Count Tsumori Chisato among the few designers today who give their imagination complete free rein. Because she brings a sketchbook with her everywhere, her spontaneous drawings invariably materialize into designs. But in order to assemble the clothes into a collection, she constructs a narrative that's often cohesive to her alone.

For Spring, her muse idled through the Japanese countryside, got dolled up in Europe, flirted with dragonflies, and ultimately settled on the moon—all while rarely stopping to remove her conical hat. Chisato wrestles with—and mostly gets the upper hand on—personalizing traditional Japanese garments by imposing her doodles and madcap fabric blocking. By now, those have become her codes. But she also charted new territory with materials that registered as more artisanal: crocheted raffia, cotton treated to resemble Japanese washi paper, and white organza that had been manipulated to mimic lace. While Chisato can make you smile with an illustration that shows lipstick on a shark, she can also make you dream about a summer spent exclusively in her all-white grouping.

She could have stopped there, or milked that message with a few extra variations. Yet Chisato would rather express the widest range of ideas than self-edit, so she also showed relaxed sportswear, printed swimsuits, and ladylike dresses. The collection was far bigger than it needed to be: fifty-four looks in total. But Chisato defended this by saying she simply likes to make things. She even seemed surprised to be asked about the number of looks. And how, in fairness, can you tell a designer to dial down her creativity?

BRAND: TSUMORI CHISATO  |  TSUMORI CHISATO OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Stella McCartney has a lock on stylish-but-not-slavishly-fashionable clothes that work for busy women. A quick glance around the audience at the Opéra Garnier and you saw countless pieces from recent collections. Over here, the washed-out plaids and pinstripes from Fall, over there a dark cape with the scrolling white embroideries of a year before that. Today's show put an emphasis on understatement; it was right there in her program notes—"an accent on understated seduction," it read—which made the front-row hits of the future harder to pick out than usual. With the installment of Raf Simons at Dior, there was talk of a new minimalism in fashion, but the Belgian has somewhat confounded expectations since his appointment. McCartney, on the other hand, is still feeling its pull for Spring, which made this quiet collection feel somewhat out of step with other things that are happening in Paris at the moment.

Even so, McCartney did have some worthwhile things to say about suiting and slipdress-ing, two areas where she's been strong since the beginning. Alongside the slouchy, almost unconstructed silk men's jackets and trousers that have become a signature, she proposed a popover top and high-waisted, full-through-the-thigh pants in a dense knit that keyed into her sporty Adidas affiliations. In monochrome black or rosy nude, they'll do the pulled-together work of a suit. On billowy dresses, meanwhile, she played sheer against opaque, slicing them horizontally below the hips and threading them back together with basting stitches. See-through skirts have become a thing this season, but McCartney's interpretation looked fresh and new. She wrapped things up with delicate summer dresses; their patchworks of lace will grab eyeballs in stores. Still, this show felt like a bit of a letdown. McCartney's loyal customers expect more.

BRAND: STELLA MCCARTNEY  |  STELLA MCCARTNEY OFFICIAL WEBSITE

The chairs at Chitose Abe's Sacai show are arranged not in rows, but in circles, and she has the models do figure eights up the runway. This season that was more vital than usual. Abe has infused her clothes, which have always had a 360-degree appeal (from the front they look like one thing, from the back another), with new couture volumes for Spring. She opened with a sack-back dress, its excess fabric reined in by a ribbed sweatshirt band. To follow, there was a skirt-and-top look, the latter of which jutted out from the upper back so exuberantly, it was as if the model was keeping a knapsack under there. Nothing stuffy about either piece, though, despite the old-world connotations of haute couture. That has to do with the modern way Abe constructed the collection's sack-back silhouettes, cocoon coats, and trapeze dresses out of sporty fabrics. The unexpected mix is the essence of Abe's aesthetic; what we saw here was trademark Sacai, only supercharged. Previously she's preferred tonal shades, but today she turned up the brights: sky blue, emerald green, highlighter pink, and an electric coral that looked good with neon orange. The floral print that she used for a trompe l'oeil dress and gown (they looked like duchesse satin sweatshirt and chiffon skirt combos) was another surprise. But where Abe got really creative was with the show's menswear materials. True, they're more of a common sight at Sacai, but not the way the designer treated them this season. A Prince of Wales check that she bonded and laser-cut to resemble athletic mesh appeared as the sleeves of a baseball-jersey sweater that looked as if it was layered over a suit jacket and skirt in that check. It was a mash-up of a mash-up of a mash-up. But let's not overthink things: What it was was one hell of a clever dress, in one hell of a clever collection.

BRAND: SACAI  |  SACAI OFFICIAL WEBSITE

The lounge chair and ottoman designed by Charles and Ray Eames in the 1950s are just about as iconic as pieces of furniture can be. They’ve been an inspiration for generations of creative minds. There they sat, for instance, in Neil Barrett’s showroom today as a reminder of where his latest collection started out. “California Minimalism,” he called it, but just as the Eames chair has a luxurious edge to its functional form, Barrett’s strong, pared-down sportswear was almost extravagant in its intense detailing. A sweatshirt cut from ponyskin doesn’t immediately murmur “spring,” but Barrett aerated his with a million tiny perforations, cooling it down. Aeration also lightened the sweatshirt collages of leather, neoprene, and mesh, which he shaped in curving patterns based on the Eameses’ ergonomic lines. There was lightness, too, in the feathers—real and printed—that were the collection’s visual motif.

The sweatshirt, the skating skirt, the bicycle short: They were the collection’s athletic building blocks. White, black, scarlet, gray marl: The color scheme was equally straightforward. The interest came from Barrett’s attention to texture, the way that wood-grain-printed leather contoured the line of a jacket or the length of a leg, or bonded ribbing added spring to the flare of a skirt. Barrett used real wood in the striking accessories, screwing a substantial wooden heel into the base of a shoe, and molding the bottom of a bag in the same way that the Eameses’ lounge chair was shaped by molded plywood.

BRAND: NEIL BARRETT  |  NEIL BARRETT OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Like the tiger sweatshirts before them, Kenzo's eye prints from Fall are everywhere you look. Now that Carol Lim and Humberto Leon have seized the style world's attention, they're serving up some fashion activism for Spring. Good for them. Today, they took up the cause of overfishing. As the pair are natives of California, the ocean's troubles hit close to home. Backstage, they rattled off a list of fish—tuna, cod, trout (and there are many more)—that are nearing extinction levels. To do their small part, they've designed a slogan tee, a portion of the proceeds of which will go to the Blue Marine Foundation. "No fish, no nothing," it reads.

Since signing on at Kenzo, Lim and Leon have been fairly reverent of the Kenzo Takada codes, even as they've tweaked them for their social-media-mad young fans. This season was the first time that they've used their personal history as a guide, and it proved a good move. Born mixologists, they wove together sea motifs, surf culture, and references to L.A.'s underground music scene in the new collection. For a venue, they chose Luc Besson's film studio La Cité du Cinéma; as Left Coasters, "the Hollywood of Paris" is a natural fit. And where else but on a movie set could they have created the waterfall that flowed the entire duration of the show, or the drums that sprayed water to the beat of the music?

The collection's melting-fish print stands a very good chance of becoming the Kenzo Eye of Spring '14. Those pieces will get snapped up by the label's acolytes. As usual with Lim and Leon, this show was chock-full of prints, and they weren't without cheek. The scribbled blue waves eventually turned red. If we don't stop overfishing, the color shift seemed to suggest, things won't end well. Activism aside, where Lim and Leon made advances was with the fabrics—not the neoprene, which is a touch predictable by now, but with a glossy tech material that looked like it had been submerged in water and came out glistening. The tailoring was ingenious in its own way, too, with back vents cut into jackets and dresses, as the designers said, to let the breeze in. All around, an enlivening experience.

BRAND: KENZO  |  KENZO OFFICIAL WEBSITE

If one designer can make the most vilified, the most ephemeral, the most transitory of things that are normally passed by (while perhaps being scowled at) into full-blown fashion statements that are desirable, monumental, and skilled (leaving you deeply impressed), it is Junya Watanabe. And he did it again in his show today.

Hippies, crusty ravers, anybody who does not wash their hair, claiming, "It will clean itself," the idea of going to Goa, macramé, home crafts, didgeridoos…and so on. This could be seen as a collection and a show incorporating some of this reviewer's most vilified things. And yet that would only be on the surface; in the hands of Junya Watanabe, such horrors became a font of fantastic inspiration from which much else followed.

Take as a starting point the humble T-shirt tassel—that fringed decoration most beloved in the beach T-shirt trade and by the bored home customizer. Watanabe used it heavily, immaculately, and to extravagant effect. While many have been using tight accordion pleating for architectural experimentation this season, Watanabe used fringing. It started in black T-shirting silhouettes, fringed to long, extravagant proportions, some precisely braided and beautifully draped. By the time those looks turned beige and gray, there was a sense of the oddly ancient and classical to the collection. The hair might have started as that of the crusty raver, with messy small braids piled altogether, but the connotations were turning into something else entirely.

This is when Aphex Twin's song "Digeridoo" launched in with complete insistence. It turns out that Richard D. James (Aphex Twin) is not such a fan of the instrument either, and he labored hard to create a similar drone electronically. If anything is a metaphor for what Junya Watanabe does, it's that. In this collection there was a link between past, present, and future; it was the idea of something changing but forever remaining the same that was defined as "Folklore" by Watanabe.

Now the fringing took on the connotations of the American West, and was simultaneously evocative in the Richard Avedon, Ralph Lauren, and Native American sense. The fringing was joined by delicate, horizontal cascading cuts. Suede, or rather suedette, took the place of buckskin, entirely elegant, especially in one open-backed, floor-length coat-dress. Watanabe's excellent denim once again featured, and it led back to one of the new folklore figures encountered earlier. Here, wearing extravagant pheasant-feather headdresses, Watanabe's new tribe finished, with the music swiftly cut. It was a journey through both the playful and profound.

BRAND: JUNYA WATANABE  |  JUNYA WATANABE OFFICIAL WEBSITE