Gory Girl Fashion

Alexander Mcqueen

The Skinny Pant

Now I'm certainly no fashion expert, but I always like a bit of McQueen (RIP). This collection continues his great eye for detail (especially tying knots...). Very crisp and smart yet with a touch of bohemian.

If you're an ex-public school boy from England - this look is for you. Prepare your dorm room biscuits and drop your trousers in this stunning look.

Calvin Klein

Glitz It Up!

Calvin Klein hits us over the head this year with a collection that could have come straight out of Adam Lambert's very open closet.

Never been a real fan of Clavin, but this new collection adds a bit of flair to his usual straight lines approach.

Dolce & Gabbana

White Is The New Black

White is indeed the new black...unfortunately, this Dolce collection is the new 'I'm going to get beaten up on my yacht after cocktails' (successfully following on from last years 'I'm going to get my head kicked in at the polo' collection). Sorry boys, the frankly lightweight 'hats and sun glasses' disguises aren't going to save you from a brisk duff up...

Definitely a collection for the skinny boys (and who wouldn't want to beat them up), but the well cut and darted shirts and cool shorts will look great over the summer.

Dsquared 2

Mix It Up!

If you want to channel Dolph Lungren at an eighties themed gay club, then look no further than the very stylish Dsquared 2 collection.

The usual European, loud style is still very evident in this rather colourful and well tailored collection.

Ermenegildo Zegna

Lighten Up Your Leather

It's all about light tan leather this season over at Ermenegildo's house. The sixities are back with this hip collection, so jump in your open topped 'sportscar' and pop down to the local Jazz Club for an expresso ('Poetry Night' is on Wednesday Mr White Hat...).

Although harking back to the 60s with this jazzy, beatnik style - there's still something fresh and exciting about this new collection.

Etro

Show Your Sheer

The new Etro collection...it’s like Mika's wardrobe fell on a boy band.

Something for the young guys (ie. not me), cool and trendy mixed with euro-flamboyance - watch out for these outfits at a yachting marina near you.

Prada

Polish Your Preppy

"Polish your preppy"? I don't think you'd be hard pressed to find a young man to polish anything of yours if you went out looking like this on a Summer's evening...

Smart and crisp this season from Prada, the usual severe lines are truly in place to create a sharp look aimed at the man about town (who might actually be at work as well).

Gucci

The Rock Hippies

Call the police! The gentleman on the left has his jacket sleeves rolled...please people, let's not forget the tragic punishment Don Johnson suffered after his brief foray into the old suit jacket sleeves rolled up game...

"Nash Bridges".

This is a slick and contemporary collection that both smacks of the eighties and brings those older fashions bang up to date. Cool, relaxed and sophisticated.

Paris Fashion - 2010 Fall

Alexander McQueen

Alexander McQueen's last works were given final honors by his trusted team in a hushed and dignified showing that went to his core as a designer who scaled the heights of couture accomplishment. Sarah Burton, his right hand, described how, in beginning this collection, McQueen had turned away from the world of the Internet, which he had so powerfully harnessed in his last show. "He wanted to get back to the handcraft he loved, and the things that are being lost in the making of fashion," she said. "He was looking at the art of the Dark Ages, but finding light and beauty in it. He was coming in every day, draping and cutting pieces on the stand." The 16 outfits shown had been 80 percent finished at the time of his death.

Paris Fashion - 2010 Fall

Valentino

The shoes at Valentino-blush-colored patent-leather kitten heels trimmed in metal studs-are an apt metaphor for the direction Pier Paolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri are taking the storied label. Former accessories designers under Valentino Garavani himself, they're utterly in touch with all of the house's romantic, ruffled codes, but they're determined to modernize it with their more dangerous, youthful sensibilities. Their biggest success so far: dressing fashion favorite Chloë Sevigny in one of their Spring gowns for the Golden Globes back in January.

Paris Fashion - 2010 Fall

Chanel

Freja Beha Erichsen and three bears on an ice floe. This was the arctic scene at Chanel, where giant chunks of bona fide iceberg, specially transported from Scandinavia, formed the frozen landscape around which models solemnly splashed through a sea of 'berg-melt in shaggy snow boots with ice-block heels. The Karl conceit of the season, no surprises, was an in-every-way extravagant play on Coco in cold weather. Using more fur than he'd even flung at Fendi-the twist being that here the fur was fake-Lagerfeld steered this collection nearer to couture than ready-to-wear than ever. Fur was woven into brown tweeds; formed deep pelmets on the lower half of leather jackets; became almost igloo-shaped capes, bonnets, even-for goodness' sake-furry trousers. Meanwhile, the suit and coat combinations also had a level of lavish elaboration usually reserved for haute eveningwear.

Paris Fashion - 2010 Fall

YSL

Stefano Pilati categorically denied there was any religious symbolism in his Fall show. Nevertheless, the sober caped black forms, wimplelike head coverings, starched white cotton, hoods, and heavy chain pendants gave a nunlike impression. Granted, it wasn't literal, but there was something of the Catholic convent in the high white dog collar on a suit, the yoked white blouse with full sleeves, the prim and modest mid-calf dresses-and the way a cardinal purple cape made an appearance at one point. Even when a sheer black dress came out, there was a cross to bare beneath it: underwear formed as a cruciform bodysuit.

Paris Fashion - 2010 Fall

Stella McCartney

Stella McCartney's show began with a fake recording of Tiger Woods' alleged call to his mistress, the one in which he asks her to remove her name from her voicemail because his wife has found her number on his phone. Things ended, as usual, with a Beatles song; this season it was "Mother Nature's Son." They made for perplexing, if thought-provoking, bookends to a collection of daywear that for the most part looked tailor-made not for celebrity groupies but for the smart, powerful businesswoman. It was clean, polished, and chic-three buzzwords of the season.

Paris Fashion - 2010 Fall

John Galliano

If you felt like you'd seen it all before at John Galliano, it's because you did. At least in some ways: A year ago, he sent out a parade of Russian/Balkan folkloric princesses; this season, as his program explained, "a tribe of adventuring nomads" trekked "through a mountainous terrain, crossing imaginary borders in search of a new land." Last March, there was fake snow; today, his bronzed, bewigged, and behatted models walked through a blizzard of silver glitter. There were some striking similarities between the two collections' clothes, too, starting with the very first pannier-skirted caban coat.

Paris Fashion - 2010 Fall

Costume National

Ah, Costume National: the label where hems must be high and leather isn't so much an option as a staple. There is nothing wrong with this kind of molto-sexy-with-a-tough-edge signature style-after all, it's far better than the brand having no style at all. But you sometimes suspect that designer Ennio Capasa and his label would be better served by showing the collection at home in molto sexy Milano as opposed to très chic Paris, where the show can come across like a thigh-high boot accidentally placed in the kitten-heel section of a shoe store.

Paris Fashion - 2010 Fall

Ann Demeulemeester

Over the past several seasons, Ann Demeulemeester has become just as known for her tough-as-nails, yet subersively-sexy, footwear as her androgynously-chic ready-to-wear. Her lace-up sandal boot has been worn obsessively by Sarah Jessica Parker, models, and editors, and copied the world over . For her fall 2010 collection, the designer showed heavy masculine boots in both black and red. The clunky wedge style added weight to pantsuits and a bit of borrowed-from-the-boys charm to dresses. Leave it to Demeulemeester to design the perfect day-to-night fall boot.

Paris Fashion - 2010 Fall

Christian Dior

Galliano's longtime favorite eighteenth-century redingote shapes, hacking jackets, and jodhpurs, interspersed with many more of the little chiffon dresses. The collection was equestrian-themed with plenty of leather and thigh high boots. I'm not sure I liked the pairing of boots with all the romantic and soft frilly dresses but I see where he was going with it all.

Paris Fashion - 2010 Fall

Issey Miyake

There's always been as much science as there is art in an Issey Miyake collection. Dai Fujiwara consolidated the connection with Fall's offering, inspired by the revolutionary mathematician William Thurston's geometric models for the shape of the universe. As abstract as that sounds, the result was an often breathtaking evolution of last season's rainbow-nation tribalism. After the show, Fujiwara and Thurston wrapped themselves for the press in a long stretch of red tubing to make the point that something that looks random is actually (according to Thurston) 'beautiful geometry.'

Paris Fashion - 2010 Fall

Balenciaga

Cosmonauts and seventies Formica. Packaging and food boxes. Synthetic foam and plywood. Sleeping bags and biscuits. "I was working on something domestic. Casual things mixed with classic. And a kind of rigidity," said Nicolas Ghesquière, listing some of the extraordinary imagery and manipulations of materials and color that went into Balenciaga's computer-age vision of couture.

Geometric, collaged, stiff yet rounded, and composed of zones of matte and shine, with cashmere dimpled to look like industrial foam and fur shaved into quilting, the components of the first coats alone were difficult enough to absorb at a glance.

Paris Fashion - 2010 Fall

Balmain

This season, he's gone Baroque 'n' roll, with a Balmain outing pitched somewhere between Prince's Purple Rain pomp and Louis XIV at Versailles. Gold, brocade, frock coats, Louis-heeled ribbon-laced boots, sequin and lamé dresses galore: Decarnin went for it.

Clever move, on lots of levels. For one thing, shifting Balmain away from the distressed MASH-militaria of summer to a classier, dressier theme puts this notoriously expensive collection on a path where the value of the original can be clearly distinguished from the cheap knockoff.

Paris Fashion - 2010 Fall

Lanvin

Before his show, Elbaz reeled off the loops he'd put himself through to get there: "Women ask for masculine tailoring, but they want to feel fragile. They want daywear, but buy evening. I designed a whole lot of draped things, but then it looked like too much. An overdose of fashion." His change of heart came on returning to the studio after a meeting at the U.N. to learn about a role he is about to take up as a UNICEF ambassador. It cleared his mind to work on plain, molded city clothes on the one hand, and made him think about Africa, his birthplace, on the other.

Paris Fashion - 2010 Fall

Pedro Lourenco

Here's one that made Paris fashion sit upright on its little gold chairs: Brazilian designer Pedro Lourenco sending out a precociously accomplished, startlingly directional collection at the age of 19. Perhaps it was the power of public relations firm KCD, the endorsement of stylist Brana Wolf, and sheer incredulity over talk of the latest teen in fashion that brought a stellar professional front row to the Westin Hotel at 8 pm, but the skeptics who walked in walked out genuinely amazed.

Paris Fashion - 2010 Fall

Jean Paul Gaultier

Gaultier is always working some sort of wacky theme. But the general gist - that the world is flat, and how we dress now is an ever-changing series of mash-ups - was pretty spot-on.

Subtract the gimmicky shoes and the costumey hats and, as usual, there were some fantastic clothes here.

The expertly cut Gaultier trench showed up in many different guises: shrunken and cropped at the hip, cutaway at the thighs in front and trailing a long hem, or in black with a kimono-silk lining. At one end of the colorful spectrum was a louche smoking jacket, and, at the other, cozy-chic knits and some casually luxe furs. The protesters gathered in force outside would've booed loudly at the fur-trimmed backpack Gaultier borrowed from Sasha Pivovarova for his photo op.

On the three-cheers side: He deserves props for the most diverse casting of Paris fashion week.