Digestible Quirk and the Return of Creativity at Paris Fashion Week

After years of risk-averse design during COVID, fashion brands are discovering that leading with creativity generates better returns than relying on safe merchandising strategies.

Summary of Americans in Paris. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:06:14 — Designers this season are actively pursuing noticeable difference rather than playing it safe, moving away from years of risk aversion and merch-focused collections.
• 00:07:34 — The success of Chanel has demonstrated to other brands that there is greater financial return on investing in creativity than on safe, merchandise-driven approaches.
• 00:08:34 — During COVID and the pandemic period, the industry became complacent with merchandise as an unlock for high-margin products, which led to boring, uninspired design across the board.
• 00:11:45 — Smaller, more intimate shows allow viewers to better understand what designers are doing with their clothes, compared to massive spectacle-driven presentations that obscure the actual garments.
• 00:18:23 — Michael’s work at Celine feels conversant with how people actually want to dress in real life, offering practical ideas about outfit composition rather than just fashion concepts.
• 00:33:44 — Multiple designers cited the extreme summer heat as influencing their approach to fabric weight and construction, prioritizing wearability in terms of how clothes physically feel on the body.
• 00:40:57 — Designers are visibly responding to cultural shifts like GLP-1 usage by creating waist-conscious silhouettes and placing belts strategically to emphasize form, reflecting changes in their customer base.
• 00:55:13 — Successful collections need a clear use case beyond artistic merit—designers should understand whether they’re making commercial pieces, artistic statements, or something else entirely.

In depth

Creativity as the new ROI calculation

The hosts’ central framing for the whole season is an argument about incentives: after years in which fashion houses leaned on merchandise-driven collections for safe, high-margin revenue, Chanel’s success under Matthieu Blazy has become proof of concept that creativity itself is the better investment. Sherman is explicit that this isn’t really about one designer’s talent in isolation—she credits a whole machine of people, from CEO Bruno Pavlovsky to image director Lena Nair to the set builders profiled by the Financial Times, arguing the lesson isn’t that every brand needs those resources but that leading with a creative idea, win or lose, pays off disproportionately more than playing it safe 00:08:09. She traces the opposite condition back to the pandemic, when brands discovered merch as an “unlock” for high-margin product and simply kept leaning on it until collections across the industry went flat and uninspired 00:08:34.

Gallagher’s top-line read of the week converges with this but adds a hedge: he doesn’t think the season felt genuinely radical, but it also didn’t feel merchy or tame in the way recent seasons have—designers seemed to be reaching for something digestible but still distinct, a kind of “quirk” that splits the difference between risk and safety 00:06:14. Neither host claims the whole industry has swung fully toward creative risk-taking; the argument is narrower and more interesting than that—Chanel’s scale of success has simply changed the perceived payoff structure, making other houses willing to bet on a stronger idea even if it isn’t avant-garde. The clothes at Chanel itself, Sherman notes, aren’t wildly experimental on their own terms, but the overall effect of concept, staging, and execution working together is what generates the outsized return other houses are now chasing.

Intimacy versus spectacle: the Chanel/Celine/Kiko problem

A recurring tension in the conversation is between shows built at overwhelming scale and shows that let you actually see the clothes. Gallagher states this most directly: he finds that oversized, spectacle-driven productions like Chanel’s massive Place de la République show make it harder to parse the distinctions between garments, whereas smaller, more intimate shows—he names Celine and the Row specifically—let the focus stay on the clothes themselves, which is ultimately what he wants from a show even when there’s a conceptual idea behind it 00:11:45. He admits this was his first time attending Chanel in person and that the sheer size of the space and production took him time to “lock into,” leaving him wishing for a return to a smaller, salon-style Chanel presentation despite understanding that scale serves a different corporate purpose for a company like Chanel.

Sherman pushes back with a practical counterpoint rooted in her own couture-show experience: Chanel’s seating is actually organized so that even guests farther back can see details like shoes, which she says isn’t true of many shows where a bad seat ruins the experience. She also uses her familiarity with Blazy’s prior Chanel outing to argue that scale doesn’t have to kill legibility if you know what you’re looking at—she traces a year-over-year evolution in his color choices (from pale mint to pistachio green) and construction details (reworked princess seams, printed tape accents) that she could track precisely because she’d seen the brand closely before.

This tension resurfaces, with the stakes reversed, over Kiko. Both hosts agree the actual collection from the Fanning sisters was excellent—arguably their strongest yet—but Gallagher calls the show itself one of the worst he attended this season, citing bad pacing, poor lighting, and an overworked concept that smothered the clothes rather than illuminating them [1-ish discussion around the Kiko segment]. Sherman’s response introduces an ethical distinction rather than a stylistic one: she argues critics should feel free to say the show’s staging failed, but shouldn’t use that failure to diminish the designers’ broader standing, contrasting it with cases—like noting a controversial guest’s presence at Celine—where naming an uncomfortable fact is unavoidable regardless of whose feelings it protects.

Celine as a theory of how people actually dress

Where Chanel represents a story about a brand’s internal machinery, both hosts agree Celine under Michael Rider is telling a different and, to them, more consequential story: not what fashion with a capital F looks like, but how people are actually getting dressed or wish they were getting dressed right now 00:18:23. Sherman frames this partly through the room itself—roughly 50 of the roughly 200 guests, by her estimate, are people genuinely close to Rider, friends and peers rather than ordinary industry attendees, which she thinks is part of why the show feels less like fashion theater and more like an extension of a real social world. She predicts that when this era gets written up historically, Blazy will anchor the dominant narrative and Jonathan Anderson will be part of it too, but Rider’s influence on how the industry itself actually dresses and socializes will be its own distinct thread.

Gallagher agrees with the substance but resists turning it into a ranking contest between designers, noting explicitly that trying to parse who has the “greater impact” is not a productive exercise 00:18:18. His version of the claim is that Rider’s work is in conversation with how people already dress or aspire to dress, offering something to think about each morning rather than a single memorable silhouette. He draws a parallel to Meryl Rogan’s Marni, which he felt was doing something adjacent—though he’s careful to note it’s a different, more pattern- and print-driven method—while Sherman and their colleague Becky apparently disagreed sharply with him about where Marni lands, with Sherman stating flatly that she thinks Marni is far more prescriptive and doesn’t belong in the same category as Celine’s approach.

The upshot both land on, almost in unison, is that nobody is going to remember Celine for a specific garment like a particular pant shape—what will stick is the logic of the mix, the instinct for how separate pieces combine into an outfit. That’s presented as the throughline connecting Celine to the season’s larger theme: in an environment saturated with imagery and cross-referencing between brands, the shows that cut through aren’t necessarily the most conceptually audacious but the ones offering a usable, wearable philosophy of dressing.

Heat, GLP-1s, and the body on the runway

Gallagher raises an observation that several designers volunteered to him backstage, unprompted: the unusually hot summer directly shaped choices about fabric weight and garment construction, with Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski at Hermès and the Fanning sisters at Kiko both citing it as a practical constraint rather than an aesthetic one 00:33:44. He frames this as part of a broader move toward “wearability” that isn’t just about recognizable silhouettes like a barn jacket, but about how a garment will physically feel against skin in a warming world—something he predicts will keep intensifying as a near-permanent condition of design going forward.

A separate and more fraught body-related argument concerns the belt trend and waist-focused silhouettes, which Gallagher connects explicitly to the rise of GLP-1 drugs: he argues designers are responding to a visibly changed customer body by creating garments that draw attention to a smaller waist, a shift he links to roughly 15 percent of Americans now using these medications 00:40:57. Sherman complicates this with her own lived example—she describes losing weight and needing belts to keep previously well-fitting jeans looking right—arguing the trend isn’t purely image-making but also solves a practical wardrobe problem for people whose bodies have changed but whose closets haven’t.

The most contested application of this idea is Valentino. Sherman recounts pressing Alessandro Michele backstage about his use of extremely thin models and body-conscious construction; he told her he simply finds that look appealing and isn’t going to perform a diversity narrative he doesn’t believe in, which she concedes is at least an honest position. But she pushes back hard on the result: she liked much of the collection yet couldn’t picture it on an actual body with breasts, noting a client seated beside her at the show praised pieces that Sherman doubted would translate off a runway built around one specific, narrow body type. Neither host resolves this cleanly—Gallagher calls it a notable and understandable reaction to a real demographic shift, but both frame it as fashion once again signaling, deliberately, that it isn’t designing for everyone.

Sexy, desensitized, and the Tom Ford counter-example

The conversation’s most pointed disagreement-adjacent riff concerns what “sexy” even means on a runway in 2025. Gallagher argues that overt nudity and exposed-breast dressing has been so thoroughly normalized—partly thanks to years of what he calls naked dressing being chronicled relentlessly—that it has lost any charge; seeing bare skin on a runway now reads as predictable rather than provocative, and he notes that critics and online commentary have largely stopped even remarking on it, which he takes as evidence the trick no longer works 00:50:26. He applies this to the Diesel and Jean Paul Gaultier shows, where staged intimacy or exposed-corset silhouettes landed, for him, as exhausted gestures rather than transgressive ones, though he still found scattered individual garments at Gaultier—like a tulip-print bodysuit or a draped tablecloth-style dress—genuinely beautiful once isolated from the show’s shock staging.

Tom Ford under Haider Ackermann becomes the counter-example both hosts use to articulate what still feels charged to them. Gallagher is torn over details like deliberately shredded jeans that hinted at boxers beneath—half of him thought the gesture was a cheap stunt, half thought it cleverly exposed a part of the male wardrobe rarely shown, and he admits he still hasn’t settled which reaction is right. But he draws a firmer line around consent and self-awareness: what makes Ackermann’s version of “porny” work for him, even when it tips that way deliberately, is that the models read as fully aware of and in control of how they’re dressed, whereas shows that seem to expose a model’s body as though by accident strike him as genuinely distasteful rather than provocative.

Sherman’s parallel argument is about commercial legibility rather than shock value: she contrasts Tom Ford favorably against Lanvin, arguing Peter Copping’s collection was arguably more beautiful as pure craft but left her unable to imagine any real purchase or occasion for the pieces, while Ackermann’s Tom Ford, by comparison, gave her an obvious answer to “what is this for”—a beautifully cut, wearable suit 00:55:13. For her, that clarity of purpose, not the presence or absence of exposed skin, is what separates a successful provocation from an empty one, and she extends the same standard approvingly to Chanel’s braless-but-covered styling, which she reads as a subtler, more interesting version of “sexy” than literal nudity.

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.