As Paris Fashion Week closes for another season, The sybarite takes a look back at some our favourite trends from the romantic capital…

Vinyl

Outerwear took on a much-needed weather-proof route with vinyl making it’s way through the catwalks of Lanvin, Saint Laurent and Chloé at Paris Fashion Week. Prepare for a wet autumn/winter ’17 with these stylish yet functional additions to your wardrobe.

Metallic Tailoring

It began to make itself felt in Milan, but flashes of metallic tailoring are proliferating in Paris – most notably at Dries Van Noten. The designer’s 100th show was a riot of colour with numerous archive prints overlaid with new graphics, each prompting a Proust Madeleine moment that meant one almost missed the metallic oil-slick oversized jackets. Elsewhere at Lemaire, languid silver trousers squeezed their way into a collection largely filled with washed out blues and pinks, slipping in at the end to electrify a standard issue blue buttoned dress. And at Koché? Metallic blue short suits brought a new grown-up feel to Christelle Kocher’s signature street-beat aesthetic. Time to switch up your all-black tailoring template, and sub in metallics with your neutrals.

Polka Dots

VBrief history lesson: the ‘polka’, a Czech form of dance, derives from the Polish for “woman”; in Czech it translates to “little girl”. The cartoonish print is unabashedly feminine – Christian Dior used it in his New Look collection, in what Vogue reported was a “direct, unblushing plan to make women extravagantly, romantically, eyelash-battingly female”. For Autumn, Winter ’17, Balenciaga used coin-sized dots adorned a couture gown created to mark the centennial of the French house. At Loewe, Jonathan Anderson employed them to uncharacteristically naïve effect, printed on tightly-pleated and ruffled silks. At Jacquemus, they were fat and globular, comprising the uniform for a Parisian girl who fell in love with a gypsy in the south of France.