Fashion's endless game of creative director musical chairs ebbs and flows like an unsmiling ocean, engulfing promising young talents before tossing them out to shore, waterlogged and breathless. Only the rare few designers survive the riptide — a fair number are hurled back nearly as quickly as they're pulled under.
The recent Fall/Winter 2024 shows were the testing ground for a handful of recently-assigned young talents, who showed their stuff for labels as storied as Tod's and as inimitable as Moschino.
There were tears. There were jeers. There were giant wedge sandals.
So, how'd they all do?
First up was Adrian Appiolaza, who only seized the creative director reigns a few months back and still successfully turned out a pretty fully-realized Moschino vision at the house's February 2024 show in Milan.
This is clearly not Jeremy Scott's Moschino: Appiolaza's iteration of the oft-irreverent fashion house is far less irreverent than it used to be.
But that's not a dig: Appioloza's Moschino issued a fantastically commercial debut anchored by ample wearability and livened up with enough quirk to live up to its legacy.
Even if, somehow, the baguette bags weren't everyone's loaf of bread, who could nitpick slinky skirts printed with produce, sumptuous suede rider's jackets, and trompe l'oeil silk pajama sets?
Appiolaza even included a few Easter eggs for the heads, a result of the Argentinian designer diving deep into the archive of house founder Franco Moschino to efficiently turn out the new collection.
Next up, Tod's FW24, where fresh face Matteo Tamburini reestablished the century-old house as the epitome of good Italian taste.
Not that Tod's needed any aid in getting there but, hey.
Classic neutral tones framed the crisp lines of Tamburini's reigned-in silhouettes, making for a sophisticated, no-nonsense collection unlikely to blow anyone's hair back but pretty likely to please anyone who appreciates nice clothes.
The Tod's customer will be happy, the family-owned Tod's Group will be happy, the armchair critics will be happy. Win win win.
Almost immediately afterwards, Tamburini's predecessor at Tod's, Walter Chiapponi, debuted at Blumarine.
Chiapponi at Blumarine is an interesting move. Schooled by industry vets like Alessandro Dell'Acqua and Riccardo Tisci (after his own four-year tenure at Blumarine in the early aughts), Chiapponi demonstrated a mastery of lavish restraint at Tod's, where he brought the house to ever-greater financial and critical heights.
Blumarine is not much like Tod's, however.
Where the latter is indicative of crisp Italiano luxury, the former is resplendent in its defiant girlishness. Retro collections and even singular pieces are longingly, lovingly reshared by Fashion Twitter on a near daily basis so of course, they took the debut of the label's new creative director seriously.
Whereas devotees deeply adored previous Blumarine overseer Nicola Brognano, who spoke the Y2K language, who catered to the romanticism inherent to the Blumarine woman, they side-eyed Chiapponi's debut effort.
The replies to a series of tweets laying out the looks spell out the general response: " Off to a rough start I see."
Critics were more on-board: though one review wanly described looks as "cautiously see-through" and "plausibly wearable," most applauded Chiapponi's efforts in ushering in a new Blumarine still tethered to what came before.
And who knows? Still plenty of time to win over Fashion Twitter.
That's Milan. Over in Paris, a week later, the one of two debuts from a woman designer — Seriously! The only new woman designing during a womenswear week — went down at Chloé, with Chemena Kamali smartly stepping up her tenure by platforming a house icon... literally.
Kamali revived the wooden wedge sandal distinctly indicative of a certain era of bygone Chloé, like when Stella McCartney was designing for the house in the late '90s.
It's nostalgic but it also feels now, with just enough Y2K flavor to not feel forced.
Except for, maybe, all the influencers and celebrities sitting front-row with identical pairs of gifted shoes.
Either way, Kamali's collection worked, warmly boho, welcomingly familiar, and utterly true to the house's ethos. At Chloé, meet the new day — same as the old day!
And at Lacoste, new creative director Pelagia Kolotouros aced her debut with a strong showing of semi-sporty stuff and surprisingly suit-y stuff. A nice mix that calls back to Lacoste's twin heritages: sportswear and Paris.
And then Seán McGirr's first Alexander McQueen show was dismantled by critics.
McGirr's initial McQueen presentation was one of Paris Fashion Week's most anticipated events, as it would introduce the first external vision for a cultish house that had only ever been led by its founder and his most trusted assistant.
At their most polite, reviewers called McGirr's McQueen debut, filled with sculptural knit sweaters and shoes shaped like horse hooves, "confused." At their most extreme, they littered Twitter with so many expletives.
It's hard not to feel at least mildly sympathetic to the 35-year-old designer, whose brief career — he only just graduated Central Saint Martins, McQueen's alma matter, in 2014 — is marked by a handful of brief but promising spells at companies as diverse as UNIQLO and Dries Van Noten.
The outrage is largely outsized, I'd say. Even setting aside the ample shoes that McGirr had to fill — ample shoes that no one could really ever hope to properly fill simply because no one is Alexander McQueen — McGirr did something that we ought to hope all young, unproven designers do: he came out swinging.
The collection is packed with impressively outré fare; say what you will about it, but it ain't safe.
That is to say, at least the fur vessels that McGirr propositioned as tops and the armhole-free dresses are something.
And, honestly, isn't that more McQueen than folks are giving McGirr credit for?
Hardly any other house is more synonymous with purposeful provocation. A safe show would've been a greater letdown, really.
Give me a divisive high-concept collection over a halfhearted gesture any day of the week.
Thank god for something different.
And so it was a mostly auspicious start for what'll be a new era for nearly a half-dozen stalwart fashion houses. It was all a bit more explosive than the last round of fairly anonymous fashion upstarts but, again, at least it was memorable.
