Paris went wild on Saturday night as more than 1.5 million people crowded the city's streets for the annual all-night cultural festival "La Nuit Blanche" (sleepless night) with France's dramatic and unexpected rugby World Cup win over the All Blacks adding to the revelry.
Cafes and galleries remained open and bowls of fire lit up the leafy avenues and lakes of the Tuileries Gardens while the sound of ecstatic cheering and blaring car horns amplified the charged atmosphere.
Fashion week ended on a similarly jubilant note with John Galliano sending out an outstanding collection in the Stade de France on a funfair set evoking Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens complete with carousel and Chinese lanterns. Round and round romped the models like saucy seaside belles in one divine dress after another, primping and posing in floppy hats, outrageous polka dot bows or helmets of hammered silver.
Such madcap frivolity didn't disguise the sexiest and most elegant black suits of the season, their waists studded with jet, frothy dresses in sublime sunshine colours, jackets of multicoloured bugle beads and capes chunky with rosettes or silver discs. From start to finish, it was a wow of a collection, feminine, womanly and full of joie de vivre. Spangled hair, shining necklaces and kiss curls added to the flirtatious springtime mood. "It was Galliano at his best," milliner Stephen Jones told The Irish Times backstage.
Alexander McQueen's show also had extraordinary force and fire. Extreme glamour was the theme of his collection called La Dame Bleue (the Blue Woman) after a mythical birdwoman who bewitched Louis XV out hunting then vanished leaving behind only feathers and rose petals.
Dedicated to the late style icon Isabella Blow, its transition from severe, radical tailoring to feral feathered dresses and reptilian skin shifts seemed to capture fashion's untamed, darker spirit.
Dresses billowed in the radiant colours of exotic plumage or had shoulders hugged with gilded wings. Sometimes the models looked trapped in dresses of metallic mesh, in bodysuits outlined in skeletal black PVC or in imprisoning grids of silver.
At Hermes, Jean Paul Gaultier galloped off with a classy collection recalling the Indian Raj, all riding boots, smart Nehru jackets, snakeskin jodhpurs and khaki turbans. It was executed with finesse and authority, from thoroughbred cutaway coats to coloured dresses of jade, purple and saffron edged with silver brocade in an elegant new take on the traditional salwar kameez.
The Indian summer was a reality yesterday in Paris as temperatures soared and thousands sunbathed ending a week of triumph for both fashion and sport, for both the dame and the boys in blue. Incroyable.
