Saw the Paris Fashion Week collections online and felt like I was missing something

Everyone is raving about those oversized sculpted shoulders from the big houses, but I visited a small textile studio in Lyon last spring and saw their hand-woven linen blends that looked way more interesting. The workers showed me how they twist the threads to create these subtle color shifts that change with the light. Am I the only one who thinks the runway stuff is losing touch with actual fabric innovation?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_cameron21h ago

Those Lyon textile studios do great work, but the runway stuff serves a different purpose. The oversized shoulders and sculpted forms are about pushing silhouette and shape, not just surface decoration. A hand-woven linen with subtle color shifts is nice for a jacket you wear to dinner, but it's not going to change how a garment hangs on the body. The big collections are often about engineering and construction, like how Demna layers and distorts proportions, which is a whole other kind of innovation. Both can exist without one losing touch.

logan27119h ago

Yeah that's a tough spot they're in. It's like the quiet craftsmanship gets overshadowed by the loud stuff that grabs headlines. I feel for those studios because they're carrying on real traditions and the payoff is so much less flashy. But at the same time, you can't really blame people for getting excited about the wild runway pieces since that's what gets shoved in our faces constantly. It just sucks that the people doing the actual painstaking work have to fight twice as hard for any kind of recognition.

casey34219h ago

The part where you said "both can exist without one losing touch" is kind of missing the bigger issue though. The problem is that the runway stuff gets all the press and hype, so people think that's what high fashion is about now when it's not. I visited that same Lyon studio last year and they told me their biggest struggle is getting buyers to look past the flashy stuff. So like yeah, both can exist, but one is drowning out the other in terms of what gets called "innovation." The hand-woven linen with those color shifts takes actual skill and generations of knowledge, not just a wild silhouette that'll be forgotten next season. It's like how everyone talks about a cool movie trailer but barely anyone watches the actual indie film it came from.