A Suggested Reading List Sparked by the Recent Couture Shows

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Fashion shows are ephemeral — 12 or so minutes of lavish fantasy and then, poof! Over and done. So, too, is a couture season, which, unlike its month-long ready-to-wear counterpart, unfolds over the course of a concise four or five days. Yet the creative impact of these runways lingers. Acquiring a tangible sartorial reminder of one’s favorite couture show of the season is a goal unattainable for all but the most financially blessed. But bookish haute appreciators can lengthen the high of a great couture turn with a library card and some quiet time.

To help those who live a couture life only in their dreams, WWD Weekend devised a reading list inspired by the spring 2025 couture shows — with honorable mentions from Manhattan and Paris men’s week.

(Look 21)

Chanel

As a species, we crave resolution. A cliffhanger is all well and good, but we ultimately want to find out what happens. Still, sometimes, the anticipatory period provides ample intrigue — or angst — of its own. Those “what happens next” tingles have been emanating from the Rue Cambon for some time, as the fashion world awaits the beginning of the Matthieu Blazy era at Chanel. For spring, on the clothing level, the brand’s design team made the most of the interregnum with charming reworkings of recognizable house codes. Meanwhile, on the meta level, the wait for Blazy continues.

The book: Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” presents a heel-cooling period far darker and more absurd than the time lag before Blazy’s arrival. But it makes for a good literary complement for those who appreciate that, whether in modernist theater or in fashion, sometimes the wait itself is plenty captivating.

(Look 37)

Valentino

A vaunted institution seeking a new leader. A dramatic mise-en-scène suggesting both religious pomp and psychological chess match. Rome. Alessandro Michele’s first couture turn for Valentino ticked every box on this checklist.

The book: Ticking the same boxes: Robert Harris’ papal potboiler “Conclave.” Michele’s cinematic staging might be more of a visual callback to the novel’s unexpectedly viral best-picture nominee adaptation. Still, Harris’s original tome provides plenty of twisty high melodrama within the potent narrative of what happens when a major institution (whether the Catholic Church or Maison Valentino) finds itself in need of a bold new direction. On the runway, there were ample demonstrations of what one might call ecclesiastical chic, with form-fitting bodices that extended into wide, robe-like silhouettes. And what is Valentino’s signature house color if not a vogue on Cardinal Red? Michele worked it with verve, including in one big-sleeved moiré number with a hint of a lace petticoat that would have looked right at home whipping papal votes in St. Peter’s Square.

(Look 1)

Willy Chavarria

One of the January shows’ biggest capital M-moments in Paris came not during couture but in the men’s fall shows. Willy Chavarria took the American Cathedral by storm, bringing with him an array of chicano-inspired clothes and a potent political message. The lineup presented a sartorial demonstration of the designer’s world view — one driven by a genuine spirit of inclusivity. On the soundtrack during his curtain-call: Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s pulpit plea for compassion issued to President Donald Trump a few days prior. The marriage of the political and the religious was dramatic, as singer Dorian Wood opened the proceedings in a striking red gown, setting up a compelling theatrical experience.

The book: See above. Again, drama, politics, Catholic fashion and (spoiler alert) a side of gender play? Move aside, Virginia Woolf. Sit down, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Richard Harris is the fashion world’s new literary touchstone.

(Look 17)

Germanier

Beading and bangles were on full display in Kevin Germanier’s colorful, exuberant spring couture show. Its over-the-top racy glam called to mind one of the 20th century’s great celeb-designer partnerships: Cher and Bob Mackie.

The book: After taking in Germanier’s joie de vivre, why not settle in with “Cher: The Memoir, Part One” for a “from the horse’s mouth” look into the life of the glitz-loving living legend? Of course, a presence as titanic as Cher’s cannot be contained in a single volume. “Part One” culminates with her meeting Sonny Bono, meaning that the Mackie era looms on the horizon. Still, there’s plenty of value in some origin story context for the woman of a thousand headdresses.

(Look 5)

Viktor & Rolf

You know the old saying: The definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Sometimes, though, repetition leads to a brand of madness so deftly rendered that it tips over into something else; it’s a fine line between crazy and genius, after all. Such was the case at Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren’s Viktor & Rolf. Twenty-four iterations of the same basic pieces — beige trench, white shirt, navy pants, narrated in old-school haute French monotone — distorted repetition à la “Groundhog Day,” only with the designers’ cerebral artiness on display.

The book: For those looking for an intellectual take on a time loop, Solvej Balle’s recently released “On the Calculation of Volume” might be the answer. Balle’s seven-volume chronicle of one librarian’s perpetually repeating day puts a heady new spin on the (fittingly) oft-revisited trope of being stuck in an eternal cycle.

(Look 48)

Armani Privé

Giorgio Armani celebrated his couture’s 25th anniversary by exploring a grand elemental presence: light. Titled “Lumières,” the show was all shimmer and sheen, its haute gloss resonating throughout the silver-and-black lineup. After seeing light translated so effectively on the runway, some might walk away with a yen for a deeper understanding.

The book: In “QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter” by Richard Feynman, the author translates his lectures on quantum mechanics into layman-ese that offers just enough quotable physics insight to impress mightily at a cocktail party. Let there be light, indeed.

(Look 2)

Schiaparelli

Daniel Roseberry approached spring 2025 with the attitude that everything old can be new again. His Schiaparelli drew from the 1930s for rare languid moments and, more often, from the hyper-structured 1950s, for ornate constructions and impressively rendered feats of waist-cinching engineering. Still, it had an air of the fresh and the modern — old practices for the new world.

The book: Employing traditional structures to modernist ends? Paging Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose “Collected Sonnets” played in the Petrarchan sandbox while exploring contemporary themes in her sonnets.

(Look 16)

Dior

For her spring 2025 couture for Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri offered a rather uncharacteristically deconstructed vision: panier skirts stripped down to their structural frames; ribbons of tattered tulle; spiny feathered headpieces. The effect was an artful take on a fairytale princess who had a run-in with a set of shears. The show notes made apt reference to the notion of poetic punk.

The book: Dior aficionados moved by Romanticism with a Gothic edge might consider Silvina Ocampo’s “Thus Were Their Faces,” the dark, dreamlike collection of short stories from the celebrated Argentine writer and artist. Creepy, surreal and beautifully rendered, these tales are not for the faint of heart. Still, Jorge Luis Borges called Ocampo “one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language,” while the judges for Argentina’s National Prize for Literature deemed her work “too cruel” to be feted. It doesn’t get more poetic punk than that.

(Look 17)

Jean Paul Gaultier

Ludovic de Saint Sernin, the latest of Gaultier’s line of guest designers, titled his couture turn “Le Naufrage,” or, for those not up on their Duolingo lessons, “Shipwreck.” He delivered on that promise with a side of what he deemed “slutty, but classy.” So, nautical disaster — but make it sexy.

The book: Where better to turn after such sultry seafaring than that sweeping tale of maritime travel gone awry, Homer’s “The Odyssey?” The epic travelog features not one boat wreck but two, and enough sirens and seductive island-dwelling nymphs to scratch the itch for a little naughty stuff.

(Look 29)

Marc Jacobs

Though not part of the Parisian couture calendar, Marc Jacobs showed in New York the Monday before New York Fashion Week, presenting a collection of capital-F Fashion that had an offbeat haute aura of its own. Proportion play and demonstrative, pointy shoes gave the whole affair a rigorous yet madcap effect. In his show notes, Jacobs wrote with emotion about “Courage,” saying that “with precious freedom we dream and imagine without limitation…not to escape from reality but to help navigate, understand and confront it.”

The book: Jacobs worked that notion with a hint of surrealism, so it pairs well with Leonora Carrington’s “The Hearing Trumpet,” the surrealist masterpiece that follows a hearing-impaired 92-year-old woman who finds herself wrapped up in a bonkers adventure that features a self-improvement cult, a cross-dressing medieval abbess and the goddess Venus herself. Eccentric maximalism at its finest — and artistically bravest.