At Dior, Lanvin and Rick Owens: The Power Woman in Winter'

PARIS — For a while there it looked as if the hair was going to overshadow the clothes.

Kim Kardashian’s hair, that is. When she appeared in Paris newly platinum blonde, it broke the front row (and all the rows after). What was on the runway hasn’t yet been quite enough to sustain conversation.

Until Alber Elbaz of Lanvin saw her new look and raised her one.

Going back to his beginnings (on Friday a show dedicated to Jeanne Lanvin was opening at the Palais Galliera, and he had retrospectives on the mind), i.e., his childhood in Morocco, he mixed riding trousers, striped up the side, big tassels flying out at the waist, with squared-off cropped jackets and flat knee-high leather boots, the tassels reappearing on the belts of wrap-around coats or re-imagined as the fringe of a traditional tribal wedding rug on a skirt.

Flowing dresses were shielded over one shoulder by a leather harness that snaked down and around the waist; chunky Mongolian lamb coats and vests covered glittering peasant-print dresses and jumpsuits; and there were rough Berber stripes under glossy ponyskin. In the end, it all came together in velvet: glossy, distressed, rose-embellished, rich. Many of these elements have walked Mr. Elbaz’s runway before, but this felt less like a rerun of greatest hits than a learning from history. The roots may have been nomadic, but the contemporary equivalent is globe-trotting executive.

Drive down the streets of Paris and Angela Merkel’s face stares out from myriad billboards on the cover of French Vanity Fair. Open a newspaper, and there is Hillary Clinton, presumed Democratic frontrunner for president of the United States, or Christine Lagarde, managing director of the I.M.F., discussing the European economy. The power woman is on the rise — it’s International Women’s Day, after all, on Sunday — but it has been a while since a designer proposed a way for her to dress that didn’t feel like a pantsuit cliché. Mr. Elbaz went some way toward rectifying the situation. Instead of armor, he offered the security of lavish functionality.

It’s one way to think about the situation, anyway; a different, more pointed approach came from Rick Owens. In a collection composed of squares and rectangles draped back-to-front, so jackets swaddled the torso and met in rippling folds at the spine, and skirts dropped past the calves only to rise to the thighs from behind, he used industrial shades and building blocks to spark questions of reversal, and what happens when the traditional way of doing something is turned around.

The answer, at least in his hands: surprising beauty, whether in the shape of a quilted backwards puffa, the front jutting out like the stern of a ship, or a jacket embellished by the Mayan-inspired architecture of a symbolic backbone. Twists and turns came fur-fringed or glinting with a river of gold sequins, like the royal robes of a space invader whose ship crashed in the desert long ago. Now she was up, and ready to rule.

Dressing for leadership is a science, a truth that Jonathan Anderson took to heart in his second collection for Loewe, where a little of this (relaxed trousers with cargo pockets in houndstooth, tweed, lamé), and a little of that (nappa leather bombers jackets with cowl necks and broad, rounded shoulders), plus a dab of sparkle (pleated gold and silver dresses grounded by the same trousers) and layers of knits "engineered" into pleats, added up to a more potent identity for the brand — especially if you take away some of the lab-coat-like pastel leathers.

There’s lots of talk these days about girls and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), the lack of the former in the latter, and Mr. Anderson is doing his part to close the gap.

Not that sartorial experimentation need be limited to the mathematical: Hussein Chalayan took as a starting point Agatha Christie’s "Murder on the Orient Express" and then abstracted it into faux-fur cold-shoulder coats and perfectly cut cashmere (the men’s wear tailored trouser fast becoming a trend of the season); mechanic leather overalls and blouson jackets in woven alpine peaks and pines; black slipdresses embroidered with just the hint of a female profile; and metallic evening gowns partially veiled by an integral curtain on top.

Begin with a strong female image, and who knows where you will end up?

For Raf Simons at Christian Dior, in "the terrain of the ‘femme animal"’ — which is to say, an altogether tougher, less-familiar sartorial space than any he had previously explored for the house that dove gray built.

Instead of flowers, Mr. Simons gave us abandoned landscapes of knit jacquard dresses, long and short; Canadian fox mini-frocks and feral coats pieced together like the earth as seen from above; and earthquake-aftermath bodysuits under sliced apron pinafores. Someone had got their claws in.

Maybe a bit too much in the case of the latter looks, but the point was made. Patent leather was cross-hatched into futuristic stretch pencil skirts and sleeveless tunic tops; men’s wear tweeds cut into cropped boy pants and matching jackets or oversize Crombie coats; crisp white shirtdresses paired with car-wash tweed skirts, cut to show what lay beneath. It’s a "new kind of camouflage," said Mr. Simons, and as such it acknowledged a new kind of urban general. Cross her at your own risk, but admire her as she goes.

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