Every Couture Week, designers push themselves to combine the very best of craftsmanship, innovation and, above all, breath-taking design for a collection that is as much fashion as it is a work of art. Much more so than ready-to-wear, couture means perfecting every tiny detail, right down to the last stitch, with pieces often taking hundreds of hours to complete by hand. And this Spring/Summer 2018 season did not disappoint: spectacle, elegance, (redefined) femininity and the essence of creativity danced across the runways, culminating in some very memorable moments.

Elie Saab, Zuhair Murad, Ralph & Russo and Azzaro were just some of the houses that quenched our thirst for glitz and glamour, with fairy-tale creations that let impossibly intricate beading, gems and sequins twirl in delicate streams down models’ bodies. But the ultra-femininity didn’t stop at such sparkly creations. At Chanel, florals and sugary pinks gave the house’s signature coco tweed a summery twist which, when set against the incredible jardin à la française backdrop, seemed to echo Lagerfeld’s aphoristically sage explanation perfectly: “There is time for prettiness when the world is becoming too ugly”. At Iris Van Herpen, these girly florals gave way to more biblical natural forces, with designs mimicking crashing waves, gusts of wind, gentle streams, desert dunes and even climbing ferns that were, somewhat paradoxically, created with innovative 3D printing technology.

"It is hard to deny that this season’s shows did complement each other in the way they portrayed femininity."

Nature turned dark at the Givenchy Couture show, for which a moonlit midnight garden was the driving inspiration. As Clare Waight Keller’s first couture show at the helm of Hubert de Givenchy’s iconic French house, the pressure was on. The result? A sublimely graceful collection that hid so many couture secrets it could burst. With a simple leather waist belt acting as a Leitmotif of sorts, the designer played a glorious game of texture, mixing tulles, taffeta, satin, feathers, beads, and ‘couture’ latex to name but a few. Its recalibration of the Givenchy couture woman, not to mention the three menswear looks thrown into the mix, let a soft liminality infiltrate the show, highlighted perhaps by the quiet determination of the models pacing the rom as if in a waking dream.

This dreamlike, abstract quality was brought into more observable, surrealist terms at Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Dior show. Presented within a set that took three weeks to build in the middle of Paris’ Musée Rodin, giant ears, noses and other body parts hung over a checkerboard floor. Models took to the catwalk with wispy square masks rimming their eyes, and clad in long domino coats, whimsically oversized tulle dresses and bird-cage corsets. The Dior woman was in there, but had donned a mask woven with Leonor Fini’s words: “only the inevitable theatricality of my life interests me”.

Though it would be reductive and dismissive to give couture week a single over-arching theme or trend, it is hard to deny that this season’s shows did complement each other in the way they portrayed femininity. That is not to say that they all conformed to the same image of femininity, in fact it would be truer to say they presented us with opposites. Nevertheless, they all unfailingly gave traditional feminine contours a twist: a brooding, midnight darkness at Givenchy; a surrealist, theatrical elegance at Dior; a dreamlike, playful whimsy at Ronald Van Der Kemp; a wacky, fantastical spectacle at Jean Paul Gaultier; a transcendental, era-defying beauty at Valentino; a bold, sexy power at Alexandre Vauthier; an earthy spirit at Schiaparelli; a hopeful gaze at Chanel.

Would it be completely amiss to suggest that the feminist movements gaining momentum in society have found an echo in haute couture? Despite being notoriously inaccessible to the masses, it is hard not to see Karl Lagerfeld’s tux-clad Chanel bride (only the third ever to wear trousers) as resonating with current gender equality battles, or to see Alexis Mabille’s unabashed revisiting of power-dressing as an expression of female power. Even at Margiela, an innovative black fabric turned into multi-coloured metallic under the camera’s flashes. Before, the Margiela woman was hidden in a tightly-cinched trench, but under the spotlight, she turned into a beacon of dazzling light.

Perhaps it is the rise of female creative directors, perhaps it is the Zeitgeist effect, and perhaps it is just coincidence, but a wave of deconstructing, revisiting and celebrating femininity in its diversity seemed to pervade this season’s offerings. A sign, hopefully, that the same wave of change could continue to seep through to the industry’s core