The fall couture shows in Paris, which ended Thursday, were held earlier than the usual July dates to avoid clashing with preparations for the Olympic Games, but the season still offered some Parisian high jewelry houses a chance to shine brightly.

Their presentations capped a series of glamorous events around Europe, as several houses continued the trend of taking high jewelry debuts on the road: Bulgari showed in Rome; Cartier in Vienna; Chanel in Monaco; Dior in Florence, Italy; and Louis Vuitton in St.-Tropez, France.

In Paris, the 67-piece Hermès collection, Les Formes de la Couleur (the Shapes of Color), was the largest the house had produced — and arguably its most playful. A freestyle brushstroke, for example, was rendered as a mono-earring called Fresh Paint, with green tsavorite garnets simulating pigment.

And while the house has nearly 75,000 shades in its silk color library, the collection was the first time it had used so many primary colors and rainbow palettes for jewelry.

“It took us a long time to do a lot of diamonds and colored gemstones,” said Pierre Hardy, the creative director of Hermès jewelry since 2001 and of high jewelry since its introduction in 2010. “With leather, silk and makeup, one sees how color informs the world of Hermès, but for jewelry we’d never experimented with that kind of mix before.”

The designer described his creative process as “liberating color from minerality, cuts and facets to let it be more supple, almost liquid or diffuse, like makeup on the body.”

Cultural touchstones provided an unexpected source of inspiration, too. In the Supracolor necklace, for example, five strands of black and gray spinel beads were anchored by a triangular centerpiece featuring a 1.1-carat diamond set in rutilated quartz and surrounded by baguette diamonds, with a cascading, rainbow-like fringe of beads in white, orange and gray moonstone, chalcedony, chrysoprase, rose quartz and pink tourmaline. Mr. Hardy acknowledged that it bore a striking resemblance to the cover artwork of Pink Floyd’s 1973 album “The Dark Side of the Moon.”

“It’s a real exercise to look at pop culture on the one hand, and something scientific on the other, and turn it into something ultra-precious,” said Mr. Hardy, who also used color to revisit signatures such as its Kelly bracelet, offered in a white-gold version fully pavéd with gemstones.

Even the house’s celebrated Birkin bag was rendered as a small but fully functional jeweled bag in white or yellow gold that had been worked to mimic crocodile leather and then encrusted with nearly 3,000 diamonds, spessartites, aquamarines, amethysts and pink, blue and yellow sapphires.

Ombré colors, couture-inspired techniques and studies in fluidity were also in the spotlight at Piaget. The brand, which is celebrating its 150th anniversary, presented some jewels from its Essence of Extraleganza collection — a word it called a portmanteau of extravagance and elegance — by appointment.

Rather than design jewels to a specific theme, Stéphanie Sivrière, the brand’s creative director of jewelry and watches, said she was inspired by the idea of “everyday couture” and using traditional goldsmithing techniques to produce metal mesh as fluid as the fabrics and trims used in high fashion.

“When we use gold, it’s never smooth,” Ms. Sivrière said. “It’s a material that always has character: it’s hammered, braided, woven.

“These are pieces that really dress the wearer — they’re very second skin — so I wanted to really use color and contrast to bring out a playful side.”

The most important piece in the collection, she said, is a cuff watch with a latticework gold bracelet set with baguette-cut Colombian emeralds and diamonds that appear to stretch around its square green enamel dial. There also is a V-shape necklace of tiny, hand-twisted gold links set with a fiery 21.23-carat cushion-cut orange spessartite surrounded by diamonds, yellow sapphires and trapezoid-cut carnelian set to a shimmy-like fringe.

The 40 Piaget jewels shown in Paris represented about half of the entire 90-piece collection, which is to be unveiled in Seoul later this year.

Travel Impressions

Claire Choisne, Boucheron’s creative director, drew on the rugged aquatic scenes she saw during a spring trip to Iceland for a high jewelry collection called Carte Blanche, Or Bleu (in English, Blue Gold).

But rather than use color, the designer said, she wanted to render water as if “frozen in its rawest state” — for example, cascades of diamonds on a transformable necklace or pools of rock crystal on a double finger ring.

The 26 jewels included a cuff bracelet, called Eau d’Encre, or Ink Water, in titanium and white gold pavéd with calibrated diamonds and bisected by a wide band of polished obsidian sculpted to resemble waves.

Ms. Choisne said that the piece was the first the house had produced using a combination of traditional jewelry-making savoir-faire and technology. A 3-D simulation was used to reproduce the impression of a churning sea, and the glassy rock was cut using specialized machinery to achieve the most natural-looking relief possible.

As for the texture, the designer said, “It’s like an ode to the memory of water.”

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.

Last week, Becky Hughes took over the newsletter because I was up to my eyeballs in spreadsheets filled with sandwiches. This week, all that beautiful organization came together in the form of our list of “57 Sandwiches That Define New York City,” a grand survey of all five boroughs through the lens of its most inspired dishes between two slices of bread.

How the sandwich gets made

When the sandwich project was born, I knew the selections had to reflect a few key factors: the city’s history of immigration and globalism, its most iconic institutions (Jewish and Italian delis, neighborhood mainstays), its ingenious chefs and, most important, all five boroughs.

I came up with a list of about 50 leads, then asked our Food staff to share their adds and to highlight any blind spots. We compiled a list of over 100 sandwiches, and after three weeks of scouting, narrowed the selection to 57 worthy choices. From there, our tireless photo editor Gabriel H. Sanchez commissioned three photographers to photograph every one of them.

Because I have a car, I took on the Bronx and Staten Island. (Shout out to Pamela Silvestri, the food editor at the Staten Island Advance, for taking me out to try sandwiches on a rainy Friday afternoon.) But my favorite sandwich was a little closer to home: I haven’t stopped thinking about the vegan lobster roll at Aunts et Uncles in Brooklyn. It proves that necessity truly is the mother of invention, because I need that “lobster” roll made with hearts of palm in my life.

I thought I’d ask my fellow sandwich hunters about which sandwiches stood out to them the most during our delicious journey across the city.

Our staff’s favorite bites

The Veg-Italian from Court Street Grocers has defined my New York experience for all 11 years that I have lived here. I am not vegetarian but I love vegetarian sandwiches, and it often feels like even great sandwich shops treat vegetarian sandwiches as an afterthought. Not Court Street Grocers. I have eaten this sandwich in airports, on planes, on subways, at work, in between meetings — it is the sandwich of my New York. PRIYA KRISHNA

I love the hot ham sandwich at Hamburger America in part because it’s so modest. Modest in size (it could fit in the palm of your hand), modest in its components (a toasted bun, sliced ham and melted Swiss) and modest in its goal, which is simply to give you a few contented moments before you face the rest of your day. PETE WELLS

My favorite was the focaccia sandwich at Lucia Alimentari: A crucial characteristic of any sandwich is the bread, but at Lucia Alimentari, the fluffy focaccia is what rules. I think about that sandwich every once in a while, and I only hope that when I go back to have it again that it’s not sold out. CHRISTINA MORALES

The Scuttlebutt, which was created in the late aughts by Caroline Fidanza and Rebecca Collerton at Saltie, a beloved shop in Williamsburg. The sandwich survived the closure of that restaurant, so maybe there’s hope for a reincarnation of my all-time favorite sandwich in New York, the Fort Defiance muffuletta, too. SARA BONISTEEL

People talk a lot about Superiority Burger, but I feel like not enough of them are talking about the collard greens sandwich on focaccia. Sitting at the bar and eating this sandwich along with a martini made me feel so … “I HEART NY.” BECKY HUGHES

The prosciutto and butter because of its perfect minimalism. The French onion sandwich for its gooey-sweet complexity. MELISSA CLARK

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?