Paris Fashion Week prepares for Balmain fashion festival

PARIS (AP) — Paris Fashion Week roared into full gear Wednesday with shows by many fashion houses and strong anticipation of Balmain’s evening fashion festival spectacular — a star-studded charity concert featuring the latest fashions, members of the public and secret celebrity performances.

Here are some highlights of spring-summer 2023 shows.

COURREGES

For Courreges, a circular sandy runway featured a falling column of sand at its center evoking the sands of time — or the movie “Dune.” Off-kilter and slightly unnerving musical cadences in the soundtrack endowed the show with a sanitized, pared-down spirit.

Courreges has become a brand that touts a signature mood over a signature style, and designer Nicolas Di Felice likes to inject his fashion with atmosphere.

The spring-summer fashions began with a play of the crisp white shirt, with a voluminous shirt dress carrying the simple and sporty vibe well. Models sometimes had bare feet or nude footwear. Di Felice used the runway to bring fashion forward twists — snipaways, toggles, sheeny space materials and deconstruction — on everyday items such as a denim jacket, denim skirt or flared pants. A sporty vest, for example, was given a kinky twist with its sheer materials.

It’s an approach that works well with this generation-defining brand founded in 1961 by André Courrèges and his wife Coqueline, that became synonymous with the Space Age aesthetic.

THE ART OF THE INVITATION

The age of email and rising environmental awareness doesn’t seem to have left much of a mark on the fashion industry’s antiquated system of invitations.

Season after season, gasoline-guzzling couriers crisscross Paris to personally deliver ever-more-elaborate, often handmade, show invites.

Top houses vie for the wackiest or most imaginative idea that often bears a clue as to the theme of the runway collection.

For Loewe’s invitation, a bright red tropical flower came through the post that the floral dictionary identifed as an anthurium. To keep the flower alive for the duration of Fashion Week, the bottom of the bloom’s stem was attached to a state-of-the-art humidity capsule.

Saint Laurent’s invite, meanwhile, was a chic black patent leather wallet with a metallic “YSL” on top, with the show card hidden inside.