Paris Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2010-11

Dior and Lanvin led the Paris ready-to-wear fashion parade on Friday. John Galliano’s collection for Dior followed the pattern set by his haute couture show in January, mixing sharply tailored fitted jackets, jodphurs, lots of leather and thigh-high boots with frilly, flouncy transparent mousseline skirts and dresses for both day and evening.

It was fur and feathers at Lanvin, where models wearing identical long, silky black wigs with square-cut bangs à la chinoise strode down the runway in big-shouldered coats and short, slim dresses set off with African-inspired accessories and the ever-present boots.

Also on the Friday runways, RM by Roland Mouret, Isabel Marant, Rick Owens, Vivienne Westwood and Nina Ricci.

Jean Paul Gaultier and Céline took weekend honors, with Celine’s Phoebe Philo sending out a sharp, strict wardrobe for the superchic executive woman, and Gaultier continuing his couture collection’s eclectic jaunts to foreign lands, mixing ethnic looks from Peru, Morocco, China, Mongolia, Turkey and Greece, sometimes all at once.

—Judy Fayard

From Friday:

Paris Fall/Winter 2010-11 Fashion Week is upon us! One of the first big names to hit the catwalk was Nicolas Ghesquière, with his gorgeous collection for Balenciaga on Thursday. Reviewers commented on the clear inspiration Ghesquière took from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, especially in the illuminated grid of the catwalk itself. Contrast was the name of the game here—traditional Balenciaga lines clashed, in the best of ways, with futuristic prints and textures, perforated wool and packing materials.

Another designer to shine in the whirlwind Thursday was Balmain’s Christophe Decarnin, who paid tribute to the 80s, to the artist Prince and to the color purple, his signature dresses sparkling down the runway. His trademark big shoulders and short hems, along with the added punch of gold-accented belts and a feast of sequins, reaffirmed his strength as a continual crowd-pleaser, with the AP hailing his collection as “worthy of Louis XIV’s Versailles.”

See a full schedule for this Paris Fashion Week at their website.