BULLETT

I’m not even going to pretend to play it cool. I love Paris Fashion Week. Love love love. PFW, for me, is jouissance; host to those shows that make me grin and flush from that fluttering feeling that feels like love and that reaffirms my claimed love for fashion. Paris is where we get those looks that illuminate the spin and make the eye greedy and all that ineffable stuff that I’m supposed to write about now.

Gareth Pugh
A Shaded View on Fashion! This is serious goth, Matrix Revolutions, Underworld cosplay fashion. Scary and nerdy, with veils like Magritte’s haunted The Kiss and a palette worthy of Jennifer Lopez in The Cell. When I hear whines of fashion types being exclusive like the cool kids in high school, I will show those whiners this fantasy collection and the adorable, sleeve fumbling designer Pugh emerging at the end, and they will understand—Yves Saint Laurent, Isabella Blow, Alexander McQueen, Hamish Bowles, Tavi Gevinson, Gareth Pugh—the great ones are the freaks and geeks.

Dries Van Noten
First, I want to note that every time I read something on Style.com that is so on that I’m called to check the byline, it’s by Tim Blanks. Looking at Dries Van Noten for Spring 2013—here’s a collection I could not stop grinning at, as if I were a four-year-old boy trying to flirt—the two words that looped through my head were “grunge luxe grunge luxe grunge luxe.” Dumb words for something so beautiful, but lucky for me Tim Blanks saw it too: “One of grunge’s most indelible images is Kurt Cobain in a floral dress thrashing paroxysmally at his guitar. On the surface, it’s incongruous that such a vision should insinuate itself into the exquisite collection Dries Van Noten showed today…” Read on, Macduff.

Damir Doma
Thank you to Damir Doma for leaving the “ethnic bohemia” accoutrements of recent seasons behind and polishing your signature silhouette with such vivid hues. This is true blue, Damir.

Rochas
Rochas’s Marco Zanini designed a pretty, playful, very feminine Spring collection that, while vintage from an era of uncomfortable undergarments and Betty Draper etiquette, didn’t feel the least bit oppressive. Maybe it was the idiosyncratic footwear and ribcage midriffs. Or the blasé pouts of the reddest model mouths. Whatever it was, it was fun.