Paris menswear fashion week to feature 39 shows in 72-brand season

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
May 28, 2021

Next month’s Paris menswear season, whose provisional calendar was released on Friday, will feature 39 shows in a 72-brand season.

 
Paris’ menswear week will also boast five fresh designer names on its official calendar, most notably Courrèges, the retro-futurist French house currently enjoying a revival under new creative director Nicolas Di Felice.
 
Scheduled to last six days from Tuesday, June 22 until Sunday June 27, the season will open with Wales Bonner, the young London talent generally regarded as the most important new UK tailor this past decade.

Four other fledgling brands have won coveted places on the calendar to stage presentations: Georges Wendell Paris, from France; Gravalot, from Britain; Jan Jan Van Essche from Belgium and Mr. Saturday of Canada.

However the Federation de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, which controls all runway seasons in Paris, stressed that the exact format of many shows was still to be decided.
 
“Formats will be specified when the final calendar is published,” the Federation noted. Whether these are ultimately live videos, phygital events, closed catwalks or combinations of all three will probably only be decided in the next few weeks by individual houses.
 
On May 19, France reopened café terraces, boutiques and department stores, as the country carefully emerged from its second major lockdown. However, France also recently introduced restrictions on travellers from the UK due to the growth of the Indian Covid variant, meaning many buyers and editors from London are unlikely to make it to Paris.

 
Moreover, the season will be denuded of a half-dozen major players: Givenchy, Comme des Garçons, Junya Watanabe, Saint Laurent, Ami and Balenciaga. Though Demna Gvasalia, the designer of Balenciaga, is planning a return to couture for the house during the French haute couture season which is scheduled for July 5 to 8.
 
However, the menswear season in the French capital does still boast some massive global brands and exciting designers such as Louis Vuitton, Dior Men, Hermès, Loewe, Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, JW Anderson, Dries Van Noten and Vetements.
 
Paris has also succeeded in preventing the haemorrhaging of its menswear season compared to London or Milan, which both take place earlier in June. As reported, there are only expected to be four actual live runway shows in Milan during the Italian menswear season in June.