The Top 10 Shows of the Season

Choosing The Business of Fashion’s top ten shows of the season can be a heated exercise: Our editors each have their own favourites and strong convictions. This time around was no exception.

The shows this season were full of thoughtful conversations about clothes, culture and commerce — but short on major fashion moments. Chalk it up to last cycle’s “great fashion reset.” With most of the big debuts out of the way, brands and their new designers are settling into the reality of doing this season after season and focus is now split between advancing narratives on the runway and landing refreshed visions with products, campaigns and store revamps.

Chanel helped close the Paris season on a high note Monday, claiming its place as our top show of the season. Matthieu Blazy’s second ready-to-wear outing for the French couture giant blended fashion narrative, craft and a new Chanel wardrobe.

Haider Ackermann’s Tom Ford was a close second, his stark white set highlighting the perfection of the styling, casting and movement. Meanwhile, Junya Watanabe brought the crowd to its feet by returning to a favourite motif — deconstructed motocross gear — and pushing it to new heights of drama. Other Paris highlights included Issey Miyake, Givenchy, The Row and Dior.

Earlier in the month, Erdem’s 20th anniversary show was the crown jewel of the London season, while Prada and Jil Sander rose to the top in Milan.

Gucci was the subject of much debate. Demna’s world-building prowess was on display with a monumental set and thumping, genre-bending music. What followed in this temple of techno — that’s to say, the actual clothes — didn’t pass muster for some of BoF’s editors. That said, the zeitgeist-y exploration of body modification and shifting beauty standards, as examined in Tim Blanks’s thoughtful deep-dive with Demna, made it the most discussed show of the season and worthy of a special mention.

Scroll on for our top 10 shows of the season list.

1. Chanel

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“[Matthieu Blazy’s] never-ending research into everything [Gabrielle Chanel] ever said or did is continually throwing up similar nuggets of inspiration, like the interview she gave to the French newspaper Le Figaro in 1955. Asked to define her own fashion, she compared it to a caterpillar by day, a butterfly by night: ‘We need dresses that crawl, dresses that fly, because the butterfly doesn’t go to the market, and the caterpillar doesn’t go to the ball.’ Asked for her favourite colour, Chanel answered, ‘Everyone would expect it to be black, but it’s actually iridescent.’ Like a butterfly’s wings. Her musings took Blazy to a higher state. The collection he showed on Monday was the spectacular result.”

Read More: The Caterpillar and the Butterfly: Mythmaking at Chanel

2. Tom Ford

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“Speaking of beating hearts, be still mine, after Haider Ackermann’s show for Tom Ford on Wednesday. He saw his woman and man as longterm survivors of debauch who had found a vital inner steel that kept them standing straight after a life of excess. But this was also his own response to the complexity and violence of the world that fashion is struggling to place itself in. The key, he insisted, was balance.”

Read More: Clash of Fashion’s New Titans

3. Junya Watanabe

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“Junya Watanabe’s new collection was a stupendous couture evolution of last season’s witty ready-to-wear readymades. Whereas that one wrapped relatively simple shapes in clever tangles of shoes and straw hats and cutlery, this latest outing artfully assembled entire looks from the detritus of late-stage capitalism, a much more imposing proposition, worthy of the title Junya gave it: The Art of Assemblage Couture.”

Read More: Man Meets Machine, Craft Meets Computer

4. Issey Miyake

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“People would once have called this high tech, soft touch. It’s a world that Issey Miyake moved through for decades. There has never been another designer who managed such a combination of human hand and technical innovation, but Satoshi Kondo, artistic director since 2019 (Issey died in 2022) comes close.”

Read More: Man Meets Machine, Craft Meets Computer

5. Givenchy

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“So far, so noir. Then came the second look, a simple black velvet sheath slashed high on the thigh, the model sporting what looked like a wimple, except that it was actually hatter Stephen Jones’s suggestion of a holidaymaker’s ordinary cotton T-shirt worn on the head to keep the sun at bay. It was a recurrent motif throughout the collection, and its incongruent connection of the casual everyday to the casually glamorous, combined in a strikingly cinematic way, felt like Sarah Burton finding her way to her own Givenchy signature.”

Read More: Givenchy’s Defiant Beauty

6. The Row

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“The Olsens’ vocabulary is consistent in its ultra-luxe reductionism, but there’s evolution: This outing, for instance, felt a little prissy and a little uptight, despite lines that followed the body gracefully and a touch of nighttime sparkle.”

Read More: Paris Day Three: Variables and Constants

7. Prada

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“At Prada, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons opted for concision, repetition and an easy but effective trick which looked brainy and perfectly on point within the world of Prada — context is everything, darling — but elsewhere would have been just bah! The show, in fact, was an act of undressing, a peeling away, a shedding of layers after layers, from extremely covered to barely there, and consisted of just fifteen outfits which passed four times along the runway, each one with something taken away.”

Read More: Milan Day Three: Who Do You Think You Are?

8. Erdem

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“Erdem Moralıoğlu has always been obsessive about the forensic-level research he does for his collections. For his 20th anniversary show at Tate Britain, he cannily steered clear of a traditional retrospective, instead taking inspiration from imagined conversations between muses of his past collections, from Maria Callas and ‘Debo’ the Duchess of Devonshire to botanist Marianne North and cross-dressing poet Radcliffe Hall — many of them figures of both establishment and transgression, who get at the balance Moralıoğlu’s work has so deftly struck over the last two decades. And in splicing up his past, Erdem let threads flail and left many edges raw, making for one of his freest outings ever.”

Read More: Unearthing the New at London Fashion Week

9. Dior

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“Dior filled the massive Grand Bassin Octogonal with water, floated it with artificial water lilies (Monet’s ‘originals’ being mere feet away in the Orangerie gallery) and bridged it so that Anderson’s models could parade through a spectacularly sunny spring day in a contemporary version of the fashion finery that Louis XIV mandated as the habit décent, the acceptable dress code, when the gardens were first opened to the public in 1667. It was the kind of elaborate, breathtaking visual conceit that only fashion’s deepest pockets could pull off. Resistance was pretty much futile.”

Read More: Paris Day Two: Monument Men

10. Jil Sander

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“At Jil Sander, after a rather clinical, palate-cleansing first outing six months ago, Simone Bellotti felt more daring, and delivered the goods, exploring ideas of contradiction, excess, tension and eroticism in a rather unsettling, Fassbinder kind of way. In other words, he embraced moreness, without forsaking lessness, and that created an electrifying, angular frisson.”

Read More: Milan Day Two: A Big Debut and a Second Coming

Special Mention: Gucci

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“The Gucci show felt like Demna’s own meditation on the equation of beauty, sex and lethality: The voracious women with their lacquered lips, leggings and crop tops; the hulking himbos; the sparkling barefooted innocents. ... He practically has a PhD in fashion sociology. His 83 looks included the Lollobrigida lookalikes and Muscle Marys, shuffling pigeon-tested street kids and pneumatic glamazons, silken-suited lounge lizards, a goth-y courier in motocross leathers and a Gina Gershon-wannabe in a flaring fur dress, a ballet dancer fresh from performing in an all-male ‘Swan Lake’ and Karlie Kloss in her husband’s suit jacket thrown over a black knit and a little logo skirt, rapper Nettspend in silver python pants and lilac animalier top, Alex Consani in a glittering gold, floor-sweeping second skin. Venus emerged in a draped white dress with a deep scooped back. Adonis was swathed in a draped white T-shirt. The integration of supermodels and skaters, salon and street, his own particular pantheon of gods and goddesses, is a Demna theme.”

Read More: Let’s Get Physical: Getting to Grips with Demna’s New Gucci