Paris Fashion Week: The Trends of the Autumn/Winter 2021 Collections

The fashion month for the upcoming autumn-winter 2021 season ended this week after four weeks of Fashion Week in New York, London, and Milan with an equally grand finale in Paris.

Despite the pandemic, the Parisian couture brands such as Givenchy, Chanel, or Hermès do not hold off from giving our emaciated souls a touch of elegance and fashionable joie de vivre back to our homes via our screens introducing their ready-to-wear trends to the new world. Just as around the world the designers rely on an exciting mix of beautiful nightlife looks and practical homeware and accordingly align a manifesto of the present on the zeitgeist of currently global happenings.

Like its predecessors, the Paris Fashion Week had to switch to a completely digital format without an audience under the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode.

We not only look back at the highlights and fashion trends of the Paris Fashion Week autumn-winter 2021 but also look forward to the future with designs for the coming season. We look forward to a time when we return to the public eye in these Parisian chic trends.

It was an exciting month full of new trends, sustainable fashion, and fashion as an outlet for political statements. The past weeks full of autumn-winter trends have given us the courage to look optimistically into a future that, despite global challenges, finds new approaches for a time of new freedom and general reorganization, so that our life as we once knew it would eventually be packed again and detached also to be continued retrospectively.

In search of the crème de la crème of Paris Fashion Week, we have summarized the fashionable eye-catchers directly from the catwalks in France's capital for you:

Giambattista Valli:
This season, the Italian fashion designer Giambattista Valli merged his hometown Rome and his adopted home Paris into a collection that literally blossomed with freedom from fashion. Cocktail dresses as an expression of the longing for lavish celebrations and new freedom emerged from the unity of both cultures. The chic French black-and-white ensembles are combined with Italian red and gold. But it was above all the floral embroidery that brought the two cities together in one of the most romantic ways and reflected the glitz and glamor of Italy, while the lightness of the silhouettes felt like Paris. Giambattista Valli transports the Italian flair of self-confident Italian women to Paris, where he dreams of seeing his very light and super-short dresses, but also the little bouclé costumes and trouser suits on the Parisian Grand Dames.

Acne Studios:
Creative Director Jonny Johansson spent the lockdown in his country house in Sweden. There he designed a kind of pastoral escape from reality for Acne Studios AW21. This collection is a dream landscape that begins with soft pastel colors before awakening to monochromatic clarity. The color palette reads like a journey from cool spring days in knitted pastel tones to heavy trench coats, coats, and high-buttoned dresses. Johansson said that he also designs his collections with a view of the future. His somehow strict retrospective view on reality, which emerged towards the end of the collection, was an ode to the contrasts of the white or black clothes that we wear for rituals in our life cycle. Voluminous yet perfectly shaped silhouettes, soft and worn-out fabrics, and contrasting color moments in elegant sophistication reflect the time we currently live in. This collection is a visual evolution that moves from a dream image to an awakened reality.

Jil Sander:
It is the paradigm of minimalism; The brand was developed to sleek, straightforward, bespoke attire often in navy, black, white, and neutral tones. For autumn 2021, however, the designers Lucie and Luke Meier decided to add vibrant prints to the collection. They want their wearers to feel strong and powerful. This season they are integrating graphic patterns within the brand's always puristic framework. A rich yellow in chevron patterns was added to soft purple and beige tones, spreading joy and a good mood. For Jil Sander, knitwear is the most malleable and versatile means of creating this feeling of autumn lightness. From coats and skirts to hand-spun fringed dresses, the duo is excellent preparation for a fashionably very exciting AW21 collection.

Lanvin:
After a year of lockdown and a year of sweatpants, Lanvin Creative Director Bruno Sialelli can't help designing a top-class collection for autumn-winter 2021. This season he asks himself what he and his customers would wear if they were a “rich girl”, as Gwen Stefani sang in the early 2000s. Knowing full well that many of his customers fit into this category, he has lively staged a collection for Lanvin full of evening dresses with feathers, leopard print, pastel colors, jewels, embroidery, and all associated accessories. This collection lets fashion lovers imagine what we will wear in the thunderous 2020s when shopping, parties, and glamor are back in full swing. He had the autumn-winter 2021 collection for Lanvin shown in the fabulous Parisian Shangri-La Hotel in a kind of music video to Gwen Stefani's cult hit and rebelliously ordered a troop of lively young models into the hotel, dressed up with them, and celebrated extensively - a scenario that we cannot make come true again soon enough.

Chloé:
The designers who directed Chloé read like a who's who of fashion icons - Phoebe Philo, Stella McCartney, and Karl Lagerfeld, to name just a few. With the autumn-winter 2021 collection, Gabriela Hearst joins them as the new Chloé-Creative Director and designs a collection completely in the style of Chloé's bourgeois Bohemian, which is far more playful and exciting than the AW21 collection of her own brand.
A range of hand-spun ponchos, found in both the brand's archives and the new designer's Uruguayan heritage, and knitted maxi dresses opened the audience-free show. Trench coats and tailored jackets made of leather and wool stylishly round off this casual approach to daywear.
Nobody should say that you can't comfortably and elegantly wait for better times at home. At least we can't wait to see where that feeling of wanderlust Gabriela Hearst takes next.

Isabel Marant:
We don't have to be fortune tellers to predict the go-to mode of the fashion industry in times of upheaval: crisis creates hope, hope creates escapism and escapism almost always brings us futurism. Isabel Marant in particular emphasizes that these new circumstances give designers more time to explore new approaches and that there is not always just one single trend, but the many different approaches to fashion promote the diversity of this industry. She exemplified her Parisian futurism in an autumn-winter 2021 collection that felt like sci-fi from the 80s. Jackets with high shoulder pads, high waist belts and wrap dresses made of leather and vinyl made your AW21 collection look quite nostalgic in contrast to straight silhouettes. Marant's futuristic folklore and spaceship cowboys allow us to indulge in bygone times of the 20th century, but also foresee a future that is shaped by the combination of digital approaches in production and its presentation.

Hermes:
Hermès may be simple, but by no means minimalistic. It is the typical good taste in elegant silhouettes and the eye for details and tailoring that makes the traditional French house so popular. Leather, wool, silk, and lambskin show that a haptic experience comes first at Hermès. Creative Director Nadège Vanhée-Cybulski presents the autumn-winter 2021 collection for Hermès in a Livestream happening between New York, Paris, and Shanghai; from there, dance performances are alternately streamed digitally, with the highlight of the AW21 collection broadcast from Paris. The palette ranges from neutral colors to bright ruby red, green, and orange tones to prints on cropped jackets. Long-sleeved, high-neck day-to-day dresses, meticulously pleated skirts, and matching sweaters were combined with high boots and leather coats for the upcoming autumn-winter 2021 season.

Christian Dior:
If shows with a large audience are prohibited, the location has to be big. On International Women's Day, the couture fashion house Dior presented its new autumn-winter 2021 collection in no other setting than the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles. Under the title “Disturbing Beauty”, Dior's creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri commissioned the Italian artist Silvia Giambrone to create an installation that would recreate the opulence, myth, and fairy tale of Versailles' ephemeral beauty. She placed waxed sculptures with spikes in front of the royal mirrors to stylishly hide the reflection of the models. There, alongside Dior's models, actors choreographed by Sharon Eyal conducted passionate dialogues with the concealed mirrors. The inspiration for this creative approach was the dangerously seductive sacrifice of characters from fairy tales that revolve only around their appearance - Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, and Sleeping Beauty. In a gloomy, ominous atmosphere, Dior had the AW21 designs with motifs from an innocent childhood such as white collars and English embroidery in contrast to anything but lovely blood-red tulle dresses of unhappy princesses stroll through the long corridors of the castle. Maria Grazia Chiuri's autumn-winter 2021 collection for Dior is a thought-provoking example of our relationship with beauty, excess, and our own image.

Givenchy:
What exactly our life will look like in the second half of the year is currently unclear even for fashion designers. Can we finally get our beloved fashion treasures out of the closet again or do we still have to wait in homewear at home for the lockdown to end? Givenchy Creative Director Matthew Williams is prepared for both cases and designed an autumn-winter 2021 collection of distinctive looks of highly decorated tube dresses and swimsuits that are just waiting to be worn outside, as well as short-cut puff jackets and XXL fake fur coats created for those who just want to keep them warm during lockdown walks.
Graphic silhouettes through an interplay of voluminous jackets and coats in a straight cut reinforce this collision of these two worlds in particular. Contrary to a time of social distancing, the focus was therefore on hyper-tactile fabric textures and picturesque sculptural accessories, which should set off the desire for the digital consumer to absolutely have to hold the collection in their hands. The AW21 collection is a true sci-fi inferno, which with a lockdown-owed outdoor touch and exaggerated permissiveness draws our attention to an eloquent contrast of hard and soft in a very modern Paris.

Dries van Noten:
Belgian designer Dries Van Noten proves how creative you can be with our new clothing and purchasing behavior.
For Dries Van Noten 47 dancers and models gathered on the stage of the DeSingel Theater in Antwerp. His autumn-winter 2021 collection, shown in elaborate but moody pictures and a fashion clip, studies the full range of human emotions from happiness to anger, confusion, logic, and euphoria. The drama, exaggeration, discreet and shyness of people are synchronized with that. The collection is thus the fashionable processing of long pent-up anger, frustration, confusion, longing, and separation, which are now danced off in subcultural diversity on a dark stage in Antwerp. There is so much emotion in these pictures and clothes that the collection seems to float on a borderline between Vaudevillian glamor and Belgian underground clubs. Lively, color-blocky looks meet glittering dresses with marabou trim and exquisite old-school tailoring. Dries Van Noten designs clothes for autumn-winter 2021 for a life that expresses human emotions to just float in our world.