Paris Fashion Week prepares for the Balmain Fashion Festival.

by Thomas Adamson

PARIS (AP) — Paris Fashion Week roared into full gear Wednesday with a slew of fashion house shows and the Balmain Evening Fashion Festival — a star-studded charity concert featuring the latest fashions, members of the public and secret celebrity appearances.

Here are some highlights from the Spring-Summer 2023 shows.

Courses

For Courreges, a circular sandy runway with a column of sand falling down the middle evokes the film Sands of Time – or “Dune”. Off-kilter and slightly off-kilter musical performances in the soundtrack gave the show a clean, stripped-down vibe.

Daring has become a brand that reflects a signature sensibility on a signature style, and designer Nicolas De Felice likes to infuse the fashion into the atmosphere.

Spring-summer fashions started with a light and sporty look, sporting a well-worn volume white shirt. Models sometimes had bare feet or bare shoes. De Felice used fashion forward twists – snipaways, toggles, shiny space materials and destruction – on the runway in everyday items such as a jean jacket, denim skirt or flared trousers. A sports vest, for example, is given a kinky spin with its scrappy materials.

In the year It’s an approach that works well with this generation’s defining brand, founded in 1961 by André Courages and his wife Coquelin, synonymous with space-age aesthetics.

The art of the invitation

The email age and increased local awareness seem to have left little mark on the fashion industry’s archaic invitational system.

Season after season, gasoline-guzzling couriers would criss-cross Paris to personally deliver more elaborate, often handmade, invitations.

Top houses are rotated to find the best or most imaginative idea, which often hints at the theme of the runway collection.

At Lowe’s invitation, a bright red tropical flower arrived in a post described in the flower dictionary as an anthurium. The bottom of the flower stem is attached to a modern moisture capsule to keep the flower alive during fashion week.

The Saint Laurent invitation, on the other hand, was a stylish black patent leather bag with “YSL” embossed on the top, hidden inside the display card.