With Paris Fashion Week scheduled to end this Tuesday, the presentation of the 2022 season of European fashion capitals will soon come to a close. It’s been more than a year since such jam-packed weeks of events and shows – Milan was also the backdrop of Design Week a few weeks ago. Between the return at last of live catwalks, and streaming events, brands have shown that they are taking up the baggage of experience of the previous few months, some interpreting the ritual of the catwalk in new ways, others avoiding it altogether as a communicative expedient. We present here a selection of the six events to remember from the Women’s Spring/Summer 2022 collections.

For the women’s collection, the well-established collaboration of the Prada/Simons duo brings the suave seduction characteristic of the brand back to centre stage, through a process of spoliation that inevitably leads to the emphasis on the body. The corset, the lace, the evening dress, the fashion show traces typical elements of traditional femininity but reducing them to the essential: a process of spoliation that frees the body – admirable, for example, in the evening skirt transformed into a miniskirt with a memory of a train. For the show, the first in presence after an extended period, the fashion house has reused part of the virtual experience acquired over the last year, combining in a single event two simultaneous catwalks presented in the Deposito space of the Fondazione Prada in Milan and in the Bund One in Shanghai. Thanks to the space set up as usual by AMO, the two environments echoed each other, where video screens were a dialogue between the two shows, an exchange between physical and virtual reality.

For the latest show, Moncler Genius offered an immersive digital event shot in five cities – Milan, Shanghai, Tokyo, Seoul, New York – featuring innovative collections from 11 brands, including JW Anderson, Palm Angels and Hyke. In Milan, guests watched Mondogenius from a movie studio as host Alicia Keys appeared IRL, interacting with Shanghai host Victoria Song across a vast screen and introducing the various collections one by one. In this way, the event gives credence to a new global, digital and diverse perspective, a place to generate new conversations, exchange ideas, and give voice to multiple creative expressions. Among the different universes explored, Milan was represented by the brand’s collaboration with Northern Irish designer JW Anderson – a collection presented by a short film shot by Luca Guadagnino – while live from New York, viewers were taken on a journey through the show of recording and visual artist Solange Knowles.

For the runway show, young Milanese brand Sunnei collaborated with interdisciplinary studio 2050+, founded by former OMA partner Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli in 2020. Entering the 7,000 sqm warehouse, guests were invited to take a cotton bag containing the flagship accessory of the whole show: Prototipo 3, sunglasses that are worn thanks to an elastic strap to be fixed around the head. The catwalk was conceived as an ethereal white tunnel, where the models walked in an alienating and totalizing light experience. Pulsating soundtrack and bright white light, this is how the event starts as the models walked in colourful and experimental designs: 3D knitwear and bold stripes, voluminous silhouettes and heavy tasselled accessories. The quality of the experience is accentuated by a strobe light, pulsing in sync with the beats of an electronic soundscape. Their combined effects produce a glitch that distorts the space, interfering with its light and sound configurations.

The Dior spring/summer collection is presented on a three-dimensional stage, a playful, pop and hypnotic setting for which Maria Grazia Chiusi looked to and quoted Italian artist Anna Paparatti, whose colourful works from the 1960s resemble board games, an allusion to the absurdities of life. Specifically, reference is made to work Il Gioco del Nonsense (1964), an oval board ringed with coloured numbers set against a geometric, kaleidoscopic backdrop. The catwalk deconstructs into circles of modules placed at different heights, at the centre of which the new Italian singer-songwriter project Il Quadro di Troisi - formed by producer Donato Dozzy and Eva Geist - provides the refined soundtrack. Here, Chiuri approaches the lines of the early 1960s to sketch the shapes of change and chart a new lexicon in our pandemic-ravaged society. Silhouettes reveal cuts and graphic effects transposed in yellow, green, red, blue, orange and raspberry, as a colour block revisits Marc Bohan’s aesthetic.

The Spanish fashion house, already the creator of the recent virtual collection of skins for Fortnite, was amazed again by twisting the rule book in terms of runway convention, rolling between the worlds of fashion, television and technology. Guests at the show, comfortably seated in the Théâtre du Châtelet, watched as models and people from the entertainment industry - journalists, buyers or celebrities including Isabelle Huppert, Jeungen Teller and Eliot Page - were projected onto the screen as they wore the collection’s new pieces. The fashion house then treated the audience to a screening of a Balenciaga-centric episode of The Simpsons. Its stars moved from Springfield to Paris and sporting the brand’s idiosyncratic pieces on the runway. Balenciaga is no longer definable as simply a fashion male, but an entertainment machine, physical and digital.

The Spanish fashion house, already the creator of the recent virtual collection of skins for Fortnite, was amazed again by twisting the rule book in terms of runway convention, rolling between the worlds of fashion, television and technology. Guests at the show, comfortably seated in the Théâtre du Châtelet, watched as models and people from the entertainment industry – journalists, buyers or celebrities including Isabelle Huppert, Jeungen Teller and Eliot Page – were projected onto the screen as they wore the collection’s new pieces. The fashion house then treated the audience to a screening of a Balenciaga-centric episode of The Simpsons. Its stars moved from Springfield to Paris and sporting the brand’s idiosyncratic pieces on the runway. Balenciaga is no longer definable as simply a fashion male, but an entertainment machine, physical and digital.