Nostalgia is a powerful thing, as this season has proved. If people weren’t denouncing it, they were announcing it as their next great inspiration. Remembrance of things past has a powerful pull for fashion, where revivals of past decades are ever-spinning in ever-decreasing circles. Incidentally, Yves Saint Laurent loved a bit of Proust—there’s a Louis Vuitton case specially made to carry his volumes currently on display at the Grand Palais, in an exhibition devoted to that brand’s storied history. Vuitton, I mean; though there’s a Saint Laurent museum just up the rue.
The strength of recollection was the idea Thom Browne explored: His Fall show was, he said, about 13 guys revisiting their gentlemen’s club of 30 years ago, maybe physically, certainly mnemonically. Hence the fact each outfit appeared in triptych: the first in rags; then a light level of distress; finally, pristine. Each featured variations on classic masculine attire—tailcoats, military overcoats, fur-trimmed chesterfields—and was topped with a bowler hat tipped eerily over the face. It wasn’t a process of disintegration, but of regeneration, returning to former glories. At the start, a pair of models whipped dust sheets off the set dressing of an old-boys’ club, including a grand chandelier, wing-back chairs, and a baker’s dozen of gilded frames.