As Andreas Kronthaler put it pre-show, his spring-summer 2024 Vivienne Westwood collection was a synthesis derived from his contemplation of his late wife’s own clothes. Some months ago, he faced the emotional task of packing up her personal wardrobe. “There were maybe 250 looks’ worth, something like that, and as I did it I knew this was going to be the collection,” he said. He decided to go for around 40 looks, which he says he chose from the 250 and arbitrarily ordered for this show by picking the numbers of those he’d archived out of a hat. Whether it was via serendipity or the magical emotional personal lay lines that most-loved and lived-in garments sometimes acquire, his first pick was the number of a brown micro-corduroy suit from 2004 that Westwood had worn day to day for nearly two decades, sometimes patching along the way. Here it was reimagined in a pale berry tone and looked easily the most interesting piece of womenswear tailoring of this Paris season so far: its harmonically incongruous “mistakes” were as wonderful to watch as it looked comfortable to wear. Kronthaler’s loving but also clear-eyed curation of these looks generated a collection that appeared not fleetingly radical, but timelessly so. The linen cape in look six was a reworked version of one Westwood wore when riding in a tank to the house of a disastrous British prime minister to park it on his lawn in protest back in 2015. The penultimate dress, based originally on a Velázquez painting she adored, was worn to an opera in Salzburg: “Some of the things she had worn only once, you know,” said Kronthaler. Westwood’s erudite, curious, and activist intellectual identity added up to a mindset no big bucks creative agency could ever fashion. She was also a woman designing for women (although there was a smattering of men’s looks here). This was a wonderful survey of a design dialect unlike any other.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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