A major vacancy in the fashion world has been filled. On Thursday, Lanvin, the oldest French couture house in continual existence, named Peter Copping its new artistic director, an appointment that indicates a potential return to pure designers after a period in which the buzz was focused on content creators.

“Peter Copping’s arrival at Lanvin is an important milestone in the renaissance of one of the great French maisons,” Siddhartha Shukla, the deputy chief executive of Lanvin, said in a news release, adding he was confident that “we will identify a new frontier in fashion and deliver beauty and results in equal measure.”

Mr. Copping, 57 and British, is known for his feminine sophistication as well as his technical prowess, and is a fashion insider’s fashion designer. He has spent the last five years working behind the scenes as head of couture at Balenciaga, where he was instrumental in orchestrating the much celebrated return of couture to that house. (The announcement of his appointment at Lanvin came the day after Balenciaga’s latest couture show, attended by Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts, among others.) Previously, he had been the handpicked heir to Oscar de la Renta before Mr. de la Renta’s death roiled his succession plans, and the head designer at Nina Ricci.

The new job signals a return to the spotlight for Mr. Copping and Lanvin, which had been without a designer since the departure of Bruno Sialelli more than a year ago, and had been struggling to regain the relevance and success it had enjoyed under its longtime designer Alber Elbaz.

It was Mr. Elbaz who had waked up what he called an industry “sleeping beauty” known more for its Arpège perfume than its fashion, and turned it into a Cinderella story. He left in 2015 after a falling-out with the owner at the time, Shaw-Lan Wang, and died of Covid-19 in 2021.

Lanvin, which was founded by Jeanne Lanvin in 1889, was bought in 2018 by Fosun International, the Chinese trading group that also owned St. John and Club Med. A few years later, it rechristened its fashion arm Lanvin Group in recognition of its flagship brand. In late 2022, the Lanvin Group went public on the New York Stock Exchange, in a SPAC merger that valued it at $1.31 billion.

Still, interim collaborations with boldface names like Future on a newly created line christened Lanvin Lab did little to create excitement around the label, and group revenues were flat in 2023, with Lanvin reporting a 7 percent drop. That may have been why Mr. Shukla went in a more classic direction.

It is now Mr. Copping’s job to prove him right. “Jeanne Lanvin was a visionary of her time whose interests and passions extended far beyond fashion, as do my own,” Mr. Copping said in the news release. A graduate of Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, he spent a decade working under Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton. His Instagram is full of photos of art and interiors rather than fashion or celebrity friends. He will start at Lanvin in September.

Meantime, the top jobs at Givenchy, Dries Van Noten and Chanel are still open, and the game of fashion musical chairs continues.

There was a Cybertruck parked on Main Street in East Hampton, outside the Altuzarra store. It was a Sunday afternoon in June, and traffic stalled for a moment. Even the rich are not immune to rubbernecking a brutalist behemoth.

The monster truck marked the end of an avenue of monograms — the island’s main luxury shopping drag, with $850 raffia handbags and $15,000 decorative surfboards. You know their names: Louis Vuitton, Loewe, Lululemon.

Two and a half miles down this same street, however, quaintness emerged. East Hampton turned into Amagansett, and that flashy boutique strip became a town square with white wood-paneled cottages. There was a shoe store called Brunch, a children’s clothing chain called Pink Chicken, a jewelry and gift shop called Love Adorned. A Cybertruck here would read as a declaration of war.

It was near these cottages that the Row, a brand founded in 2006 by Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, quietly opened a store on Memorial Day weekend.

Quietly is how the Row tends to operate. Not only in its clothing — often described as “quiet luxury,” a term used to describe very expensive basics — but also in its communication.

The founders rarely give interviews, advertise or otherwise promote their line. While the Row did announce its Amagansett opening on Instagram, that account is more outwardly devoted to sharing modern art than to moving product. In February, the brand caused a stir at Paris Fashion Week by asking its runway show attendees to “refrain from capturing or sharing any content during your experience” — which is, for many, the primary reason for attending a fashion show. The audience was encouraged to write down thoughts instead.

Somehow this stance works. In an industry overrun by influencers, the Row’s silence is stark. Monasticism is chic. There is an impression of exclusivity and taste, buoyed by the extreme prices. One of the Row’s most popular items, the Margaux bag, ranges in price from $3,490 to $6,810, depending on size and material. It is timeless and ladylike, the kind of purse that might remind Kendall Jenner of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

The Row’s stores also have a reputation for being intimidating at times, even among seasoned high-end shoppers.

One loyal Row customer told me she felt like “peasantry” in the Los Angeles store, which houses an untouchable swimming pool. At the store in Manhattan — a townhouse with a limestone spiral staircase — “there is one guy who works there that all my friends are afraid of, who radiates a very ‘you can’t sit here’ vibe,” said Jess Graves, the writer of a shopping newsletter called The Love List, “even to girls I know who walk in wearing the brand head to toe.”

The Amagansett shop is different. It operates out of a house with roots in the 19th century, formerly occupied by Tiina the Store, the Hamptons’ Gap for billionaires. (Tiina stocked the Row.)

It has a porch and a screen door and a woven beige carpet. The fitting rooms are harshly lit behind denim patchwork curtains. (By contrast, the spacious wood-floored dressing rooms at the Upper East Side store, where I recently tried on a $1,550 white cotton poplin tent dress that made me look, tragically, like a hospital patient, have soft lighting and softer robes.)

There is no statement artwork in Amagansett, unlike the London store, where an oval light installation by James Turrell greets visitors at the entrance. The vintage furniture is noteworthy — there’s a black chaise shaped like a person from the 1970s by Olivier Mourgue Bouloum and a white painted wooden lounge chair from the 1930s by Robert Mallet-Stevens. But the décor, with its Asian and African influences, is not the point.

The point of the store is the large selection of jewelry, home wares, snacks and skin care by more than 20 brands and artisans that are not the Row. Shampoo from Florence. Beaded necklaces from Greece. A mother-of-pearl caviar set. A bronze lighter carved to resemble tree bark. A packet of dried mango and a jar of raw almonds. Vintage glass candlesticks that can be purchased only in a set of a dozen for $16,000.

There are racks of ready-to-wear clothes made by the Row, of course, the selection tailored to this beach town: bike shorts ($1,050), denim shirts (also $1,050), ribbed tank tops ($670), sleeveless silk maxi-dresses ($1,890). Ms. Graves bought herself a raffia bag here earlier in the season. (“It felt very appropriate while I’m out here this summer,” she said.)

But the Row confirmed that the Amagansett store is its first attempt at a “local” store concept. What this presumably means is a space that is more relaxed, filled with objects that complement the brand’s vision of itself, staffed by sales associates who do not scare people away but warmly help shoppers track down sold-out jelly flats. Not that the Row’s fans are easily scared away: Even those who are intimidated don’t stay away for long, these masochists for cream-colored cashmere.

In retrospect, the popular jelly shoes, along with the beach towels that models wore as scarves on the Row’s runway in September, may have been a sign that the brand was loosening up — that brightness and humor were coming to this austere world. (Its most recent look book showed a silky camisole dress layered over pants, Y2K-style.)

A British client of the Row visiting the Amagansett store marveled at the vibe shift. Where was the icy indifference? “I don’t think it would fly with the audience here,” she said.

If fashion is a storytelling business, it should follow that runway shows are narratives.

Yet they can’t be. For starters, they lack a plot. True, designers can be relied upon to spiel about inspirations, travels or philosophies as a listener’s eyeballs roll back in his head. The truth is that most fashion shows are best consumed, as everything else now is, in fragments. They are elements of an ongoing internal scroll, as continuous, algorithmic and addictive as Instagram reels.

That, anyway, is how this critic began viewing the collections in Milan and Paris this season, with the result that the following is best thought of as a mixtape, not anchored to specific nationality or geography or context, random and in some sense impressionistic and probably also solipsistic in the way everything is fundamentally forced to be in an attention economy.

Take Hermès. The designer Véronique Nichanian is anything but a household name, probably not even among those in the economic stratosphere this label was created to serve. So what? She’s as consistently fine as — and in many ways better than — other fixtures in the pantheon of men’s wear, people like Giorgio Armani or Helmut Lang. There is a reason you don’t know her.

“We don’t do marketing,” Axel Dumas, the Hermès chief executive, said at the company’s show. “We don’t even have a marketing department.”

Why bother when you are producing jaunty collections for those people whose own initials are enough, as the old Bottega Veneta tagline once held. So-called quiet luxury generally tends to make a racket. Ms. Nichanian’s is a muffled version and whispers wealth.

If money were no object, and if this were some fantasy exercise in personal consumption, I would readily click on one of her feather-light leather field jackets in pale lavender, possibly also a pale pink varsity jacket or definitely the cardigan with subtle color blocking at the hem.

Despite the prevalent horrors of the world, the season just past was one in which designers leaned on the poetic. Maybe it is precisely because things are so ugly that beauty has become a haven. You would think so based on the collection the designer Satoshi Kondo created for Homme Plissé Issey Miyake. Notes from the show pointed out various tricky harness details that allowed a wearer to slip off a coat in one of the house’s proprietary pleated fabrics and roll it into a little carry pack.

What this viewer took away from the collection was a fervent wish to have been invited to the upcoming Ambani wedding in India just for the opportunity to wear a Miyake cargo shorts outfit in sea-foam green or a jacket cape over lilac pleated trousers or a stark white gossamer layered look that was a corrective to the stiffness that characterizes most wedding garb.

If Indian wedding fantasies became a kind of subconscious leitmotif this season, it could be because designers like Junya Watanabe and Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Garçons Homme Plus riffed so wonderfully on formal wear. Mr. Watanabe did it by radically recasting tuxedos as patchwork suits of frayed black or blue denim, then ornamenting them with white thread machine patches, and scraps of tartan. Memo to celebrity stylists and also groomsmen everywhere.

Ms. Kawakubo delved into formal frock coats, by no means for the first time. Hers were ruffled at sleeves and hem and tails and were shown against a soundtrack featuring Erik Satie’s music for “Parade.” Cue sirens, typewriter clatter and gunshots. Gruesome headlines came to mind.

Yet such is Ms. Kawakubo’s elegance of thought that the designs also evoked an era different from our own, that of post-Edo Japan: formal, courtly, simultaneously stylized and yet naturalistic. It is amusing to imagine wearing stuff like that to join one of the firefly-watching parties depicted in Junichiro Tanizaki’s “The Makioka Sisters,” one of the literary monuments of the 20th century.

Rick Owens also hearkened to what was essentially the same period — 1920s and ’30s — though as embodied by early Hollywood. The show, held on the steps and plaza of the glorious Art Deco Trocadéro complex, was monumental, fantastic and one of this observer’s highlights. It was also bombastic and utterly camp.

Possibly only an oddball kid growing up with no television in Porterville, Calif., in the 1960s could arrive at the affection Mr. Owens feels for the sword and sandal spectacles of Cecil B. DeMille. Why else would anyone stage a fashion show featuring 10 looks repeated 20 times, each on phalanxes of models, more than 200 in all. Against the booming cadences of the Allegretto of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, the models marched out in battalions: four models, five lines, dressed in wrapped knit shirts, side-split shorts and Geobasket sneakers, almost all of it uniformly white.

The show was epic as intended. Yet, putting aside the theatrics, the clothes themselves were commercial: biker jackets with a variety of coated treatments; drifty cowled chiffon coats; hooded capes; and boiler suits. Even a deflated leather version of pumped-up knee boots he showed last season looked less freaky now that the eye has gotten used to them.

The designs Pharrell Williams showed at Louis Vuitton — a show with universalized “It’s a Small World (After All)” thematics that, one could be forgiven for thinking, looked a bit like a market play dressed up as inclusivity — were more assured and commercial than his last foray into the cliché American West. We accept that Mr. Williams isn’t Virgil Abloh, whose design explorations, though sometimes nutty, were always approached in earnest. Still, Mr. Williams’s Vuitton merits a spot on my mental shopping list if only because many of the looks featured a style of luggage created for the pan-continental airline Air Afrique in the 1960s.

Lately the look — a multicolor check pattern — has been repopularized by creative types like Lamine Diaoune, Amadou-Bamba Thiam and Jeremy Konko, each of whom collaborated with Mr. Williams on the collection. Seldom do I come away from a Vuitton show with an itch to buy anything. Yet this time I could indulge a fantasy of strolling through an airport concourse with one of those bags, perhaps on my way to a seminar on Aimé Césaire.

In a personal playlist for the season, mellow grooves would be the outro. Top among them is a slow jam of Grace Wales Bonner’s tailored and elevated take on Afro-Caribbean streetwear. I’d take a “tuxedo” that appeared near the finale. Its top was a patterned hoodie based on the archive of the Afro-Caribbean artist Althea McNish, elegantly paired with dark trousers and a cummerbund. Funnily, the throwback qualities of Ms. Wales Bonner’s collection unexpectedly called to mind that of Giorgio Armani, who also evoked tropical atmospheres in what was something like his 350th collection over 50 years.

Sometimes it is fun to play human resources games while watching the clothes go by on a runway. Mr. Armani turns 90 in a few weeks, and in a wild-card imaginary succession scenario, it is wonderful to think what Ms. Wales Bonner would do with a global behemoth whose design codes — think suede blouson bombers, rib-knit sweaters, stuff that still resembles the ’80s men’s wear pictorials the photographer Peter Lindbergh shot and that have influenced designers ever since — are fundamentally close to her own.

A shrunken version of similar looks from the ’80s turned up at Prada, where the designers Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons share a taste for torquing retro references and making stodginess look cool. Here it took the form of V-neck knits, cardigans, super-snug crew necks and high-waist trousers with trompe l’oeil belts, worn on the requisite starvelings. Those same clothes on men with average waistlines would look pretty different and a whole lot more conventional.

On the other hand, the printed tops — the ones featuring sad faces drawn by the execrable French painter Bernard Buffet — if worn unironically by some skate rat barely old enough to shave would be really punk.

“I tried to make things people would cherish,” Dries Van Noten said on Saturday evening, during a cocktail party and dinner preceding his final runway show. Mr. Van Noten held his first show in Paris back in 1991; now, at 66, he is stepping away from his namesake brand. His retirement was a shock to many in a business in which careers tend to be abnormally truncated or else to exceed their expiration date.

The decision to retire was not taken lightly, Mr. Van Noten said. Whose is? And it was destined to be a disappointment to fans of this gentle Belgian’s presence on the scene. And they are many. Why? There was his evolved craftsmanship. There was his singular gift as a colorist. There was his ability to skew pattern and tweak silhouette without compromising wearability. Perhaps alone among the designers of the vaunted Antwerp Six group he belonged to, Mr. Van Noten produced, for 150 collections, commercially accessible, cherishable clothes.

A pre-show dinner party of a kind the French term a cocktail dînatoire was held in a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris. Fans from throughout the decades — among them, the designers Pierpaolo Piccioli, Thom Browne, Glenn Martens, Stephen Jones, Harris Reed and Diane von Furstenberg — floated about a vast space as waiters poured Champagne in abundance and circulated with trays bearing tiny bowls of beet soup, white asparagus with poached egg, foie gras and shrimp on skewers.

As a waiter passed with a flight of beef tartare snacks, Edward Buchanan, the designer and Milan fashion director of Perfect Magazine, waved them away. Raw beef at parties is iffy, he said.

Asked about his relationship to Mr. Van Noten’s designs, Mr. Buchanan told a story. “Two years ago in L.A., all my things were stolen,” he said. For months after the theft, he spent every spare hour obsessively combing the internet for replacements — not of his personal mementos but of his lost Van Notens.

“I didn’t really care about anything else,” he said.

It was like that with Van Noten’s designs. You coveted them when you saw them and hoped to keep them for life.

So it felt keenly bittersweet that Mr. Van Noten’s valedictory collection, shown on a long runway poetically covered with shreds of silver leaf so light they fluttered through the air, encompassed many keystones of his graceful, unostentatious mastery. The show opened with an austere lightweight overcoat that suggested something dour was to follow, an impression quickly offset by a parade of transparent peekaboo trousers, dusters, overshirts and double-breasted suits buttoned low and slouchy in the manner of film noir gangsters.

Hawaiian Punch florals rendered in cool monochrome and paired with snakeskin patterns were followed by iridescent metallic trousers and tunics jackets in a gold-and-silver fabric that moved like molten metal. The effect was both minimalist and wizardly.

If there were no other single reason to lament Mr. Van Noten’s retreat from fashion, there is his color sense. Could another designer layer a taupe field jacket with bellows pockets on the breast and sleeves over a pair of salmon-colored fuzzy shorts with unfinished hems and a rosy-beige shirt whose color, in more benighted times, Crayola crayons marketed as Flesh?

Let’s hope so. Until that time, the smart money is on a serious uptick in online sales of vintage Dries Van Noten. As Mr. Buchanan realized when his bleach-dipped denim jacket was swiped, Joni Mitchell was 100 percent correct about not knowing what you’ve got till it’s gone.

Tucked away on a side street behind Père-Lachaise, the largest cemetery in Paris and perhaps the most visited necropolis in the world, Colm Dillane, a.k.a. KidSuper, stood at the cyclonic center of a studio strewed with clothes, bags, shoes and props and crammed with models, stylists, photographers, videographers, the designer’s parents and the rapper Lil Tjay. Mr. Dillane looked for all the world like a man whose fashion show was far off in the future, not the following night.

“What’s up, what’s good?” Lil Tjay asked Mr. Dillane. The question was rhetorical. Lil Tjay, whose given name is Tione Jayden Merritt, knew the answer before Mr. Dillane opened his mouth.

“It’s all cool,” the designer said. Of course it was.

While some in fashion prefer to work in semi-clinical settings, surrounded by silent white-smocked assistants, and others in solitude, delegating to distant teams, Mr. Dillane is the embodiment of crowdsourced creativity.

If anyone around him, be it Wisdom Kaye, his stylist, or his 21-year-old assistant Clara West, who only recently graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology, has a good idea, his ears are open. If a concept looks as if it may tank, he will improvise. If, for instance, the 6-foot-8-inch model cast to wear a headless costume figure in a fashion show designed in collaboration with the entertainment megalith Cirque du Soleil has legs too long for the available samples, order a pair stitched overnight.

“I’m not sure what we’re going to do about feet,” Mr. Dillane said, referring to the model Kaylann Balde’s size 12 shoes.

“Don’t worry about it,” an associate said. “We’ll figure it out.”

Improvisation is a default setting for Mr. Dillane. Coming out of nowhere as a Brooklyn Tech nerd who went from selling T-shirts from his New York University dorm room to building a booming streetwear brand, he finds himself going head-to-head with the biggest names in fashion on its most competitive stage. The cliché has always held that moxie is a New Yorker’s superpower, the ultimate flex.

Whether that still holds, the reality is that with no formal training and only his abundant reserve of ideas and drives to propel him, Mr. Dillane has thus far managed to stage 11 fashion showings — two off the official calendar in Paris, one off-calendar in his hometown, four on the official roster of Paris Fashion Week and four films, also presented in Paris during the Covid-19 lockdown. One of these was a stop-motion claymation-style film featuring miniature replicas of famous figures.

It was most likely that film that brought him to the attention of the judges of the LVMH awards, who granted him the prestigious Karl Lagerfeld prize in 2021. That, in turn, brought him to the attention of LVMH, which handed Mr. Dillane the creative reins at Louis Vuitton for the label’s second presentation after the designer Virgil Abloh’s death.

“One thing I learned at LV was that they were just as unprepared as I am,” Mr. Dillane said on Friday, as models from a casting call that brought in more than 400 prospects for 31 available slots trooped into the studio. “Two days out from the big LV show, there was no choreography. They were chill about it. The difference is they had money. They can throw money and people at anything.”

What KidSuper has is talent and a vibe. That is why shows like the one planned for Saturday night tend to draw out celebrities, ballers and the hip-hop elite. It is why models forgo big money jobs to work for him.

“We don’t have any problems at all getting models,” the casting director Maxime Valentini said. “Everyone wants to work for Colm because of his energy. Models even try to crash the castings.”

“Fashion is like a Trojan horse for all these other concepts,” said Mr. Dillane, who views himself as a multimedia artist and who has variously staged shows imitating a comedy roast and starring real-life comics; a filmed “docuseries” on his life; a fake art auction; and a short of vignettes inspired by Wes Anderson. That one was titled “If the Plan Doesn’t Work, You’re Insane, If the Plan Works You’re a Genius.”

Whether his latest effort will be viewed as brilliant or crazy remains to be seen. Yet the elements are coming together, he said. He had already constructed a pair of giant hands using 3-D printers and choreographed a presentation with eight circus performers who will be manipulated on the stage of the Le Trianon theater as if they were marionettes. Earlier in the week, he rehearsed the show’s opening scene with a hair suspension artist.

“She’s a hair-hanging person, and the hands pick her up onstage like she’s on strings,” Mr. Dillane said, abruptly pulling off his T-shirt and walking around half-clad. “I’ve always liked that idea of fashion and puppetry.”

The Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen, who counts Beyoncé, Björk and Tilda Swinton among her regular clients, is known for dazzling haute couture pieces that resemble sculpture.

Now she’s aiming to show that the equation also works the other way around: She’s not a fashion designer but an artist who happens to make pieces for the body.

Van Herpen is planning an art exhibition, called “Hybrid,” that took a year to plan but will run for just 45 minutes on June 24, as part of Paris Haute Couture Week.

Why just 45 minutes? That’s shorter than a yoga class, some Netflix episodes or a nap.

Compared to her usual presentation at Fashion Week, the designer said, it’s actually a long time.

“Normally we do a runway show that takes only 15 minutes because the audience goes from one show to another. So this is very long for this setup,” she said. “This show really is a hybrid performance,” she added. “There are living performers doing the installation and it will be physically intense.”

On a recent afternoon, van Herpen welcomed a reporter into her airy studio in the center of Westerpark, a complex of former electric-company buildings inside a lush green park in western Amsterdam.

It is one of her two studios in the Dutch capital; her couture atelier, a 12-minute walk from here, where she creates what she calls her “body works,” didn’t have enough elevation to hang her largest new artworks. Here, they dangle 16 feet from the rafters.

In front of the arched windows framing the constantly shifting clouds, is a curtain of tulle, decorated with swirling shapes made of dried splatters of oil paint and dyed silks. This is one of her latest pieces, “The Weightlessness of the Unknown,” among the sculptures that will be shown in Paris.

Upstairs, three more swaths of tulle stretched along steel poles providing a “canvas” for designs made of silk organza plissés and 3-D printed objects. The decorative patterning could be prehistoric fossils, skeletons or fallen birds decomposing on a beach — or rather an imaginary combination of all three.

“My work has always been interdisciplinary,” she continued, “and I really feel such a strong connection between art, architecture, science and couture. That’s what I’m doing with the exhibition,” she added, trying “to let go of the boundaries that we set for ourselves, as the creators and for the audience.”

Tulle, silk and 3-D printing have long been some of van Herpen’s favored materials, which she has used to create gowns and outré headdresses that have both regal and aviary grace. Her fashion pieces are simultaneously futuristic and primordial, referencing her fascination with science and anthropology, as well as with contemporary art.

But after assembling 15 years’ worth of “looks” for a major retrospective, “Sculpting the Senses,” at the Museé des Arts Décoratifs in Paris (it closed in April) — and designing bespoke gowns for Queen Máxima of the Netherlands and France’s first lady, Brigitte Macron — van Herpen realized she had another ambition.

Creating works that aren’t linked to the human form is “exploring a new realm within my own creative process,” she said. “The body is such a focus point that it was for me really about finding freedom. I wanted to see what I am making beyond the body, because there’s more to me, I think, than only couture.”

It was also, partly, to slow down. Until 2023, van Herpen had produced biannual runway shows of her collections for 17 years. In January, she decided to skip the 2024 Spring collection showcase in Paris to focus on her new artworks.

Van Herpen calls the resulting show a “hybrid art installation,” which will include nine works in total: four large works in her Westerpark studio and five others that will incorporate people, whom she refers to as “performers.”

They will not trot down a runway, as models do in a typical fashion show, but be suspended, “using an invisible construction,” that will allow them to stand in place. During the single show, she explained, the performers will remain largely motionless and aloft.

She admitted that presenting the works this way “will be quite challenging. You shouldn’t have any fear of heights,” she added. “You need to be very grounded.”

Because she expects the audience to include the fashion press, museum curators and other art-world people, she thinks the 45-minute run time will defy everyone’s expectations. “For some people it will feel very long and for others very short,” she said. Benches will be placed in the gallery space for spectators, as at a museum.

Van Herpen said she is currently in discussions with a museum to exhibit the works on a more permanent basis, starting in early 2025. But she couldn’t yet disclose details.

Her “canvas” of tulle, both translucent and sturdy, is often used in ballet costumes — a reminder that van Herpen was once a dancer. Onto that shimmering surface she added sculptural elements such as layers of oil paint, crusted into thick impasto, and designs made from both hand-pleated silk and 3-D printing.

For one of the new works, “Ancient Ancestors,” she took inspiration from research conducted by Emmanuel Farge, a French biochemist at the French Institut Curie, a cancer research and treatment center. Farge discovered that primordial marine organisms’ cell structure was determined, in part, by the movement of waves.

The 3-D sculptural elements embedded in the tulle resemble horseshoe crabs and seabird skeletons. “The structures refer to past but also to the future, because these organism are constantly changing,” van Herpen said.

She described the two largest hanging sculptures, “Weightlessness of the Unknown” and “Embers of the Mind,” as self-portraits, although they are wholly abstract — more reflective of her emotional state.

In recent years, her inner life has focused on transformation, she explained. She moved from Amsterdam with her boyfriend and collaborator, Salvador Breed, to Het Twiske, a wetlands nature reserve about a half-hour’s drive north of the city, known for its many bird species.

On long daily walks with her dog, she explained, she often reflects on nature’s ability to decompose and regenerate. “My focus now is more on a transition, rather than a fixed state of being,” she said.

Does van Herpen expect to continue moving further into the realm of art and, perhaps, away from the constraints of creating clothes for the human body?

“I can’t ever see into the future, but I know this is permanent,” she said, referring to her shift toward fine art. “I am a person who needs those different influences; if I focus on one thing only … it just isn’t giving me the right dynamic.”

She added, “I’m not leaving couture, but I’m also not leaving this other” — she paused, seeking the precise word — “dimension. I really intend to take the freedom to work on the pieces that I feel need to come out, at that moment.”

“Hybrid,” Iris van Herpen’s new exhibition, runs at 11:30 a.m. at 53 Boulevard Haussmann in Paris on June 24.

There is a scene late in “Becoming Karl Lagerfeld,” the six-part streaming series on Hulu about the early Paris career of the famed German designer, that features a youngish Karl talking to his mother, who has just had a stroke and whom he has installed in an elaborate château in the French countryside. He is in despair. Without her, Mr. Lagerfeld says, there will be no one who knows the real him.

“Who cares?” she effectively replies, suggesting that the created self is so much more interesting.

For decades, this was essentially dogma in fashion. Great designers were often synonymous with fantasists and mythmakers, not only when it came to their clothes but to their life as well. Their homes were extraordinary stage sets; their self-presentation an invention; their speech populated with exaggerated edicts and ultimatums.

Their fans consumed these caricatures the way they consumed their clothes, the image feeding the popular narrative of the creative genius. Few were better at it than Mr. Lagerfeld, who with his powdered ponytail, dark glasses and fingerless motocross gloves was a cartoon unto himself, but he was far from the only one.

Dior with his white coats fit the bill; so did Chanel with her ropes of pearls and cigarette holders. John Galliano with his costumery did too, as did Tom Ford with his porn-lord shades and undone shirts.

And so it was for years. Recently, however, a different trend has emerged. It’s one that takes the form of three streaming series dedicated to revealing the designers behind the clothes; to stripping off the masks of the monstres sacrés and exposing them in all their human fallibility.

First up was “Cristóbal Balenciaga,” a look at the career arc of the Spanish master and the trauma he suffered as a closeted gay man and with the advent of ready-to-wear. (That series, which aired in several countries earlier this year, is not yet available in the United States.) Then came “The New Look,” which focused on Christian Dior, his daddy issues and dependence on tarot cards, and Coco Chanel and the terrible moral choices those designers made to keep their businesses going during World War II.

“Becoming Karl,” which depicts the rivalry between Mr. Lagerfeld and his peer, Yves Saint Laurent, focuses on Mr. Lagerfeld’s apparently enormous inferiority complex and the two men’s rivalry for the love of Jacques de Bascher. It is simply the latest entrant in a new genre that could be called “Designers, they’re just like us!”

But do we want them to be?

Film has been dancing around fashion for decades, ever since Kay Thompson declared “Think pink!” in “Funny Face” in 1957, drawn to the subject because of the razzle-dazzle it seems to promise. With a few notable exceptions, the result is often over the top or absurd, in part because it’s hard to dramatize an industry already busy dramatizing itself. That’s why documentaries like “Dior and I” or “Valentino: The Last Emperor” seem more effective. These new biopics are trying to find a middle ground.

But turning what has become an abstract, broadly palatable brand into an actual person raises, once again, the complicated question of how to think of the relationship between the artist and their art. Whether or not you wear Chanel or Dior, they have become part of the shared cultural vernacular, their style so omnipresent it acts as a general reference point. But if their creators, who reshaped wardrobes across the world and with them the tools of identity, are themselves identified in all their frailty and occasional ugliness, does that make their legacy more appealing, or less?

“Becoming Karl,” which covers Mr. Lagerfeld’s career at Chloé and Fendi and ends with his job offer from Chanel, the brand that truly made him famous, manages the unlikely feat of turning Mr. Lagerfeld, who was both an extraordinarily talented designer and a pretty terrible person — racist, sizeist, demanding, cruel as well as brilliant and erudite — into a sympathetic character. There is Karl self-medicating with chocolate, strapping himself into a corset and dancing alone in his room rather than braving the possibility of rejection. There is pain under the pantomime of fabulosity.

By limiting its purview to the time before Mr. Lagerfeld’s fame and power allowed him to pontificate with impunity, and by passing the blame to his terrible mother and a Parisian world that looked down on him as German (Pierre Bergé, the partner of Yves Saint Laurent, is the villain here), the series offers an alternative narrative. Just as “The New Look” paints Dior as something of a trembling flower, a victim of a terrible father, and Chanel as a product of her experience as a single woman fighting for her own survival. If she got a friend addicted to drugs and tried to use Nazi laws to reclaim her business … well, needs must.

Designing clothes is not an inherently dramatic act, which may be why the show runners decided to focus on the people. Yet these characters — Dior, Chanel, Lagerfeld, Balenciaga — changed not just how we dress, but how we think about fashion. Chanel liberated women from the corset and created the jacket-as-cardigan and the little black dress (among other enduring tropes). Dior invented the New Look and galvanized a generation of shoppers. Balenciaga gave us the sack dress, the egg coat, the baby doll and the belief in fashion as a religion. Lagerfeld took all that and made it part of pop culture.

They created legacies powerful enough to resonate across the decades and signatures clear enough for their names to continue in the hands of others, which is why they loom so large in the popular imagination. It’s why they matter in the first place. Why, in fact, these series could even exist.

And yet the subjects of the series always understood that the essence of their success was a mirage: that what they were selling was the magical promise of transformation through stuff; through wool, silk and chiffon; through the glorious illusion of chic associated with their names. Not, in the end, their reality.

Wanting what we do not need (and what, in a biblical sense, is not ours) is at the core of luxury-goods consumption. And want, more than anything more evolved or cerebral, was the emotion stimulated by the men’s wear shows in Milan this season. Does the world require a linen field jacket with Breton stripes or a navy blazer made from terry cloth piped in white or a safari jacket styled as evening wear and worn with Gurkha trousers and a slightly ludicrous shawl collar waistcoat? It does not.

Yet viewing this stuff at a Ralph Lauren Purple Label presentation at the designer’s elegant palazzo here spurred an irresistible fantasy in this viewer to inhabit a sphere in which Chris Pine is seen wandering through a drawing room in high Gatsby drag, and Colman Domingo is observed resting an elbow, clad in a double-breasted navy suit jacket, on a marble mantelpiece, and Usher saunters by wearing many shades of taupe, a loose-weave sweater casually knotted across his shoulders.

This did, in fact, happen. But though it was in no sense the real world, it was an indication of what fashion is intended for. That is — as nobody has ever understood better than Mr. Lauren — to transport us from our real circumstances.

“Dressing for me has always been an adventure,” Mr. Lauren said in preshow press notes.

Name the person who, while trying on clothes at a store (remember those?), does not temporarily depart from sanity and venture into some unlikely scenario. In one dream scene you are that colleague sauntering into work nonchalantly laying waste to the office competition by wearing, say, one of Silvia Venturini Fendi’s gloriously nothing balmacaan coats in muted madras-cloth patterns.

Or are you that guy in a wonderfully engineered trapeze jacket the color of port wine by Sabato De Sarno at Gucci who nonchalantly strolls into Balthazar? (Is this the place to mention that, despite rumors of Mr. De Sarno’s imminent departure from the label, he more than held his dignified own? This against the provocative backdrop of his predecessor at Gucci, Alessandro Michele, having unexpectedly dropped a first collection as creative director of Valentino titled “Avant le Debut,” of well over 100 resort looks so frilly and granny and echt-Gucci that some wags termed the collection “Vucci.”)

Or are you that person styling your hair in shoe-blacked spikes and putting on a khaki JordanLuca flasher coat to show the cookie-cutter Dimes Square stereotypes — in their Etsy-adjacent Bode or earnest Evan Kinori workwear — how it’s really done?

Or, finally, are you that plus one at a Julia Fox dinner at Jean’s wearing an oversize JW Anderson quilted bomber with a floating hem, barelegged but for a pair of lace-up boots? Slay the house down, as the ballroom children say.

Unseemly emotions are the underbelly of fashion desire. The critic Anne Hollander pointed out long ago that we must, of course, dress to cover our nakedness. Beyond that, there are agendas. RuPaul said it another way: You’re born naked, and the rest is drag. On my imaginary shopping trip through the Milan collections, with an agenda of being imaginarily more stylish than I in truth am, I was assisted by David Farber, the men’s fashion director of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

It was Mr. Farber who guided me through Matteo Tamburini’s confident men’s wear debut as the creative director of Tod’s, choosing for me an elegant all-purpose trench coat to be worn over an untucked pocketed work shirt and a pair of white denim jeans in Goldilocks-perfect proportions: not too wide and not too lean. Have them wrapped and sent.

“I’m a pragmatist,” Mr. Tamburini said. “I look for solutions.”

Brunello Cucinelli does, too. It so happens that the people for whom he is providing solutions could buy and sell most of us 1,000 times over. Objectively speaking, it does not matter. In the same way that fashion insiders go bananas for Phoebe Philo’s more nothing-looking designs or that hedge-fund types will pay a fortune for the anonymous and yet perfectly judged, Zoran-inspired garments from the Row, Brunello Cucinelli sets standards of not only taste but consumption.

We have established that “quiet luxury” is about as subtle as a bullhorn. Still, Mr. Cucinelli’s collection, as much as anything on view in Milan, made it plain that if you have “Succession” money, you would do well to follow where he leads.

“I was remembering ‘Miami Vice,’” Mr. Cucinelli said at his preview, held in the gilded salon of Napoleon’s onetime bolt-hole, the Palazzo Serbelloni. What he meant was, essentially, that moment when linen suits in so-called tropical colors signified to American consumers the epitome of Medellín kingpin-era cool. Mr. Cucinelli provides his version of Giorgio Armani pastels apparently beloved of Miami drug lords. That in itself went a long way toward keeping his presentation, and his label, oddly relevant for his owner-class clientele.

Mr. Cucinelli’s color palette happened to be toned down 1,000 decibels from the brash hues of Don Johnson’s heyday. That is to say, he showed linen suits with wide lapels in double- and one-and-a-half-breasted styles, unlined and slouchy yet so delectably louche one would go willingly into credit card debt to possess them. And isn’t that, in the end, the luxury-goods sucker punch?

When is a fashion show not just a fashion show? When it is a vehicle for cultural diplomacy.

At least this appears to be the case with the cruise (or resort or pre-spring or whatever you want to call them) destination extravaganzas that have taken place over the last month. These events increasingly serve to position the big five brands that hold them less as mere fashion houses and more as national ambassadors to the world: billion-euro avatars of influence on unofficial state visits.

Once upon a time, back when this interstitial season was invented to bridge the gap between the fall and spring runway shows, cruise collections seemed to contain clothes that were more wearable or practical than designs shown during the regular seasons. Now, at least in the hands of the mega-brands, the clothes (or at least their wearability) are almost besides the point. The point is the spectacle, access and power they represent — of all kinds, including that of celebrity and social media. Indeed, the front-row stars are as much an attention-grabbing part of the shows as the shows themselves.

In a world of fashion micro-trends, that may be the biggest trend of all.

This was especially true this season, as the shows of the five big heritage French brands — Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Dior and Balenciaga — served as de facto calling cards for the Paris Olympics, which is being touted as the most “fashion” Olympics ever.

It is no coincidence that two of those brands, Louis Vuitton and Dior, are owned by LVMH, which is a top-line sponsor of the Olympics. Nor is the fact that Bernard Arnault, the mastermind of LVMH, has explicitly stated that he sees his mega-brands not as selling luxury, but selling “culture.” And it is worth noting that this was the first time Balenciaga had shown in China, and, for Hermès, the first new collection show held outside of France.

“Hermès has always had a strong connection with New York,” said the brand’s designer Nadège Vanhee, before her New York debut, held on Pier 36 and complete with hanging yellow traffic lights and a Gallic cocktail boîte.

“It’s the same spirited woman: taking in the sounds and energy of the city,” Ms. Vanhee went on, though her clothes looked more fitting for someone taking the city on, not just in; the slick black and caramel leathers telegraphed an active, rather than passive, vibe. The brand’s signature scarf prints and fringe were still there, but the overall effect was more haute night crawler than equestrian, down to the leather paperboy caps. And more alluring for it.

Fashion, as much as anything, has been part of France’s patrimony and identity in the world. These shows simply expand the territory.

The Influence Travelogue

It started with Chanel in early May, just after the Olympic flame arrived at that port city.

On the rooftop of the Le Corbusier-designed MAMO, in front of Kristen Stewart, Tessa Thompson, and Lily-Rose Depp (among others), the designer Virginie Viard offered up a parade of athChaneleisure: long-line bouclé jackets over bike shorts, tweed hoodie skirt suits and little cocktail frocks with double C-branded plackets. There was even a pair of evening sweats.

If the combination of sports and brand semiology was awkward rather than inspiring, at least the lacy takes on tank top dressing were cool. And the setting was spectacular, even viewed remotely, via livestream, which is how this critic watched since New York Times reporters do not accept free trips (most of the media that attends, like the celebrities and some Very Important Clients, do so as “guests” of the house). Indeed, it was more memorable than the clothes — perhaps a harbinger of the fact that a few weeks after the show Ms. Viard announced she would be leaving the brand.

Next up was Vuitton, where the designer Nicolas Ghesquière continued his pursuit of time-traveling architectural grandeur in the multi-columned Hypostyle Room of Antoni Gaudi’s Park Güell in Barcelona and in front of Sophie Turner, Cynthia Erivo and the sisters Haim.

There, under a ceiling of mosaic domes, he sent out a parade of wardrobe building blocks with just as much structure. The triangular 1980s jackets with jutting shoulders, and precisely angled gaucho hats were weirdly galactic, while the puffballs of evening taffetas had go-go-decade references in their swirls.

Then came Balenciaga, at the Jean Nouvel-designed Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai, where the city’s jutting skyline served as both a backdrop and a starting point for the equally towering boots that went down the runway. They were stacked on 18-centimeter soles and made in the shape of skyscrapers, their height allowing for elongated floor-sweeping trench coats. And that was just the start of the meme-baiting, which continued through trench and puffer coat bags (literally slung over the shoulder) and more duck-billed sneakers.

For a brand that has made a signature out of combining show and social commentary, the statement felt less like food for thought than fodder for social media. It was also a distraction from the power player pussy-bow day silks, fit for an ironic Margaret Thatcher, and the even smarter evening gowns made in upcycled materials.

See, for example, one strapless white look made from Tyvek, a strapless sheath crafted in gold foil, and a candy-floss pink cocoon dress adorned with what looked like feathers (but turned out to be strips of pink plastic garbage bags). In a country where luxury is a subject of increasing tension, it was a canny representation of mood.

Castles and Tartans

As the artistic director of Dior women’s wear, Maria Grazia Chiuri, said before her show, held in the elaborate gardens of Drummond Castle in Perthshire, Scotland: “I think it is very important to explain that fashion is not only a brand; that fashion is a territory where we are speaking about many different aspects that are political, economical, cultural.”

Hence her decision to devote her cruise collections to both highlighting the global history of Dior and marrying it to local artisanship. This time, the focus was on a 1955 collection that Christian Dior showed at Gleneagles, as well as on the history of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her passion for embroidery and its semiology. Throw in the work of the Scottish specialists Harris Tweed; Johnstons of Elgin, the knitwear company; and an independent brand called Le Kilt founded by 30-something Samantha McCoach in 2014 to make kilts contemporary, and you get clan Dior.

The result positions Dior as a tastemaker, bestowing its seal of approval and aura of chic onto others, and gives the collections a reason for existing in a world that can often seem crammed with too much stuff. Ms. Chiuri’s interpretation of local aesthetics can be eye-rollingly banal — Scotland! Tartan! Bagpipes! Argyles! — but it also reflects the curiosity of an outsider.

Sometimes that combination works very well, as it did with the softened New Look silhouettes crafted from purple and black tartan shawls and the chain mail evening gowns; sometimes less well, as in the faux-punk postcard pastiches of old Dior-in-Edinburgh photos and the cocktail frocks and corsets embroidered with words such as “bossy,” “hysterical” and “nag.” (Ms. Chiuri can’t quite abandon her yen for a feminist slogan.)

One shawl with a map of Scotland on top was so literal that you expected a Google maps dot pointing to the show’s location. But the sheer commitment of 89 such looks ultimately has a sincerity that is undeniable and more interesting than what often appears in her regular runway shows.

It makes cross-border collaboration look awfully good.

Earlier this year, the actress Kristen Stewart appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in a pocket-covered black leather vest that looked like it had been swiped from a 1980s lesbian bar. Bare-chested, her hair cut into a squirrelly mullet, she wore only one other garment: a white jock strap into which her hand plunged suggestively past the wrist. The 34-year-old former ingénue — who entered the public eye in 2008 as the teenage star of the “Twilight” movie franchise, before coming out in 2017 — seemed to be reclaiming pleasure exclusively for herself. For other appearances to promote “Love Lies Bleeding,” her A24-produced queer thriller, which was released in March, she channeled a similar spirit, showing up in a sea green Dickies bomber jacket over a stomach-baring crop top at the Sundance Film Festival and a structured black leather blazer with a fishnet bra on “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”

It was a press-junket wardrobe that showcased a newly joyful, even giddy aesthetic that’s emerging among a generation of lesbians and young queer stars — an approach to dressing centered on mixing overtly sex-forward, often hyper-feminine pieces with tailored, traditionally butch wardrobe staples. “It’s so playful and obnoxiously sexy,” says the New York-based fashion designer Daniella Kallmeyer, 37. “It’s not about a ‘typical’ look. There’s no stereotypical way to dress queer or like a lesbian. It’s about unapologetically owning your identity.” In January, the singer Reneé Rapp wore a hot pink bustier with a silky blazer to the premiere of the “Mean Girls” remake, and the singer Billie Eilish attended the Golden Globes in a bulbous black Willy Chavarria suit jacket. In the March issue of Vogue, there was the actress Ayo Edebiri wearing barely there miniskirts with wildly oversize button-downs.

Even celebrities who don’t identify as queer are experimenting with fashion in similarly gleeful, nonconformist ways. See Rihanna’s cropped haircut and black necktie in the April issue of Interview, and Anne Hathaway’s velvet, linebacker-shouldered three-piece suit on the cover of V Magazine’s summer issue, under the headline “His and Hers.” It’s a defiant mood that also showed up on the spring 2024 runways: At Maison Margiela, models walked in disheveled oversize suits, their hair in frizzy nests and, at Miu Miu, Miuccia Prada created a world of rumpled polos and boat shoes, as if the models had raided a British boy’s school.

While this rupture of gendered fashion norms in the mainstream might seem new, the look is not, of course, without precedent. In 1653, the French artist Sébastien Bourdon painted the Swedish monarch Christina in a languid black silk dress layered over a white linen shirt, tied at the collar in a style commonly worn by men. (The following year, Christina, who had already refused to marry, abdicated, before taking on a plethora of lovers of both genders in Rome.) Nearly two centuries later, the American artist Romaine Brooks painted a generation of Parisian lesbians in “new woman” bobs, monocles and tailored jackets. And after World War II, a collision of masculine and feminine aesthetics occurred because of renewed enforcement of legislation like New York’s 1845 “three-piece clothing law,” which required women to wear three articles of “feminine” clothing (bra, underwear and skirt) or risk arrest during frequent raids of queer bars — leading to dimly lit rooms filled with butches wearing tailored suit tops and narrow navy skirts. In these environments, despite the confines, fashion was a crucial signifier, a means of forging community and maybe even falling in love as a result.

It’s not so surprising, then, that as the rights of women and queer people are once again under threat, lesbians are asserting their autonomy with clothes. “In the past decade, the political landscape encouraged queer visibility in various forms, but now politicians are attempting to squash that visibility,” says the writer Eleanor Medhurst, whose book, “Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion,” will come out this month. “Queer women are pushing back against that with fashion, which can play a really important role in making ourselves visible in the world.” And for women of any sexuality looking to affirm their agency through what they wear, who better to take cues from than lesbians, who’ve long been excluded, to varying degrees, from those pillars of traditional femininity, marriage and motherhood? Lesbian fashion has always been about more than just clothes; it’s an attempt to embody a truly liberated world that doesn’t yet exist.