Goga Ashkenazi is intent on making her rehab of Vionnet stick. She acquired this French heritage brand last year, and anybody who's spent time with her knows she's fabulously determined. Doubtless she'll eventually figure it out, but for every step forward today, she took another step back. On the one hand, Ashkenazi had managed to secure big-name models like Carolyn Murphy and Lily Donaldson; on the other, her catwalk was scattered with high walls that ended up obscuring the audience's view. There were moments when you could hear the photographers hooting in frustration.

More pertinently, let's get to the clothes. Ashkenazi had a clever idea in her men's cotton poplin shirts and shirtdresses, which she wrapped in cages of tulle plissé to give them a Vionnet spin. They looked interesting—crisp without being too businesslike. But what to make of the plissé bodysuits, the practical implications of which are quite limited? Or the men's white jersey T-shirts that she layered underneath draped tulle evening gowns? You could ascribe those to a misguided attempt at raising the label's cool factor. Ashkenazi was better off when she stayed closer to the Vionnet DNA. A pair of elegant asymmetrical evening gowns with draped backs that revealed their cotton jersey linings got at the ease she is aiming to convey here.

BRAND: VIONNET  |  VIONNET OFFICIAL WEBSITE

"I didn't want it to feel too referenced to a period or a theme," Sarah Burton said about the magical collection she showed for Alexander McQueen tonight. True, there was nothing so specific as to anchor the clothes we saw to any one time or place, but the associations flew thick and fast: the golden helmets, harnesses, and armlets of Amazons; ostrich-feathered Zulus; the intricate beaded outfits of tribal priestesses; the kilt-over-trouser combo of the Celtic warrior; the graphic geometries of Mondrian, or Picasso in his African period.…

Lee McQueen always insisted that National Geographic was his first port of call, and that magazine's ethnic grab bag pulsated in Burton's collection, in graphic checkerboard beading, in flurries of ostrich feathers, in crocodile breastplates. It added up to a primal image of strength and empowerment. Burton's twins are eight months old now, and she's ready to get back in the game; there was an overwhelming sense of reconnection in her collection. "Saying something new, saying something personal," was the way she put it. Much of that jelled with things we've been hearing elsewhere. The harness tops and leggings under flaring skirts were timely. Even more so was the notion of female tribalism that has reverberated throughout the season. What differentiated the McQueen take on these ideas was the mind-boggling craftsmanship. Checks? Such a simple little word, until those checks were configured in beads and feathers hand-worked with minute precision.

It was always in the evening looks where a McQueen collection would swing into a fetishistic overdrive of technique. Here? "I didn't want to do 'big' gowns," said Burton. "I wanted energy without froth." So there was a dress that looked like a beautiful lattice of recycled plastic, and another with rings of red feathers reaching skyward, simultaneously a Capucci couture quote and an evocation of tribal dancers. The show notes referenced "found objects," which made it easy to imagine these clothes becoming the subject of cargo cults in the distant future, some tribe-to-come wondering why—and, maybe more important, how.

BRAND: ALEXANDER MCQUEEN  |  ALEXANDER MCQUEEN OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Valentino’s Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli took opera as their source material this season. The micro minidress with beaded lace collar that opened their Fall collection has been replaced by a more worldly and well-traveled fringed cape embroidered with turquoise, coral, and red in a pattern that was hard to pin down. Grecian? Egyptian? From somewhere else in North Africa? All you need to know is that Maria Callas' Medea, from Pasolini's film version of the classic opera, was on the mood board. Chiuri and Piccioli's muse is no longer a girl with a pearl earring. She's a mythological sorceress.

Innocence, then, has been replaced by something not altogether darker for Spring, but certainly more mysterious. It lent a richness to Chiuri and Piccioli's recognizable silhouettes. As they said beforehand: "It's a fashion opera. A show has to be a show." Even as flat sandals adorned with golden scarabs reasserted the realness of the collection, some of the long black lace gowns embellished with brightly colored details looked not all that unlike costumes or indigenous dress—elevated to the hautest levels, of course. It's exactly this sort of stagecraft that has the world's most photographed young women vying to wear Valentino; they were all there today arrayed in the front row. And they'll rush to get the more ornate pieces here: a dress patched together from silvery squares that looked like armor, a monastic romper (interestingly, not an oxymoron chez Valentino) in organza embroidered with tiny strips of leather.

As at their July Couture show, Chiuri and Piccioli savvily balanced the extraordinary workmanship of their evening gowns with not-quite-humble daywear: crisp blue poplin shirts, cropped khaki pants, a suede dress with a fringe-trimmed cape back, and even a pair of jeans—if you can call them that—in dark denim with deep ruffles that began north of the knees. For the non-jet-setters in the audience, the really remarkable thing about these designers is that a rugby-striped cotton coat can cast as potent a spell as a dramatic gown made from the finest filigreed lace.

BRAND: VALENTINO  |  VALENTINO OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Karl Lagerfeld had a great summer: The sun shone, Choupette was happy, creative juices geysered. The concept and the clothes for his new collection came together at the same time. Art! You can scarcely pick up a magazine or newspaper these days without coming across something about the volatility of the art world, the millions that are being spent in the getting of pictures on which the paint is scarcely dry. It's become a huge oligarchical pissing contest, with the annual art fair in Basel, Switzerland, its most competitive arena. And Lagerfeld, antennae attuned to every wrinkle of the here and now, didn't miss a trick with his Chanel/Basel mash-up today. Right there on the soundtrack: Jay-Z's "Picasso Baby," with its accompanying video ripe with images of art-world grandees lining up at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea so they could bask in Hova's glory.

The Grand Palais was transformed into a gigantic white-walled hangar of paintings and sculptures—quintessential Basel or Frieze—all seventy-five of them made by Lagerfeld during his Summer of Prodigious Creativity. He didn't actually make them himself—that feat would be too Olympian even for Karl—but he drew the pieces or made maquettes so his studio could realize the finished product. Just like Jeff Koons. And, as with Koons, Karl's reference points were identifiable, though he cleverly twisted them so they each included some element of Chanel: a camellia, a pearl, a bottle of No. 5. Some of them had red dots beside their titles, like they'd already been sold. Postshow, he wearily insisted he had no intention of doing any such thing; he'd already been asked a thousand times, just like he'd been asked to sign the whole lot.

The coming together of concept and design was clearly responsible for the way Lagerfeld's theme infected his collection to a greater degree than usual. "Transformative!" was Koons' response at Stella McCartney's show the other day when he was asked about the common ground between art and fashion, and the transformations the Chanel atelier achieved with the signature tweeds were nothing short of art. In fact, they weren't even tweed as we know it: They were some indefinable multi-processed hybrid of de- and reconstructed stuff that was then mounted on tulle to create outfits that were identifiable as iconic Chanel. Phew! And you can only imagine Lagerfeld's delight at fooling all of the people all of the time.

Deconstruction, trompe l'oeil, collage, bricolage—this Chanel collection was a fest of art processes. You never get the sense that Lagerfeld is pushing himself; he makes everything look much too easy for that. Nevertheless, in the ninety-ish looks he showed today, there were more stories than he would usually be bothered to tell. For instance, a paint chart from the 1900s yielded a whole group of primally Pantone-ed pieces. They were something quite new for Chanel. There were great things that looked like they'd been scissored from charcoaled canvas—again, in keeping with the theme but intriguingly raw for Chanel. And Lagerfeld's collaborators kept the dream alive with their impeccable contributions. Sam McKnight's wigs were paintbrushes-cum-Darth Vader helmets of hair. Peter Philips' makeup looked like an artist had wiped his brushes on eyelids instead of on clothes or canvas. Macabre maybe, but one more Chanel pointer to the transformative art of fashion at its most far-reaching.

BRAND: CHANEL  |  CHANEL OFFICIAL WEBSITE

This was Maiyet founder Kristy Caylor's big debut after the departure of former designer Gabriella Zanzani. It's been two years since the label began showing in Paris, and tonight's outing—held in a rarely seen inner courtyard of the École des Beaux-Arts—qualified as a moment. The questions on everyone's mind: Can Caylor take Maiyet beyond its artisanal, ethical fashion origins? Can she make it a relevant part of the fashion conversation?

Judging by the white shirtdresses that opened the show, Caylor has a canny sense for what's news. Her shirtdresses, naturally, come with silk embroidery done by hand. Proving do-gooders have a sense of humor, as well as a nose for trends, she stamped a couple of pieces with block print messages. A “No future without forgiveness” miniskirt walked by (that's the name of a Nelson Mandela book, by the way), and a few looks later, out came a dress with the slogan “No goats on the loom.” (That, in case you were curious, is a reference to a problem pet that belongs to one of Maiyet's Varanasi weavers.) The strongest argument for the label's relevance, though, just may be the slipdresses. They're one of the key pieces for Spring '14, and Maiyet had some of the best, chief among them a peach silk version whose embroidery turned out not to be embroidery at all, but a shibori dyeing technique done on a scale that was almost minuscule. It was beautiful. Another slip came in navy blue with an understated stripe of silver embroidery below the bust—just enough to elevate it above the everyday. So, back to that key question, can Caylor make Maiyet interesting to women for whom ethics don't enter the shopping equation? After tonight's performance, our answer is yes.

BRAND: MAIYET  |  MAIYET OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Hearing a French designer cite Sonic Youth as inspiration is akin to an American name-checking Serge Gainsbourg: It implies a certain pop-cultural fetishizing from afar. Vanessa Bruno used "Bull in the Heather" as her runway music, and described the nineties alt band as the aural equivalent of the pattern clashing that made her Spring collection so lively.

Certainly the colors started off high-frequency: red, orange, deep green, and vibrant blue. They gave depth to geometric patterns, butterflies, simplified poppies, and zebra stripes—and when those prints were matched or mixed together, the impact intensified. Bruno is not the first in the Parisian contemporary sphere to mention the sportswear message this season, and her focus on exposed midriffs confirmed her interest. She gingerly touched on grunge with a few romper overalls—suede Perfectos lined with pretty lepidoptera didn't really qualify. And mostly, the French touch persisted in well-cut trenchcoats, gamine dresses (strapless and white-collared to cover the bases), and slim cropped pants.

Bruno said that the print focus was a challenge for her, but it hardly showed (only on one or two occasions did the mix register as discordant). In fact, her biggest challenge could be at the retail level, where sales associates will need to get comfortable styling these looks on customers. But the Bruno girl should be game.

BRAND: VANESSA BRUNO  |  VANESSA BRUNO OFFICIAL WEBSITE