Highlights from Paris Fashion Week 2022: Men are the new men

Menswear crackled with energy as Paris came to life, with Thom Browne and Hedi Slimane leading the way.

PARIS - The importance of sticking to your guns, metaphorically and creatively speaking, was a takeaway from a booming menswear season in booming, touristy Paris. As apparently everywhere, prices in the French capital have exploded. Hotels at all levels are full, and the cost of a take-out ham-butter sandwich is almost double what it was six months ago.

challenges for menswear designers, unlike multinational corporations that use apparel as a loss leader for selling logo bags, these include starting a new conversation with consumers, reinventing landscape of work and to use the changing ways we interpret gender as a creative tool.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">As for the latter, it's perhaps being the place to note that despite the prevalence of clutches, bags, walls, skirts and various other frilly things, some designers have managed to eliminate traditional feminine associations, men wear this season focused on those who bias the masculine. Dual-gender presentations have largely disappeared from Paris and Milan, or much of the sexual ambiguity that marked pre-pandemic experimentation. Although the genre fluidity is here to stay, it wasn't her moment on the Paris catwalks. At least for now, designers have defaulted to the good old, bad old binary: men, obviously, are the new men.

That was great for designers like Thom Browne and Hedi Slimane, who each waited until three consecutive fashion weeks in Florence, Milan and Paris were over to put on shows that blew the doors off. In the salons of the Automobile Club de France on the second floor of the Hôtel Crillon, the Thom Browne show was something of an affectionate send-off of fusty couture presentations from the "Funny Face" era. The models wore numbered paddles and a group of famous house friends - Marisa Berenson, Farida Khelfa, Amy Fine Collins and others - wobbled stereotypically "late" in heels and hobble skirts.

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They took their seats in the ballroom just in time to ogle a crowd of guys wearing tweed dresses so short it looked like no one had gone commando . There were shortened organza buttonholes; specially woven tweed jackets with a sleeve on the sleeve or cropped to bracelet length; coats with elaborate frogging and conservative flat loafers that, save for the embroidered anchors on the vamp, seemed appropriate for the country club.

Looks from the Thom Browne spring 2023 collection. Credit...Photographs by Dan Lecca Yet , what made the show memorable was a steamy detour into Tom of Finland territory. Namely: codpieces with embroidered Prince of Wales anchor piercings and man's skirts suspended at sagger height and worn over red, white and blue jockstraps that revealed generous plumber views...let's say a cleavage dorsal.