While Denmark dared to step forward this week and summarily declared all measures against the pandemic to be over, in France at least one could get the impression at the Paris Couture Week that everything is back to how it was two years ago: the designers showed again in 15 shows in front of an audience their spring collections – last season there were half as many.

However, since some had recently been infected by "bisous" from a distance, everyone had to be vaccinated this time.

Designers made use of the newly opened space: catwalks were lavishly outfitted again, collaborations took place with artists, and stars returned to the front rows.

Caroline O Jebens

Editor in the society department at FAZ.NET.

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chanels

which seem almost conservative in their density, plus many blazers, mostly buttoned up;

the long, open-fronted skirts and dresses loosened it all up.

The makeup of some models was absolutely irritating, blue eyes in young women.

Hopefully a fall from the horse.

At

Dior

chief designer Maria Grazia Chiuri collaborated with the Indian painter couple Madhvi and Manu Parekh, whose oversized paintings offered a supposedly simpler but no less impressive backdrop. The couple, known for their vibrant and surreal paintings inspired by tales and folk tales from their childhood in rural India, displayed large-scale paintings with the models walking in front of them - embroidered at Chanakya Ateliers in Mumbai. (By the way, this is the first time that Chiuri, who often works with women artists, involved an artist in her creative process.) With Chiruri's understated looks, she got everything right: the consistently elegant 1960s looks in soft colors of light gray and sand, however also black, did not appear simple at all, but decided.Chiuri wanted to refer to the "original excellence" of the house: the embroidery and the shape; Arts and crafts should be seen as one. In this way, something supposedly insignificant like tights at Dior becomes the trademark of the collection: elaborately embroidered, they gleam unobtrusively with the dress.

Schiaparelli

showed a collection for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, at the Petit Palais. Effective for the press, rapper Ye and his new girlfriend, actress Julia Fox, were seated in the front row in matching leather outfits (she smoked e-cigarettes there, almost like in the old days). However, Daniel Roseberry's show didn't need celebrity couples to be widely shared on social media. The show took up space the way shows should - through its beautiful designs. Opulent collars, broad shoulders, wide hats. One wishes Irving Penn could have photographed them. The shapes are so perfect in themselves that they don't need a large palette - black, gold, white. The fabrics: velvet, silk, brocade. And Schiaparelli is also resolute in its opulence: royal with embroidered court shoes,sacrally through eyes of high priestesses peering from golden bags. "For two years I thought a lot about the surreal," says Roseberry of his collection. The result was an imagined muse, a being from heaven, somewhere between extraterrestrial and priestess: "I imagined a being whose clothing defied the rules of gravity."