Mr. Cruz loves fashion. He said so himself before the start of the Lanvin show, held at the venerable École des Beaux-Arts early on a drizzly Sunday. That a pro ballplayer like Mr. Cruz would elect on his off-time to flit around Paris amid a crowd mostly of men who think nothing of wearing skorts or skirts or dropped-crotch trousers is itself an indicator.
“I’ve learned so much from designers,” said Mr. Cruz, who has been a consistent front-row presence not just at shows by mainstream designers but also at those of insider darlings like Dries Van Noten and Rick Owens. “It’s really helped me reveal my life and my personality through clothes.”
Young, rich, handsome, confident in his masculinity, Mr. Cruz is representative in most senses of an observation the Dior designer Kris Van Assche made about the 27-year-old athlete’s generation. Secure enough financially to indulge in fashion, culturally liberated from any stigma that might once have attached to guys who expressed serious interest in clothes, he is an emblem of the future.
“Take a plane and look who’s sitting in first and business,” Mr. Van Assche said backstage before a show that opened with three tuxedos and then tried to set up a lively dialogue between formality and informality. “It’s not some 70-year-old.” When the tension between the sports- and formal-wear held — a suit in white denim comes to mind; oxfords with boat-shoe grommets — the clothes seemed just right for well-heeled highfliers. When it didn’t — the blander suiting and some overliteral references to boating — even the post-pubescent models seemed aged by the clothes.
Though flights of artistry were rare here, travel was clearly on people’s minds. At Louis Vuitton, the designer Kim Jones used research accumulated on a recent trip through the Indian Desert region of Rajasthan to put together a tonally assured show of trench coats, double-breasted suits, field jackets and flight suits in luxury fabrications rendered ordinary-looking through workroom trompe l’oeil.
Paris Men’s Fashion Week Street Style
Mother India lays dangerously seductive traps for Western designers. They visit and come back drunk on visual clichés. Pink, for instance, is no more the navy blue of India than is olive drab or mud brown. In conversation Mr. Jones blithely recycled that old saw attributed to Diana Vreeland, and yet on the runway he proved himself more discerning, deploying bright colors with caution, as punctuation, particularly notable in a flamingo-hued flight suit inspired by Maharajah Hanwant Singh of Jodhpur, a passionate early aviator killed when his small plane crashed into power lines.
Is it a stretch to suggest that in a masterly show built around boro, the traditional Japanese patchwork fabrics worn by workers, Junya Watanabe was also exploring themes of travel? Mr. Watanabe is, after all, Japanese. Yet so seldom have his collections made much in the way of specific reference to his country’s peerless crafts traditions that he seemed to have embarked on a homecoming tour. At the show, set in a schoolhouse from the era of Napoleon III, against a backdrop screen evocative of the Edo dynasty and to a soundtrack that blended sumo wrestlers’ grunts with American jazz, the suits and jeans or barn jackets and trousers in blue and also gray and cream patchwork were a kind of extended essay in cultural hybridization.
It also accomplished something unexpected. A show by a Japanese designer in Paris may not seem like the most obvious example of the universal influence the United States has exerted on fashion. Yet consider that Mr. Watanabe showed his clothes with flip-flops and the story shifts. Americans were the first to democratize all forms of work wear, Levi’s being the most universal example. It follows that the notion of it being acceptable, even cool, to wear flip-flops (or zoris, as the original Japanese versions are called) with a suit is a distinctly American one.
Paris Men’s Fashion Week Spring 2015 Accessories
So it is with sneakers worn with suits; T-shirts (the ubiquity of scoop necks seemed like proof positive that men are the new women) worn under jackets, with the now-universal bare ankle. Let’s allow a moment of silence here for the hosiers of the world.
More evident than any other particular thing throughout the last few weeks in the fashion capitals of Europe was the global export of Americanism. It’s not merely jingoism to note the inevitable cultural legacy of the United States in Europe, particularly given that both the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy and the centenary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand were widely commemorated last month.
Kilroy was here. He left his mark in the relaxed and unconstructed suits manufacturers as unalike as Brunello Cucinelli presented at the Pitti Uomo trade fair in Florence and that the Valentino designers Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli also did in Paris in the form of beautiful pajama-like suits printed with an allover pattern of flowers.
His signature survived in the drifty featherweight doughboy trench coats atMartin Margiela worn over trousers with one leg left at ankle length and the other cropped to the knee, in the American hip-hop style. It was there in an attenuated way at a Dries Van Noten show that featured a lot of bared flesh, elegant versions of athletes’ or dancers’ workout wear and elegantly embroidered harnesses. It was there, too, in Hedi Slimane’s extended riff atSaint Laurent on the Sunset Strip scene in its Vietnam-era heyday: band jackets, sheepskin vests, encrusted gauchos, snakeskin boots, sequined serapes, Army surplus and all the trappings of L.A. cool in an era when the house band at the Whisky à Go Go was the Doors.
The enduring presence of American sportswear was also easy to detect in the strenuously easeful suiting Alessandro Sartori presented at his Berluti show, held in the garden of the École des Mines before an audience that included the industrial titan Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH, and his entire immediate family. Berluti was a solid example of both American influences and also of how stealthily Mr. Cucinelli has become a role model for an industry. The 60-year-old Mr. Cucinelli is notable for having been early to identify and capture a market sweet-spot — polished and casual high-end sportswear: Italy American-style — ready-made for a generation of newly created global wealth.
“Cucinelli gets it,” the film director Paul Feig said before last Sunday’s lackluster show at Lanvin, to which the “Bridesmaids” director and dedicated dandy turned up wearing one of Mr. Cucinelli’s snug one-and-a-half-breasted summer suits with a carved Bakelite rose pinned to the lapel.
Like Victor Cruz, like Nick Woodman, the 39-year-old founder of GoPro, like Mr. Feig himself, an average Cucinelli consumer has neither a desire nor any necessity to dress for business as his father did. By the time he has evolved beyond sneakers and hoodies, he is well-primed for a label like that by Mr. Cucinelli or — as Antoine Arnault, the LVMH scion whose pet project it is, hopes — by Berluti.
The majority of the clothes the skilled Mr. Sartori designs are fabricated by hand, often in segments assembled at specialist factories throughout Italy. That they look offhand was part of the appeal of a collection of superlight suits in an array of hues like those in a Winsor & Newton field box and of requisitely complex fabrication (enzyme treated leather, anyone?). Those clothes would look great on a man like Victor Cruz, someone at the apex of his health and wealth and physical prowess. So, too, would the sneakers for which the entire collection seemed like an elaborate loss-leader. Lacking a multimillion-dollar signing bonus, most of us will have to make do with the old-school Adidas Stan Smiths that are enjoying a comeback. Berluti’s Playtime sneakers retail for $1,580 a pair.
There is something else to be said about the target Berluti consumer: He spends a lot of time in the ether. Whether venture capitalist or hedge funder or a Hollywood honcho like the C.A.A. kingpin Bryan Lourd, this particular man thinks little of flying to Brazil to catch the United States taking on Belgium at the World Cup, or overnight for a meeting in Tokyo. Veronique Nichanian obviously had such a man in mind when building her spring 2015 presentation for Hermès, a collection whose brief appeared to be creating a working wardrobe for the new jet set.
At Hermès wealth tends to be subtly transmitted (let’s forget the awful H-logo belt buckles). So it was with Ms. Nichanian’s latest offerings. She rendered Hermès’s trademark prints in abstract ways: a blurry ikat called Flores; a digitalized Glitch; a microfloral titled, for no plausible reason, Les Jardins d’Arménie. She showed one- or two-button blazers over trousers of Goldilocks proportions — not too narrow and not too wide. She showed flap pocket field jackets; covetable windbreakers; a paneled cardigan that in less skilled hands might have skewed granny.
What was especially surprising about the season was how few deviations there were from the overall thematic. True, the voyager Mr. Owens might have had in mind was likely to be intergalactic. But he would be dressed right for taking his flying saucer to a recharge station in a sleeveless dropped-crotch onesie, biker-style boots with flanges resembling wings, and a raincoat distressed to look as if its wearer had spent the night sleeping on a bench.
Even Yohji Yamamoto seemed in a mood that combined an unusual, for him, degree of practicality with lightness, showing a selection of layered garments in muted floral patterns, pinstripes, shibori prints and with contrasting overstitched patches. There’s no need to worry about stepping off a plane looking rumpled in a suit from Mr. Yamamoto; he does it for you first. Though Mr. Yamamoto can be fairly dour at times, here he was clearly in a sprightlier humor. The funny Lost Cat posters he printed on the backs of some final looks made for a memorable punch line. Yet it was his rendition of the light summer coats many designers showed, draped over a taut jerkin with three rows of vertical buttons and baggy floral trousers, that lingered in a viewer’s mind.
Memorable in altogether different ways were Riccardo Tisci’s show forGivenchy and the latest offerings from Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Garçons. In everything from the luscious thugs Mr. Tisci hired to model — so starkly different from the chicken-chested man-children seen almost everywhere else — to the monochrome palette, the stern ecclesiastical suiting, the lace-up knee boots and gangster-style stocking caps, Mr. Tisci showed himself indifferent to trend.
Never a follower, Ms. Kawakubo again set her own course in a collection whose superior command of technique could cause other designers to lay down their pin cushions and whose antiwar message — explicit in printed slogans on some of the clothing, and implicit in beautiful meshwork that referenced camouflage net — injected a welcome note of awareness of a world beyond shop windows and catwalks. Give peace a chance.
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