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"OMG IT'S OVER!!!!" you are all thinking. Or maybe you're not because you followed couture week about as closely as you followed live tweets of the cronut line. Sure, you freaked out about the Margiela revelation and pored over the street style and probably saw a jillion tweets about that pregnant bride at Chanel, but you're going to need to talk the talk. Why? Because maybe your girl wants you to take a step away from that think piece you're pitching to xojohn.com ("Me, My Selfie, and I: An Anatomy of Self-Portrait") and make her your think piece for a minute. Herewith, a cheat sheet for all the bros.
Rachel Seville is a writer living in New York who believes in miracles. Read her blog, Pizza Rulez, here and follow her on Twitter here.
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On pandering to fashion:
"People think that I pander to fashion particularly. You know because, people say “why fashion?” It’s not politics, world war it’s not that, it’s fashion, it’s just a jacket or something, it’s just a dress. But I believe that the world can only be saved through design. And I think that the fashion world has.. and when I say through design, I know it’s some snarky classist editor that’s gonna take that and say “Kanye West said that the world will be saved with a couture dress.” That’s not what I’m saying. The mentality behind design, you know art is to be free. Design is to fix."
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Schiaparelli
Marco Zanini was pretty conservative when he showed his inaugural collection as the designer of Schiaparelli's revived line. This time he went suitably bonkers, trotting out all her loony signatures: monkey fur, hats that look like rejected patent models and the designer's signature shocking pink all trotted down a leopard print catwalk. The incredible rat print dress will get misused as Katy Perry's look for next year's VMAs performance, but it's this satin blouse with an explosive pussy bow (it's okay, you can laugh) and hot pink trousers, belted with turquoise crocodile, that suggest funky excess is about to have a high fashion moment again.
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Dior
Raf Simons was basically Eric Bana in The Time Traveler's Wife, bopping from courtly costume to the Belle Époque to the 20s and then also to outer space. We'll probably see Jennifer Lawrence in every one of the corset and pannier dresses that opened the show during awards season, but it's the stunningly baller flight suits that you should keep your eyes on.
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Giambattista Valli
The freshest thing this week, Valli showed a stripy suffusion of eccentrically tailored goods, interlaced with florals that popped off like ceramic arabesques. But the big takeaway was that this was Pajama City. It was practically a sleepover. Not just the stripes—which were candy-striper cool—but the silk shirts with contrast piping. Pajama dressing has, for the past few years, struggled to rise above its rap as the domain of the louche eccentric, but Valli made louche look put together. So this is it, your seal of permission to wear your silky Sleepy Jones to dinner. (Seriously, do that.) And these bow-towel-turban things are going to blow up.
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Chanel
Lagerfeld went vers une Couture and designed a Corbusier-inspired collection. "Lagerfeld has been listening to Kanye!" you yell at your computer monitor. Except, he's not a dick clown who gets all his cultural knowledge from bootleg rants—my apologies to the commentariat—so, sorry to be the one to break it to you, he probably isn't. An expectant model in a bridal look that recalled the Arnolfini Portrait closed the show, proving that the Renaissance was the original age of 16 and Pregnant, and the 'dos nodded to There's Something About Mary's infamous "hair gel" scene.
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Armani Privé
The boss don of the red carpet showed a lot of leg in red and black (as reported by WWD earlier this week, the "new couture customer" is a little ma). A big surprise: The signature sleek was countered with woozy netting, like on this gal, who seems to have anchored her seventh grade science fair project onto her head.
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Ulyana Sergeenko
This star du Tommy Ton is often gently criticized for designing like her client is Euna, the Unsmiling Tsarevna, but this season she appeared to be reading Russian spy novels instead of fairytales.
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Maison Martin Margiela
It's hard to believe there was a coolest thing, but there was absolutely, definitely and positively a coolest thing, and that was a coat designed by Paul Poiret for an Oriental party he gave in 1910, worn over a sheer skirt studded with defunct coins. (Poiret was Chanel's rival, and the superior designer.)
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Vionnet
Dang, Hussein Chalayan would do Madeleine Vionnet proud. The woman who invented bias-cutting and draped her women like babely caryatids would be thrilled with this technical prowess, which had me scrolling like, "But how did he...is this possible? How do you even..." Most impressively, he somehow molded this metallic fabric into a kind of CAD model-like snake, though the twisted furls of satin were pretty divine too.
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Valentino
Valentino was inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites, which means four things: parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. The Pre-Raphs were basically a bunch of softies who rolled around playing the lute and interpreting flowers and traipsing through a never-ending Renaissance fair. There was medieval botanica and William Morris-esque wallpaper prints. Check out the image above. Bae is definitely going to Scarborough Fair.
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Viktor & Rolf
Couture has morphed from an absolute authority on trends and taste to the place where those wild red carpet dresses are born (which is perhaps an even rarer place of pride). Viktor & Rolf trolled couture's stated purpose with a collection of dresses made from red carpet, in perhaps the most provocative, or at least the slyest, show of the week.