At Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, a brutal heat wave disrupts the fantasy
As always
Paris (CNN) — During a suffocating heatwave that took hold of countries across Europe last week, temperatures in Paris hit dangerously high levels — closing landmarks, breaking trains and driving up a heat-related death toll. Still, a surprising number of attendees at the city’s bi-annual Men’s Fashion Week proved their commitment to a look and arrived in mind-boggling layers: funnel-neck jackets, jeans, even a fur shawl. Professionally styled celebrities, models and servers perhaps fared the worst in the historic heatwave, wearing what had been decided weeks earlier, from the claustrophobic latex stockings and trench coat Connor Storrie wore to the Saint Laurent show, to the poor waiters dressed in full horse costumes at the Acne Papers garden party in the Palais Royal. One hard-as-nails publicist working the door at a show on Saturday said they were powering through heatstroke.
Out on the runway the broad suggestion from the big designers about what men should wear next summer was equally head-scratching: suede suits, coats and fur-lined pyjama tops-turned-jackets at Dior, thick bomber jackets at Kenzo, as well as suede trousers, leather jackets, fur-trimmed padded coats and parkas at Louis Vuitton. At Sarah Burton’s menswear debut for Givenchy, the textile du jour appeared to be leather: trousers and rugby shirts were cut from it and styled together, while leather tracksuits in black, red, orange, zingy yellow, green and blue filled an entire room, a reissue of the version Timothée Chalamet loves to wear.
There is always a suspension of disbelief required in luxury fashion, as designers use the runway to communicate their most extravagant, pie-in-the-sky vision of what clothes could be. But as the extreme heat disrupted the schedule, moving both the Dior and Rick Owen’s show to morning slots, and forced PR teams to moonlight as wellness officers by handing out hand-fans, ice lollies, instant cooling packs and sun-shade umbrellas, the fantasy for many began to wither.
“I feel hotter and hotter as I’m watching,” said French actor Antoine, who kept cool in a tall Stetson hat at the Dries Van Noten show on Friday. “I think fashion is really good at, whether it’s by accident or on purpose, creating metaphors,” said i-D editor-in-chief Thom Bettridge at the Issey Miyake show, wearing a blue New York Yankees baseball cap and a babushka-style floral headscarf tied under his chin — a sunburn prevention technique he picked up from the older women in his life. “I think a bunch of people sweating into oblivion, watching clothes on the runway get trotted out, it’s a perfect metaphor for what our world is facing right now.”
Heatwaves are by nature an anomaly and the collections shown during fashion week are designed months in advance. But Europe is now the fastest-warming continent on Earth, heating up at a rate of twice the global average. The UN predicts the next 5 years will break even more temperature records. Should designers, who work in an industry that is one of the biggest culprits for greenhouse gas emissions, at least be making clothes that people could reasonably aspire to wear in the hellfire summers to come? Or should we just submit to the heat-induced reverie?
“I want to see ridiculous things,” said Hero Magazine fashion editor-at-large Davey Sutton at the Rick Owens show, where the coolest offering was an inflatable jumpsuit with a built-in fan made in collaboration with Adidas (the design was resurrected from the sports brand’s archives, where it was used to cool off runners). “Everything sucks. There’s war, there’s famine, there’s genocide,” Sutton said. “Let’s have some fantasy and let’s forget about all of that garbage momentarily and see some fun things.”
“I think it’s legitimate for designers to not have commercial stuff on the runway, because that’s in the showroom,” said Achtung Magazine editor-in-chief Markus Ebner. “Don’t get fooled by what you see on the runway as a serious proposition for the season.” But others saw the fantasy argument as a cop out. One seatmate at a Sunday show called the vibe of the week tone deaf.
Andreas Murkudis, whose eponymous concept store in Berlin stocks over 200 brands, called the disconnect “a big problem,” adding that climate change has all but eliminated transitional seasons therefore shortening the window for retailers to actually sell Spring-Summer clothes. “In Berlin, it’s cold until the end of March,” Murkudis said at his Paris pop-up store Tokyo Sense on Friday. “And then the summer comes immediately. It’s not like years before, where we had maybe 15, 18, 25 degrees. It goes from 15 to 35. So you don’t need (jackets, trousers), you only need tank tops.”
Backstage at his pared-back menswear show Bulgarian designer Kiko Kostadinov, who is celebrating 10 years of his brand, hinted at the challenge of being a global label catering to all hemispheres in one collection. “We try to use less materials in the collection, so that naturally leads to using a material that’s more versatile,” said Kostadinov, who used a mix of silk crepes, mohair and silk wool for his Spring-Summer 2027 offering of floaty tunics and airy button-down shirts. “It’s summer here, but it’s semi winter somewhere else, and vice versa… You don’t really think about that when starting a brand.”
The chatter at shows often danced around the fact that the clothes on many of the runways seemed unfit for purpose, unless your life lets you hopscotch from air-controlled apartments to air-cooled cars into air-conditioned restaurants — infrastructure that is almost non-existent in Paris and much of Europe. Beyond luxury fashion’s astronomical price tag, it seemed a new form of elitism blossomed on the runway: Air-conditioned apparel. “As long as we’re in a climate-controlled environment, anything goes,” said Desmond, a personal shopper from Charleston who arrived at the Rick Owens show in 91 Farenheit heat wearing an enormous pair of cascading leather boots.
But some designers did manage to create beautiful, interesting garments without sacrificing practicality, and were even able to whip up a desire to get dressed during a temperature that makes an enemy of clothes. The Issey Miyake’s label IM Men, one of fashion’s more avant-garde, high-concept brands, was ironically a top contender for most sensible with billowing suits in gauzy brown fabric, lightweight soft-shouldered blazers styled shirtless and with shorts in a key-lime pie green, chic shrouds in a fine-weft that blanket the body but don’t cling. Julian Klausner, who showed coquettish silky boxer shorts, backless silk spaghetti strap tops and wafter-thin shirts in Instagrammable sunset ombres for Dries Van Noten, told journalists backstage this season started with the desire to do something “light, airy and delicate.”
But in general, it was the smaller, younger brands which felt more connected to life on the ground — and their clothes could handle the heat. Tigra Tigra, the Los Angeles-based womenswear brand helmed by Bailey Hunter and worn by Solange and Clairo, geared its collection around a tropical wetland “on the hottest night of a monsoon summer.” Dresses, skirts and silky separates made from Mashroo (a 700-year old hand-woven satin) were offered up as “clothes for moving through dense heat long after dark.” One of the strongest collections of the week came from 2025 LVMH Prize winner Soshiotsuki, who made his Paris debut on Saturday evening at the Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris. The Japanese tailor, whose biggest hero is the late Giorgio Armani, transformed linen suits from the ill-fitting, crumpled and frumpy summer wedding guest option into something sleek and essential.
Camiel Fortgens, the Dutch designer behind the eponymous brand, who staged his Sunday runway on the sidewalk outside Uno, a cafe around the corner from the Bourse de Commerce, seemed to tap into something as rare as ground water in a dustbowl: smart, cool, wearable clothes that don’t rely on fantasy. There were light organza-style dresses in a shade of pink engineered to recall a rogue red sock getting chucked in with the whites, a starched quarter-zip fashioned out of what looked like linen and Vibram soles glued onto Birkenstock footbeds to make freaky, semi-platformed versions of Germany’s best and ugliest sandal. Backstage, Fortgens said street style was his first love. “I always took pictures of people, and that was my Instagram. Just pictures of people on the street… Especially the old people,” he said. “I like that natural evolution in clothing, and I wanted that (this season), it’s like you just put it on. Not too styled.”
The result? Utterly refreshing.
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