PARIS–On a cold morning inside the bright long hallway of the Sorbonne, designer Stefano Pilati sent out a stellar collection for YSL menswear set to a luscious soundtrack by Scanner, with Sam Wagstaff reading an Andy Warhol interview and a few words from Madonna’s Justify My Love.

The backdrop at the entrance of the white marble floor runway was a giant black board with words written, then erased and then rewritten to correspond with the words spoken in the soundtrack.

Perhaps this activity suggested the designer’s own ideas. In his previous men’s collections, Mr. Pilatti had many. Some of them worked and remained; some were discarded and resurrected; and some were simply erased forever.

Long Nguyen is the co-founder and style director of Flaunt.

PARIS–There’s something about the integrity of Mr. Yohji Yamamoto’s work that resists succumbing to seasonal trends. You have to respect designer who follows his own vision despite the warp speed pace of fashion changing around him. It’s more often the case that the fashion world eventually catches up with him–you can see his men’s pantsuits in many of the women’s collections shown here in the last two seasons.

In a small showroom on the Rue Saint Martin, Mr. Yamamoto, as usual, used a range of real people and fashion models–young and old, large and slim sizes –a reflection of the real people who purchase his clothes.

When the show ended, guests exiting one way and models another–some of the dressed-to-the-nines editors (blood red elbow gloves on one and a rabbit hat and blue Mongolian fur on another) seemed more done up then the models. And maybe that has always been the point for the designer who pushes boundaries only with how he cuts the clothes, often using the same fabrics season after season:

PARIS–Three painters were still busy working on a massive mural inside a second floor hall at the Grand Palais when Dries van Noten’s fall men’s collection took to the runway. The artists were commissioned to recreate the colorful work of Dutch artists Gijs Frieling and Job Wouters, and had, in fact, been working for the past 24 hours (their oeuvre can be seen in a time elapsed video can be seen at driesvannoten.com). The painters ignored the models walking behind them and continued working on their canvas wall.

The colorful mural, which also featured quotes from Oscar Wilde, set the tone for a collection that was meant to embody what the designer dubbed ‘psychedelic elegance.’

Long Nguyen is the co-founder and style director of Flaunt.

PARIS–First, a little background, or history lesson–if you will, on Kim Jones‘ Paris-Tokyo inspired collection for Louis Vuitton:

‘Japonisme’ is a French word used to describe the influence of the Japanese art of ukiyo-e (wood block prints, exemplified by the work of artists Utamaro Kitagawa and Katsushika Hokusai during the Meiji Restoration era) on impressionist painters in the 1870’s and later Art Nouveau and Cubist artists including Claude Monet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrac and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Japonisme was neither an attempt to copy a Japanese art style by French and European artists nor was it any sort of merged integration between the East and West. Rather, it was about Western artists using essential elements prevalent in Japanese art–particularly the emphasis on mundane subjects–in their own work which emphasized the ‘everydayness.’ See: Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Père Tanguy or Camille Monet on Garden Bench by Claude Monet.

It was this idea of ‘Japoisme’ that Kim Jones channeled yesterday at the Serre du Parc André Citroën, with the words Paris and Tokyo inscribed in black letters on a giant mirrored globe above the runway.