Paris Fashion Week Plays it Safe

Thanks to the recession, “disciplined good taste” reigned on the Paris runways this week, leading Bloomingdale’s fashion director to dub the season “terrific, from a commercial point of view, but not so much so that it’s safe and boring.” Guy Trebay begs to differ. “If success is measured by distance traveled, then this has been the Paris season that ran the gamut—as Dorothy Parker once famously sniped about Katharine Hepburn's acting range—from A to B,” he writes in the New York Times.

“The clear message to experimentalists, and to the exuberant eccentrics and the creators who rate design on the basis of something more than an uptick in department store sales, was to keep the day job while you wait out the recession,” Trebay continues. “Good taste held everyone in its straitjacketing grip.” Everyone, that is, except the show attendees, who donned “crazy plumage” from sequined yellow sweatshirts to “clogs soled with hardback books or two-by-fours.” (More designer fashion stories.)