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1. Givenchy: The ’70s With a Twist

Sheesh, if Riccardo Tisci’s fall collection doesn’t move the fashion needle, nothing will.

There’s been a strong element of the ’70s in the collections for fall—following on the spring trend. Most designers have been pretty literal. Chloe’s Clare Waight Keller showed a Stevie Nicks-like collection on Sunday (to Fleetwood Mac music) that was hippy and swishy and roundly lovely, but it didn’t move the needle.

Tisci masterfully touched on a theme that was rife in the ’70s—a reverence for the Renaissance—but twisted it into futurism. Facial jewelry, embroidery creating Gothic crosses on black dresses, animal tails forming fringe on a fur jacket, tuxedo tails on suits, peasant-style dresses in black velvet—it was a cornucopia of fashion and his strongest collection in recent memory.

OK, the nose adornments looked comically like mustaches. All the better to sear that collection into memory.

2. Haider Ackermann: Tailored Punk

Photo: bridesmaid dresses online

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One of the more exciting collections of the Paris week so far: Haider Ackermann. The designer’s raggedy stitches—in the models’ hair as well as embellishing the clothes—gave a punk attitude to the excellently tailored apparel.

Highlights were the peplum back of a jacket sewn askew with those ragged stitches, and the same stitching along the waistbands of loose-crotched slacks. Also, the pleated skirts were wrapped and closed askew as though they’d been quickly pinned together.

3. Vivienne Westwood : On the Verge

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Men wearing women’s clothing has been a thing this season, but no one has done it like Vivienne Westwood, the legendary British punk-haute-couture designer. Always one step short of scandal, for her highest Gold Label line, she put male models in ballgowns, women’s cropped suit jackets, and knitted pants, making a note of the fact (in her show notes) that they’d had to learn to make dresses with no waistlines.

As a backdrop to the scene, the German band Die Hartjungs played live in the middle of the runway, scorching the room with their shrieks and chords.

To finish off the looks, what else but Hawaiian skirts made of raffia. Backing it all up, as ever, was Ms. Westwood’s precisely off-balance tailoring and draping.

4. Comme des Garçons: Royal Trip

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The point of a Comme des Garçons show is to be in awe, if not of the clothes, then of the reverential bafflement of the other guests.

This is like watching a museumgoer ponder Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings: canvases painted one shade of white that everybody is worshiping. But what does it mean?

It doesn’t really matter what designer Rei Kawakubo, who is 72, was inspired by each season, though she expresses it in a few words (the ceremony of separation, this season). What matters is what she will inspire in others, who slurp up her multi-buckled brogues and heart-with-eyes logo sportswear with an avidity that borders on passion.

Ms. Kawakubo presses beyond the confines of fashion—adding extra sleeves and even arms and appendages to her collection pieces—into the realm of pure emotion. These aren’t the clothes that will be in stores. This is the way she has been feeling. For fall, her models passed one another in a mournful pas de deux in the center aisle, dressed in fantastic balls of lace and cotton, looking a lot like an Elizabethan queen, but on acid.

5. Kenzo: Rambunctious Layers

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It is impossible to separate a Kenzo collection from the experience of getting to where it is shown. Designers Carol Lim and Humberto Leon (besties since they attended Berkeley together) make a point each season of choosing a new venue than has never housed a fashion show. And they show on Sunday mornings, dragging sleepy partyers out of bed and sometimes into Parisian suburbs.

That’s part of the formula they use to reignite excitement over this formerly moribund brand. This Sunday found them in the northern reaches of the city, in a vast expo-style tent.

The duo changed up their typical boxy silhouette for fall, layering light woven bias-cut fabrics, piling on anoraks, and spicing up suits with bold stripes of color that ran catty-corner across jackets.

It’s still rambunctious, though, and studiously unsexy.

6. Celine: Elegant Comfort

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One of the reasons designer Phoebe Philo has had such success in her various jobs (once, at Chloe, most recently at Celine) is that she designs what women want to wear, not what they think they should wear. It isn’t necessarily flattering or sexy, but it looks sleek and comfortable.

She introduced a revolution in women’s footwear with her fur Birkenstocks and has now put white tennis-style sneakers on her runway for fall, breaking another convention against white after Labor Day.

Her stunning gathered-waist leather coats—one in light tan, the other black—epitomize the simplicity of her ideas: total elegance and comfort at the same time. It’s a shame that so few of her garments are produced that they are almost never seen on the street.

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