbent on “Fury Road.” There were face masks, at least one lethally spiked and biker jackets deconstructed  into panniers or capes for maximum silhouettishness. One jacket was cut away, its tails fanning into a thick fringe. A shearling coat dispersed into godets. It’s that Edwardian tailoring thing that clutches at the heart of Japanese design, and here it was delivered in a perfectly precise symmetry cut from black leather (and pleather, its synthetic analogue). But the presentation — clothes and music combined — made a transcendent statement on the power of women. That felt fundamental.

PARIS — Jonathan Anderson’s collections are deep. So deep. On some level, they almost attain the level of myth. The location of Friday’s Loewe show was the Château de Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris. Deeply ingrained in the history of French royalty, it was, at various other times, a prison for the Marquis de Sade and the spot where German spy Mata Hari met her end by firing squad during the First World War. The show itself took place in a huge white box in the chateau’s courtyard. Anderson wanted arriving guests to feel history pressing in all around. It’s how he feels with Loewe. So much history… and then you’re confronted by the white box. It’s a metaphor. Purification is Anderson’s end game.

At the same time, he wants to push boundaries with what can be done — what is acceptable, even — with fashion. Here, the luxury of fine leathers, cashmeres, duchesse satins, velvets was turned to subversive purpose. There were slouchy boots served with any number of outfits in this collection that grounded the look, as a boot will do, but also undermined it. Not at all the footwear you’d expect with an evening cascade of ice-blue duchesse. Mind you, that same cascade was suspended from a doorknob! You smile. So would Marcel Duchamp. Anderson is still fashion’s arch Dadaist.

The models paraded around perfect squares of confetti, created by artist Lara Favaretto. They were moulded, not glued, so when the mould was removed, they started to crumble into puddles of primary colour. Another irresistible metaphor: all things must pass. Anderson opened his show with a similar statement about fragility. Dresses in duchesse were printed with blurred images, something observed in passing, like a Gerhard Richter painting or a Martin Margiela ghost dress. Later, there was a dress printed front and back with a trench coat, or a fur coat. “Fashion can become a bit of a blur sometimes,” the designer drolly observed in his post-show presser. The dresses, the canvases, were all antique pieces, not Loewe originals. “That’s the beauty of fashion, you can re-visit, re-interpret, re-engineer,” said Anderson.

There was an even more fragile beauty in the show’s gestural subtext. It started in the recent men’s show, with male arms resting, sling-like, in their tunic tops. Here, the gesture was more a defensive wrap. Anderson viewed it as a counterpoint to the impassivity of the robot dolls, the Pepto-Bismol modular pieces, which he compared to stress balls. “You can squeeze it and it goes back on itself.” Any collection by Jonathan Anderson wraps the universe into a very strange ball. And yet it seems to connect to fashion’s sweet spot: I see, I want, I buy. And never more so than with the bags that are any major brand’s bread and butter.

Anderson said every bag in his new collection referred to a Loewe piece from the 1970s, an era he rejected out of hand ten years ago when he arrived at the legacy-laden leather house with a mandate to modernize. Now he’s embracing that past. “It’s a restart,” he declared.

And isn’t that what every whiskery fashion house craves? First and foremost among them is Givenchy, now almost three years into its revamp by young American Matthew Williams. The road has been long, with many a winding turn, but this season, something clicked and Williams meshed with the stately ghost of fashion’s last aristocrat, Hubert de Givenchy, to deliver a collection that straddled his own predilection for streetwear punkitude and an almost-classic beauty. The way that a dress in emerald green silk from the late 1970s was reinterpreted in sinuous knit for the 2020s was a master stroke. At the same time, in the same collection, bondage trousers in a sorely distressed houndstooth underpinned artful remnants of t-shirts and leather jeans, the entire ensemble swathed in a shearling duster. Drama!

In a season where the statement coat reigns supreme, Williams offered more drama in the form of broad-shouldered Gothic floor-sweepers. But there was also lyricism in a sheer lilac gown, or a full-length wrap dress inspired by a serpentine creation by Lee McQueen that Williams found in the archive.

PARIS — Jonathan Anderson’s collections are deep. So deep. On some level, they almost attain the level of myth. The location of Friday’s Loewe show was the Chateau de Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris. Deeply ingrained in the history of French royalty, it was, at various other times, a prison for the Marquis de Sade and the spot where German spy Mata Hari met her end by firing squad during the First World War. The show itself took place in a huge white box in the chateau’s courtyard. Anderson wanted arriving guests to feel history pressing in all around. It’s how he feels with Loewe. So much history … and then you’re confronted by the white box. It’s a metaphor. Purification is Anderson’s end game.

At the same time, he wants to push boundaries with what can be done – what is acceptable, even – with fashion. Here, the luxury of fine leathers, cashmeres, duchesse satins, velvets was turned to subversive purpose. There were slouchy boots served with any number of outfits in this collection that grounded the look, as a boot will do, but also undermined it. Not at all the footwear you’d expect with an evening cascade of ice-blue duchesse. Mind you, that same cascade was suspended from a doorknob! You smile. So would Marcel Duchamp. Anderson is still fashion’s arch Dadaist.

The models paraded around perfect squares of confetti, created by artist Lara Favaretto. They were moulded, not glued, so when the mould was removed, they started to crumble into puddles of primary colour. Another irresistible metaphor: all things must pass. Anderson opened his show with a similar statement about fragility. Dresses in duchesse were printed with blurred images, something observed in passing, like a Gerhard Richter painting or a Martin Margiela ghost dress. Later, there was a dress printed front and back with a trench coat, or a fur coat. “Fashion can become a bit of a blur sometimes,” the designer drolly observed in his post-show presser. The dresses, the canvases, were all antique pieces, not Loewe originals. “That’s the beauty of fashion, you can re-visit, re-interpret, re-engineer,” said Anderson.

There was an even more fragile beauty in the show’s gestural subtext. It started in the recent men’s show, with male arms resting, sling-like, in their tunic tops. Here, the gesture was more a defensive wrap. Anderson viewed it as a counterpoint to the impassivity of the robot dolls, the Pepto-Bismol modular pieces, which he compared to stress balls. “You can squeeze it and it goes back on itself.” Any collection by Jonathan Anderson wraps the universe into a very strange ball. And yet it seems to connect to fashion’s sweet spot: I see, I want, I buy. And never more so than with the bags that are any major brand’s bread and butter.

Anderson said every bag in his new collection referred to a Loewe piece from the 1970s, an era he rejected out of hand ten years ago when he arrived at the legacy-laden leather house with a mandate to modernize. Now he’s embracing that past. “It’s a restart,” he declared.

And isn’t that what every whiskery fashion house craves? First and foremost among them is Givenchy, now almost three years into its revamp by young American Matthew Williams. The road has been long, with many a winding turn, but this season, something clicked and Williams meshed with the stately ghost of fashion’s last aristocrat, Hubert de Givenchy, to deliver a collection that straddled his own predilection for streetwear punkitude and an almost-classic beauty. The way that a dress in emerald green silk from the late 1970s was reinterpreted in sinuous knit for the 2020s was a master stroke. At the same time, in the same collection, bondage trousers in a sorely distressed houndstooth underpinned artful remnants of t-shirts and leather jeans, the entire ensemble swathed in a shearling duster. Drama!

In a season where the statement coat reigns supreme, Williams offered more drama in the form of broad-shouldered Gothic floor-sweepers. But there was also lyricism in a sheer lilac gown, or a full-length wrap dress inspired by a serpentine creation by Lee McQueen that Williams found in the archive.

PARIS — “Some designers sugarcoat everything and that’s a valid thing, but I’m more of a neo-realist,” Rick Owens was in a reflective mood before his show on Thursday. “I need to see the gorgeousness and the horror of the world because that’s the human condition, and that’s what we all have to wrestle with. So I think it’s more of a realistic gesture.”

The collection he was about to show certainly had the gorgeousness. “I went on a sequin orgy,” confessed Owens. There were coils of them around model torsos, pavés of them on puffer jackets and tunics, handfuls of them strewn through capes of shredded denim. There were also slinky knit goddess dresses trailing serpentine trains, and duchesse satin shrouds rising into points that created an eerie closeup-ready frame for the face. It may have been the most mutant version of Old Hollywood’s outré glamour that Owens has ever offered, but it was glamour nonetheless.

As for the horror? Its presence was more abstract. On the anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s misbegotten invasion of Ukraine, Owens was confronted by the challenge of how to present a fashion collection. Every day, we see the dignity of people in the face of adversity. He felt his response needed to be, in his words, “respectful and responsible.” He’s usually drawn to the chaotic and the unkempt. Now, he felt the more appropriate response was something more formal, earnest even, however uncool that might sound. We’ve never seen hair and makeup so stylised from Owens. Some of stylist Duffy’s hair confections were as structured as a principessa’s from alta moda Roma. That might have seemed counter-intuitive when the world is closer to a nuclear apocalypse than at any time since Owens started staging shows that did actually seem to anticipate apocalypse. His answer? “I’ve done post-apocalypse, it’s the opposite now. I want something a lot more polished, more deliberate.” I get it. When chaos prevails, order represents defiance.

Maybe that was one reason his shownotes scrupulously detailed the origin and treatment of his fabrics, with a strong emphasis on responsibility. Petra, his granddaughter, was backstage in the arms of her mother Scarlet. Maybe that’s what it takes these days to remind a designer of the impact of their business. (Babies in the vicinity induced the same realisation in Lagerfeld and Armani.) “There have been times when I felt darker, for sure,” Owens conceded, ”but now there is a level of acceptance I’m noticing in myself. I’m finding a different kind of serenity.” It showed in the clothes, in a new spirit of formality and structure. There’s reassurance in those notions, and that was something else that nuzzled at the edges of this collection. Just look at the lucite-heeled boots that have become cultural signifiers for a global kickass collective. Now they’ve got “duvet padding.”

Formality was also the keynote of Daniel Roseberry’s first ready-to-wear show for Schiaparelli. When he offered his earliest couture confections for the house, I was on my hind legs wondering how they might work for ready-to-wear. Making the World Surreal with Schiap! Obviously, the collection couldn’t be as extreme as couture. Roseberry emphasised that this new collection was less about fantasy, more about the Schiap woman in the here and now. Still, he did a pretty good job of reproducing his Schiap’s extravagant spirit for the wider platform of ready-to-wear. He claimed that had a lot to do with the fact that he went back to the very foundation of the house, Elsa Schiaparelli herself. “The way she dressed, the turbans, the way we styled the bijoux, it all came from photographs from the 1930s,” said Roseberry. “It was almost like a security for me.” He also said he’d been obsessed with the new documentary series “Kingdom of Dreams,” with its depiction of the fashion industry in the 1990s when creativity could fuel commerce, rather than the inverse which prevails now. “That show left me so supercharged.”

And there was a third driving force: the clients who insist on something exotic, precious, unique. For instance, the woman who wanted a down jacket that wasn’t as mass as Moncler. Roseberry offered her a huge, feather-filled parka in black satin with the big gold nipple buttons that tell the world you’re wearing SCHIAP! A denim jacket and jeans (and, man of the people that I am, it was the denim I was keenest to see) were zhooshed with anatomical gold buttons. Something as straightforward as a double-breasted cashmere coat could also be transfigured with a dozen or so of those fasteners. And the sleeves of a coat in black velvet chenille were embroidered with golden beads.

So it was, after all, extravagance that shaped Schiap’s ready to wear. It wasn’t merely the gleam of gold. There were faux Astrakhan and snow leopard jackets, quilted stretch satin skirts, and an intense, artisanal hand-painted theme in coats and jackets (it will be stencilled for scaling up at the production facilities in Italy.) The keyhole motif, a Schiap emblem, appeared at the heart of a draped black jersey dress. A black leather suit was trimmed in the brass measuring tape that is another key motif for the house. The capper for the whole exercise might have been Irina Shayk’s duvet coat in champagne-coloured silk satin. “The great thing is we don’t really have a price limit so we can go really far,” said Roseberry. That coat had already made his point.

PARIS — The best antidote to disposability in fashion is to make clothes precious, so you don’t feel the urge to replace them. But what makes clothes precious? Nothing as banal as a price tag, though a beautiful fabric and make clearly help. I’m a dreamer, so it’s the life of cherished clothes that makes them precious to me.

The Japanese put broken pottery back together with gold, celebrating the flaws to make the object even more beautiful. They call it kintsugi. Dries Van Noten practised a kind of kintsugi with clothes on Wednesday, not only because gold was leafed and threaded and woven throughout the collection, but because there were dozens of hidden details that gave a subtle new life to coats, jackets, dresses. It was a beautiful show, with that particular combination of sobriety and opulence that was a distinct signature for the designer in the 1990s. Though he doesn’t like looking back, there are kids in his studio who weren’t born then and their enthusiasm motivated him to reassess his past. Bless them, because we were the beneficiaries.

Dries is a past master of contrast, most fundamentally masculine and feminine. The first look was a pinstripe suit leavened with a silk ruffle that curled down the outside seam. Later, a raw-hemmed tweed dress with fabric bunched into a ruffle running down the front. This resonated, like something artisanal you could do yourself. Personalised. Precious. Dries talked about the contrast between masculine fabrics and “flimsy little silk things somebody has drawn on with pencils or painted little flowers on.” The silhouettes were strict, elongated by chunky platforms, but the fabrics had the glint and lure of a treasure trove. A too-big coat was drawn in at the waist with a cluster of gold bugle beads. The waist of another coat in finest English wool was wrapped in gold leaf (Van Noten used a similar effect in a men’s collection years ago). Gold also leafed the entire front of a camel blazer. Elsewhere, it was as unassuming as the thread that mended a broken buttonhole.

That kind of intimacy underpinned the collection. Fold back the lapel on a plain grey coat to find a hidden insert of gorgeous jacquard. Peel the layers of a dress — mousseline, organza, gazar — and find a hem of French lace. For Dries, it was always about the private pleasure, the complicity between clothes and the person wearing them. The fundamental symbiosis of fashion. He reinforced that point here with ardent musical accompaniment by drumming virtuoso Lander Gyselinck. “He becomes one with the drum when he plays,” said Van Noten, “and that’s what I like with clothes and the person who wears them. One identity.”

Jun Takahashi’s pursuit of preciousness takes an opposite but equally enthralling path. Multiple identities, rather than the single symbiosis. Wednesday’s was wrapped around Two-Tone, the ska-based post-punk pop sensation that swept the UK at the end of the 1970s. We’ve come to expect the obscure/arcane musical reference fully realised for the here and now by Takahashi in minutely observed detail, and so it was with his new collection, which was, not incidentally, titled Enjoy Yourself, after a song by the Specials, ska’s star band. The music was a memory of joyous teenage for him.

So was the immaculately evoked, sharp, severe tailoring of the suits worn by ska stars like Pauline Black. Takahashi did a little freeforming with the black and white check that shaped Two-Tone’s visual identity, adding a brown and cream co-relative lifted from an album sleeve by German electronic musician Manuel Göttsching. You could go down a rabbit hole with Jun, so simply accept that his fandom is inspirational in its breadth and sincerity (there are dozens of his playlists on Spotify that will testify to that).

The wonder of all this was severely clouded in December, during Takahashi’s design process, when both Terry Hall, lead singer of the Specials, and Manuel Göttsching passed away. What are the odds of that happening? Death unsurprisingly added a mordant note to the show: “Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.” A recurring motif was a beaded, claw-like hand, a memento mori. A trench coat passed by, encyclopaedically embroidered with downbeat slogans. “There are people who act like monsters and monsters who act like people.”

The Specials’ biggest hit was a song called “Ghost Town,” released in the darkest days of Margaret Thatcher’s unravelling of the fabric of British society. The same thing is happening now, all over the world. Takahashi is a sensitive soul, acutely tuned to such developments. His collection spun off into a gorgeous sequence of protective puffa coats, including a tuxedo/duvet hybrid that could dress the last red carpet before humanity’s closing curtain. Were the models weeping blood?

PARIS — Far be it from me to analyse a designer’s psychological state, but it did seem to me that both Maria Grazia Chiuri at Dior and Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent were responding to a darkening world in their latest collections. Consider them as coping strategies. That certainly added a different weight to the work.

Chiuri’s focus was Paris in the 1950′s, not a Technicolor Audrey Hepburn popping down to a boho Left Bank jazz club in “Funny Face”, like Hollywood wanted us to see, but the black and white postwar city of the existentialists (or the neo-realists, in Chiuri’s Italy). When she dug in the Dior archives, she saw how the initial burst of New Look optimism contrasted to dark, edgy monochrome, almost like the punk of its time. She found human co-relatives in the beatnik chanteuse Juliette Greco (a Dior client) and Edith Piaf, the iconic “Little Sparrow” whose fearlessness and unpredictability made her the French equivalent of Judy Garland. Completing Chiuri’s trio of inspiratrices was Christian Dior’s sister Catherine, French Resistance fighter and concentration camp survivor, who found succour in her postwar success as a florist.

These resilient women struggled, suffered and survived, or not — just as millions of women are doing right now — and Chiuri showed a huge collection of clothes that reflected all that. There was too much, but maybe that was the point. As the looks passed by in steady procession, their somber beauty became a curious balm for the soul, and the details began to assert themselves: the way the back of a jacket floated away from the body, the crop of a peacoat, a strangely appealing embroidered leather harness, a shrunken argyle-patterned mohair sweater and a skirt in chiné a la branche (the blurred, shimmery floral effect that was once the province of silk weavers in 18th century Lyon), the coronets of gilded straw and dried flowers worn by the models in the finale…and, most of all, the crinkled fit and flare of clothes woven with metallic thread, so the pieces retained a kind of memory. They looked exhausted but elegant, like old favourites treasured in hard times. And, because this is Dior, after all, the fabrics were fine reworkings of the moiré, the duchesse satin, the pied de poule that were Christian’s original stock in trade.

Chiuri felt it was the most French collection she’d done since starting at Dior seven years ago, but also the most Italian in its precise construction. She also said her artist outreach this time, Joanna Vasconcelos from Portugal, had come closer to her own process than any of her other collaborators, with a studio that was like a fashion atelier. The show took place in a huge visceral cocoon, a kind of magic garden created by Vasconcelos from floral-patterned fabrics in the Dior archives. It was her tribute to Catherine Dior, whom flowers saved from a living hell. It was also one more testament to the lavish scenarios that Bernard Arnault’s bottomless pockets are capable of underwriting, hard times be damned. Piaf’s tremulous tones rang out at show’s end. “Moi, je ne regrette rien.” Indeed.

I could say exactly the same thing about Saint Laurent. The very first fashion show I ever saw in Paris was a YSL couture show in 1987, in the ballroom of the Hotel Intercontinental. (I’ll always remember it as the day I met Nan Kempner.) Walking into Saint Laurent’s usual venue on Tuesday night, a pharaonic tent constructed within cooee of the Eiffel Tower, I was overpowered by déjà vu. The low catwalk lit by a string of massive gilt chandeliers was Intercontinental Redux. Saint Laurent’s maestro-in-residence Anthony Vaccarello insisted he wanted something more intimate after last season’s epic reel around the fountain, but intimacy is clearly a moveable feast when the billions of today’s fashion tycoons start their lubricating churn.

And, actually, Saint Laurent’s spectacular mise-en-scene did make a rather interesting point. Saint Laurent is no longer just a name or a look. It is also emblematic of a time, a place, the Intercontinental ballroom in 1987, for instance. It is history. Maria Grazia Chiuri acknowledged as much when she talked about the vintage map of Paris she used as a scarf print for Dior’s last ready-to-wear show. She marvelled at the fact that Christian Dior’s couture salon on Avenue Montaigne was included on the map alongside the museums and monuments that have always defined the city in the eyes of the world.

If the collection Vaccarello presented didn’t exactly make any more history, it was a more tangible acknowledgment of the moment than he’s shown lately. As is his wont, he elaborated on one message throughout the show, which could be broadly summed up as power dressing. He listed the components: minimal, classic, pure, basic clothes, a reaction to last season’s monumentalism. “No tra-la-la, no trick of styling.” The models’ hair was styled uniformly tight, small heads. They all wore aviators, blanking the individual. The jacket shoulders were stunningly wide and straight (they demanded a completely new construction), sometimes in classic menswear fabrics, sometimes in leather, over a simple silk tank top and a tailleur jupe, a tailored skirt, or leggings. It was a hard look, unleavened by eveningwear. Vaccarello thought that was maybe reflective of the fact that he found the collection a hard one to work on, due to time constraints. And that was perhaps why he made a compensatory effort to inject a complementary, fluid softness in the transparency of mousseline skirts, or with the blanket-sized scarves that draped torsos or floated like long trains.

If Chiuri adopted Juliette Greco and Edith Piaf in the 1950s as her arch-Parisiennes, Vaccarello opted for Saint Laurent standard-bearer Catherine Deneuve in the 1990s as his. Her filmography in that decade is food for thought. No specific look. Just shadows collecting around a time, a place.

MILAN — If Tomo Koizumi’s clouds (and caterpillar) of fizzing colour were the exclamation point at the end of Milan’s Fashion Week for next autumn, Giorgio Armani’s collection was the bronzed afterglow. He called it “Cipria”, which translates as “face powder” and explains why the models were made up with a clear emphasis on cheekbones and temples. The effect was a subtle diffusion of the heightened maquillage favoured by the fashion photographer Guy Bourdin, whose radical, provocative work from the 1970s and ‘80s is currently (thrillingly) on display in Armani’s exhibition space in Milan.

Those were, of course, the years when Armani was blazing his own revolutionary trail across fashion. In the wall text at the exhibition, Armani observes that, although they seemingly had very little in common, “Bourdin did not follow the crowd and he did not compromise and I identify with that.” Then he tellingly adds, “I don’t believe that there is any other way to make a mark on the collective imagination.”

You could look at the collection Armani showed on Sunday and see the lack of compromise, however subtly it may have been couched in the fluid tunic tops over delicately frilled trousers, or the black velvet drape of a piano shawl trailing metallic fringes, or, indeed, the general saturating languor of the clothes, like an opiated dream conjured from a silent movie. The models had kiss curls. As the show progressed, their heads were covered with fringes of beading, like flapper hats. Armani has always made movies in his head but now, they are more seductively idiosyncratic than ever. Like the late period of a great artist, where he is looking inside, not outside, and drawing succour from intimacy, rather than grand gestures.

Actually, almost any fashion designer is making movies in their heads. And it’s the prerogative of youth to be engaged by the grand gesture. Hence, Maximilian Davis and Rhuigi Villaseñor, the two young turks hired to transfigure Ferragamo and Bally, respectively. Both of them opted for the same guiding principle: Desire. I mean, if a designer doesn’t understand that desire is fashion’s mean motivator, then they’re in the wrong business. Desire can wear many faces in fashion: I want to be brighter, I want to be real-er, I want to be funnier, I want to be sexier. Davis and Villaseñor opt for the path of least resistance — sex. In that, they can look to the expert tutelage of forefathers like Versace and Ford. Villaseñor, in particular, did a great job channeling Ford in his first season for Bally. This time round, he expanded his repertoire, infusing his collection with a louche opulence that possibly erred on the side of excess. Like the most fetishized, riding-booted patrician dressing. You could fairly say that was the fantasy root of Ralph Lauren’s empire-building, and, like Ralph, Rhuigi is the consummate outsider, the Filipino boy who lived in the US for 20 years without a passport, with his nose pressed to Town and Country’s window. One lesson he will acquire with experience from his patron saint Tom Ford is the power of the cocked eyebrow. You can’t take yourself too seriously with that particular vision. His show would have benefited from the effervescence of a disco beat, rather than the stentorian electronica which sank it in self-importance. But Rhuigi is 31. He practically has a lifetime to learn.

Maximilian Davis is four years younger.  Speaking of grand gestures, his second presentation for Ferragamo was staged against a towering navy wall that felt like a Richard Serra commission (though Villaseñor could claim Leonard de Vinci’s house as his venue…wait, I digress). And I wouldn’t have been surprised, given the way that the art world now seems to genuflect to the fashion world. More than his debut, Davis tapped his own body-conscious leanings with this new collection. It was stark and cool, and it also had a little slyness in its celebration of the good ol’ red, white and blue (and yellow). Ferragamo traditionally has deep roots in the US, at least in its Old Hollywood incarnation.

If modernising that kind of glamour is one of the challenges Davis faces, it’s not yet clear how he can do that in a way that convinces a new audience. A ruched silver lamé micro dress was a glaringly obvious flourish. Still, if Ferragamo has traditionally been an accessories house, there was certainly an abundance of impressive bags. Maybe that’s the platform from which Davis can spread his wings.

MILAN — “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is winning all the movie prizes on its way to Oscar gold. On Saturday night, it felt like Matthieu Blazy tapped into the same propulsive, polymorphous momentum with his sensational show for Bottega Veneta. Post-presentation, he talked about “the alchemy of the street,” the magic that happens when the world hits the sidewalk. Who knows what you’ll see, who you might meet?

“I was very interested in Carnival, where everyone walks in the same direction, we don’t know where they go but they go together,” Blazy marvelled.

This urgent message of togetherness, a deliberately uplifting riposte to the news that surrounds us, was borne along on surging sounds of celebration: samba, the sound of Carnival, African beats, an American marching band. Underscoring the momentum, the audience was joined in one room by the famous runners of Pompeii, two bronze statues on loan from the museum in Naples. In the other room, another museum loan, the sculpture by Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni, which is one of Blazy’s profound inspirations, with its abstract rendition of a muscular body in motion. They provided a true “Everything, Everywhere…” moment of discombobulation. Who knows who you might meet at a BV show?

Blazy claimed he’d decided not to edit the collection. Instead, he kept adding characters, including some from his first two outings for BV. There were all sorts, every generation — a vamp, a gigolo, a gangster, a businessman, Delphic oracles, power dressers, poetesses, a couple who’d just got out of bed (their bedsocks knitted leather), even some mermaids (a personal obsession of Blazy’s), scaly torsos emerging from watery cascades of shimmering fringe, because creatures of myth should not be denied their place in the industry of human happiness.

“There is nothing more beautiful than kids when they feel empowered, when they wear a costume, and we wanted to bring this kind of feeling,” Blazy explained. “The idea you can be whatever you want to be.” 

It was almost as though he was suggesting fashion as a kind of transformative superpower. That is actually an idea which is at the core of Blazy’s creativity. His instinctive appreciation of the craft of making clothes has found the perfect outlet in Bottega Veneta’s workshops. The very first look he showed for BV a year ago — a white cotton tank, a pair of blue jeans — hardly looked like a bold new direction, until the penny dropped that the entire outfit was nubuck leather. Blazy closed his show in Saturday with the same look, like he was closing a chapter. (Even though he did mutter, “Maybe it starts again.”)

But that gesture, coming at the end of a cavalcade of extraordinary variety, was also a reminder of how far he’s come in twelve months. There were more of those trompe l’oeil leather pieces, the skins even lighter this time. A coat that looked re-embroidered was actually woven in one piece (a technique which took the whole year to master). One young man was sensibly dressed in a shirt, tie and pants, all of them knitted.  Here was the key: the effort was subtle, not showy.  “We try as much as we can to integrate the technique within the fabric itself,” said Blazy.

Which isn’t to say that there weren’t showy pieces here. Since his days at Margiela, Blazy has always grasped the pulse of desire that ignites fashion. An intreciatto thigh boot on Julia Nobis or Emma Balfour, for instance. There were glories here: the draped dress in a shade of Art Deco eau de nil, clasped at the thigh with a ceramic buckle; the grey tweed coat collapsing into a torrent of loose threads; boudoir-ish looks trimmed in…I want to say passementerie but that is probably much too banal for the BV magician and his apprentices. But there was also tailoring and knitwear and dressing-up dresses and a proper sense of all-day garde-robe for men and women. In other words, a commercial astuteness which suggest Blazy’s creative alchemy is quite capable of chasing gold for King Kering.

MILAN — Gucci was a surprise. We had heard that the brand’s need for a calmer, more classic approach to design had precipitated the departure of the shamanistic genius Alessandro Michele, and his studio would be delivering transitional collections until the new creative director Sabato De Sarno’s first show in September. “Transitional” normally suggests something bland, half-assed, but that’s not what happened on Friday. Yes, the collection was a mess, with a let’s-try-anything vibe, but here that suggested less desperation than a peculiarly joyful letting go. The press notes told us that there are people in the studio who worked for Tom Ford nearly thirty years ago. They’d weathered the Giannini Interregnum (consigned by this collection, at least, to the trashcan of history) and the Michele Renaissance, and this was their leadup to “a new chapter.” A moment to reflect on what was, what might have been, and what will be.

The only thing half-assed was the complexity of the staging, though it certainly suggested nothing short of full commitment to Gucci’s nowness. The models arrived and departed by elevators, like a mechanical embodiment of the ups and downs of fashion. (In Klumspeak, “One day you’re in, the next day you’re out.”) The arena centred on two circular structures, apparently symbolic of “the creative wheel … that is always spinning at Gucci.” They looked more like sunken conversation pits from the 1950s, stocked with a few dozen of the brand’s most familiar KOLs, who, rumour had it, all received a memo advising them to dress down, in observance of the quieter, more classic Gucci that was about to be unveiled. That memo clearly dodged at least half of them. Anyway, it scarcely mattered when the collection itself erred quite comfortably on the side of excess from the moment the first model stepped out of the elevator and onto the catwalk  in a floor-length black satin skirt and a metallic GG bralet (slightly more covered than Stella Tennant in Chanel Spring/Summer 1996). To be fair, the next look was a double-breasted grey overcoat. And that was kind of the way the show rolled, a shouting match between sparkle and sobriety, showgirl and Miss Prudence.

As is the modern way, catwalk stars of yore were brought back to strike a chord. But these women were the Faces from the glory days of Ford’s Gucci. Amy Wesson wore baggy jeans, a banker stripe shirt and a trench. Guinevere Van Seenus had a sheer, sparkly tank and skirt over red knickers and tights, wrapped up in a skunk fake fur. Somewhere in the middle was Liisa Winkler in a grey wool bodysuit and a charcoal topcoat. That was one of the few fingers tentatively pointed at a more sober future. But until that day dawns, the current design team was blissfully happy to swamp itself in piles of paillettes and barely-there slip dresses. Still, when the team — dozens of them — trooped on stage to wild applause at show’s end, it did feel a little like a last hurrah. The next chapter is a huge challenge that this transitional moment, joyous though it was, could scarcely even begin to address.

The lighting shrank Jil Sander’s cavernous show space into tiny illuminated pools. Zen staging demanded a zen overture — strings gently plucked, ivories gently tinkled. A reverential, intimate mood was established. All was as it always is in Sanderland. But then Bjork kicked in, and Lucie and Luke Meier took us somewhere bigger and bolder than usual. Biker leathers, with Jil Sander embossed like a go-fast biker logo. “The visual of speed,” Luke called it. That’s why the models’ heads were wrapped, like they were about to don motorcycle helmets for a motocross rally. Then came sporty volumes and layers, over-sized parkas, anoraks, tanks and trackies, zippers defining seams as a decorative detail. The emblematic shades of Sander minimalism — white, black, grey —were juiced with tangerine, electric blue, lime green,  lilac, lemon, rose pink. And, all the time, those incredible coats.

Luke likes to talk about the rigour of the Meiers’ process, and that has always applied in the past, but there was a skittish magic in this collection: a fizzing column of tinsel, a full-sleeved, high-waisted dress embroidered with starbursts, a black cape clustered with dark camellias, all of them breathed a different kind of oxygen than usual. “I think it’s always important for us to create something in a magical way because we all need it,” said Lucie.

The lime-green devoré gown suggested a different state, an absinthe-induced reverie, which tied in with the Victorian rose prints towards the end. I scented a dark fairy tale element but Luke  shot that down. He said he and Lucie had gone back to the moment when they decided to become designers — late 1990s, the breakdown of genres between art and fashion and music, drum and bass in particular. Those were the days when the Meiers could feel truly positive about technology, about the future, and they wanted to convey the same feeling here. There was positivity in that colour palette. There was positivity in the fabulously incongruous graphics (Melting chocolate cherries? You would, wouldn’t you?). There was positivity in a sci-fi dress sense that felt more pristine utopia than last-stand dystopia. And, all the time, those incredible coats. With shoes and bags to match. If accessories truly, boringly are the enduring tentpoles of retail’s future, might as well buy a bag or a boot that serves that future, however bright or bleak it turns out.

MILAN — The invitation for the new Prada show came tucked inside the massive catalogue for Recycling Beauty, the current exhibition at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. Co-curated by Salvatore Settis, Italy’s pre-eminent historian, it covers the vast sweep of human history, but its essence can be distilled to an observation made by Miuccia Prada in her introduction: creative reuse feeds our concept of modernity — the past fuels the future, in other words — while at the same time reinforcing enduring human values, like love, and care for each other.

That was also the essence of the new collection she and Raf Simons presented. They called it Taking Care. “The real meaning of what we do is to bring importance to the everyday,” was one Miuccia quote in the shownotes. And here, the everyday meant clothes you recognised as outfits that served a purpose, most obviously, a nurse’s white cotton uniform and an army-brown shirt and tie, but also a wedding dress, equally uniform in its own way. The everyday was elevated by making that nurse’s uniform floor-length, adding a train, or, conversely, cropping the embroidered layered veiling of a wedding dress into a short skirt and pairing it with a plain grey sweater and a brown suede blazer.

I doubt it was a consideration with Miuccia and Raf when they were creating their collection — uniforms and utilitywear have long been appealing tropes for the duo — but nurses in the UK are currently in a protracted and popularly supported battle with the staggeringly inept Tory government for long overdue recognition of the value of their work. So a major Italian brand attaching fashion currency to uniforms that became emblematic of nothing less than a struggle to survive during the years of the pandemic felt like unwitting recognition. “Because these garments are important, the wearers are important,” said Simons in another shownote quote. “Because every day of life counts,” Miuccia added. I re-iterate: the collection was called Taking Care.

But it wasn’t only the medical, it was also the military subtext that resonated. Vladimir Putin launched his brutal attack on Ukraine a year ago. Since then, we have all been schooled on a daily basis in the struggle of ordinary people against a tyrannical invader. So it made sense that protection was a subtext here: padded tops and skirts, cocooning parkas and duffels, substantial leathers, an abbreviated peacoat. Miuccia said she wanted “warmth.” All of these clothes, so functional and yet, in their proposed proportions, up-to-the-minute fashionable, suggested a contemporary, pragmatic take on beauty, where emotion co-opts glamour. We have to look out for each other. Fashion is a mirror. It reflects.

And, every so often, it projects too. When the audience entered the vast show space at the Fondazione Prada, they were confronted by a room that was bare of the usual design flourishes that accompany a Prada presentation. Instead, a shadowy industrial expanse, with a low ceiling supported by metal columns. There was, however, a strong and incongruous floral scent, the source of which became apparent as the show began and the ceiling rose to reveal that the columns were wreathed in lilies. A symbol of love in any number of weddings, lilies are also a funeral flower. Massed in the ceiling above us, they felt like a beautiful but sad acknowledgment of beginnings and ends. The show closed to the graceful arc of Johann Strauss’s “Blue Danube,” the waltz of deep space in Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The past fuels the future, for good and bad.