Paris Fashion Week Wrap: Pharrell Walks, Kanye’s Blaze White Ninjawear, Birkins Everywhere

Paris Menswear Spring/Summer 2025 is about to wind up, and the Alpha-wolf in Paris has been and is still clearly Vuitton’s creative director, Pharrell Williams, who brought his fearless fashion-forward chops to the runway and to his personal palette, as seen above at the Vuitton show earlier in the week. Bellbottoms and boot-cuts are everywhere, man, and them skinny-leg jeans are long gone! And that’s just the first part of Pharrell’s hilariously challenging messages.

There’s more than a whiff left of Pharrell’s ‘go-West’ cowboy from last year, but it’s been channeled now. Which is why, in Pharrell’s sure hands, bellbottoms read more like boot-cut calf-roping jeans, but a kind of calf-roping that, with a snazzy all-purpose Vuitton top like Pharrell’s, can be made ready to rope in some new contracts at the office or in the recording studio. It can be a stylish Vuitton multi-tool dangling from that left-side belt loop, ready at a moment’s notice to scrape out a horse’s hoof or to get a calf clear of some underbrush on the back forty. On the runway, it’s dressy. It screams meetings. Imagine the recording executives on the other side of the table from that rakish, businesslike Vuitton top. They’d cave instantly, sure, man, whatever you want.

Off runway, for better than a year now at the big awards shows, including last year’s Oscars, new dad-fashionista and fluent Francophile Bradley Cooper has been rocking bell-bottomed suits, of all things, which the otherwise rapier-smart actor has brought to a fully-baked Yves-Saint-Laurent-in-the-Seventies point — all that was missing from Cooper were the huge Coke-bottle-bottom eyeglasses that YSL himself used to sport. For a long while we were hoping the actor could apply the brakes to the silhouette and get some different schmattas. Pharrell’s point in Cooper’s ersatz home-town is, in a word, no, the bellbottom leg has many uses. They’re here. I’m the man and I’m not letting them leave the corral. Get over it.

Menswear still matters to Kanye West. Last summer in Italy, as he was knitting up and licking his wounds from his own volcanic eruption that caused the collapse of his shoe empire and cost him the great majority of his sponsorships, he took time to attend an event in Milan. He studiously avoided Paris. Instead, in the summer of 2023 Italy functioned as the friendlier minor-league practice field, a soft-opening, if you will, to stretch some of the shriveled front-row social musculature required for every front row in Paris.

Now, this week, he’s back in Paris. It hasn’t been unpleasant, necessarily, but it has been somewhat of a surprise to see him venture back to fashion’s global capital, although it’s never a surprise to see him pop up at menswear shows. This conundrum can be read in a rehabilitative light — first, although he seems to be burning through it at a high rate as if he still had his sponsorships, the man still has a ton of money and Europe can be a forgiving operating theatre for all levels of men doing their 40-days-in-the-desert for various forms of miscreancy. In West’s case, the man needs to be seen as a still-working or at least minimally viable member of the fashion community. However haphazardly, he’s doing that.

Notable in the shot above is that, in personal styling, he’s moved from the basic black ninjawear of 2023’s long Italian sojourn to a more messianic white ninja costume. The move to white can be read as expression of desire. There is no apology for anything nor will there ever be, but his time of exile is at an end. He’s come through it, this is the post-apocalyptic result. By stating this in costumery, and by coming to Paris to do that, West adds a further delphic thought: He wants to be back in the fold, but the notion of a messiah is never far from West’s apocalyptic vision of himself.

For years now West has been playing with various sorts of masking-in-public. The (white) mesh technical fabric over the face — very much representing a decision to debut this week in the Paris front row — quotes not a manly profile so much as it has been lifted directly from womenswear, specifically from the burqa, or as it’s known in Pakistan and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the chadaree or chaadar. West has a way of wearing his all-consuming internal dialogue in public, so, as an expression of that, his latter day chaadar/hood construct seems an unwitting, but accurate, physical manifestation of the larger prison he’s constructed for himself.

In that prison, a modicum of revenge is on his mind. For the past couple of years, the Yeezy brand has been doing a sort of stripped-back skatewear-dude thing in menswear, with hoodies and plain tees, a notable exception being his tee bearing a stencil of an often-used English verb for sexual intercourse, but that verb is spelled out in Cyrillic characters rather than English, and it’s placed high, almost discreetly, on the wearer’s right collarbone. Down in the center of the tee’s chest is the object of that obscenity, also in Cyrillic: Aдидас. Which, of course, spells “Adidas.” The tee retails on the Yeezy website for $80.

On a far brighter front, if it’s a Paris Fashion Week of whatever stripe, it’s axiomatic that there will be a Birkin — no, NOT the bag, although there will be plenty of those. Pictured here headed into the Alexandre Mattiussi show, British/French actress, singer and occasional model Lou Doillon, daughter of French director Jacques Doillon and eternal Paris It-girl Jane Birkin, brings the extended Birkin family’s rock-solid style DNA to the public and to the week.

Wait, you didn’t know that Jane Birkin had a second family with a different, cool French director after her marriage to Serge Gainsbourg? Get with the program, philistine! Next fashion week, anywhere, bone up on your global-hipster/French history so you’ll at least be able to bow and scrape to all the Birkins properly.