Anyone who was at Dries Van Noten's men's show in June was prepped for his women's presentation today. Back then, he was talking about how his research for his career retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris next February had led him to the "pretty, but strange" flower prints that men wore over the centuries. He was thinking about men like Oscar Wilde, Jean Cocteau, Jimi Hendrix. For his new collection, you could almost imagine the women Dries had on his mind as their decadent soul mates—extravagant free spirits like Tamara de Lempicka and Loulou de la Falaise. Spring be damned, the show was a stunning parade of dark tulip damasks, jet black ruffles, Byzantine gold, Ottoman tassels, and embroideries that set the night sky against barbed wire as the season's leitmotif. Into that heady brew Van Noten stirred the plain and simple, in the form of honest, hardy fabrics like poplin, calico, natural linen…the result was a perverse, audacious marriage of rich and poor. Opulence masked itself: A gold leather waistcoat gleamed under a rough calico coat; a crocodile handbag was burrowed deep inside a carpetbag. It was just like the royal family (French, Russian, pick another) disguising themselves as peasants in a futile attempt to escape the revolution. And there's a cautionary tale for our time.

The detail was extraordinary. There were tiny droplets of gold in the models' eyelashes and gold woven through the parts in their hair. The backdrop of the men's show was massive sheets of quivering gold Mylar. Here, the gold was applied as foil to huge slatted wood screens. The empire was failing, the gold was flaking, but still, the artisans slaved on. The handwork on a micro-beaded gold shift was so miniscule it was almost invisible. An equally minute tracery of sequins paneled the front of a calico coat. (It's moments like these when Van Noten effortlessly touches on the obsessiveness of haute couture.)

The designer teased the face-off between the peasant authenticity of raw cotton and the outrageous flounce of gold lamé ruffles by sticking them in the same outfit. He joked that his last look—anchored by a giant rosette of white and gold—was "bridal," but seconds before, he'd shown the same outfit in a furious flounce of funereal black, complemented by Daiane Conterato's resolute little face looking like she was ready to flamenco that frock to death. Dries conceded the darkness of the collection, the almost gothic quality. But he insisted that Spain, inspiration for the ruffles, was dark too: Goya, Velázquez, Zurbarán, Balenciaga…

The soundtrack was a solo performance by the bass guitarist Colin Greenwood, of Radiohead. Inspired by his favorite piece from the collection, which featured a cunning use of the barbed wire embroidery, he adapted the bass line from the Radiohead song "My Iron Lung." For his Spring men's show, Cindy Blackman Santana's drumming; for his women's, Colin Greenwood's bass. Next season? "Well, obviously, Cindy and me playing together," said Dries. Wait for it: Dries Van Noten, über lord of fashion's drum 'n' bass set.

BRAND: DRIES VAN NOTEN  |  DRIES VAN NOTEN OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Today, the Guy Laroche show opened with a hoodie. But the filmy fusion of silk and polyamide ensured that this was no average sweatshirt. Paired with a flared miniskirt in matching material and ankle-bracelet python stilettos, the look pushed the brand into far cooler boy/girl territory than in seasons past.

Except that this was not the collection's main message. Artistic director Marcel Marongiu looked to dystopic cinematic references—Gattaca, Metropolis, and David Cronenberg—rather than Rihanna off-duty. He cloned the diamond-shaped buttons on crisp white shirts so there were two rows, and he experimented with optical fiber as neo-fringe. He could have convinced us that the small white leather pieces puzzled and sewn together were the skin of an otherworldly animal. Marongiu was clearly focused on fabric innovation, but the stronger moments included the coats and gilets that were as amply shaped as they were buoyant in weight. Here was volume that looked forward, rather than the box-pleated dresses that looked back (to Laroche's sack silhouettes). Hemlines that curved with exaggerated effect, fabric that folded in on itself, and asymmetrically fastened blouses went against the natural—albeit unscientific—laws of how garments are constructed; some ended up too tinkered.

Laroche, an early colorist, might have wondered about the bilious yellow grouping that emerged midway through. Marongiu explained that he had been obsessed with the hue of the highly poisonous golden frog. Its scientific classification: P. terribilis. That kind of backstory doesn't auger well. Fortunately, the collection had the type of movement and form that will play well both on-screen and off.

BRAND: GUY LAROCHE  |  GUY LAROCHE OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.

BRAND: GARETH PUGH  |  GARETH PUGH OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Jun Takahashi's Undercover show began with a manifesto, borrowed (a little postshow Googling revealed) from the all-girl post-punk band Savages. "The world used to be silent/Now it has too many voices/And the noises are constant distraction/They multiply, intensify." The sentiments sounded tailor-made for the smartphone-obsessed fashion flock.

But then Takahashi went and served up some made-for-social-media moments of his own, with palindromes and anagrams decorating his part-sport, part-S&M-inflected streetwear. (As an aside, it doesn't seem a coincidence that the revival of logomania corresponds with the explosion of Instacrack.) "Snug" turned to reveal "guns"; "silent" became "listen"; and "dog," of course, was "god." Wordplay along these lines is already a big trend—witness the "Selfie" T-shirts printed in Céline's font, or "Homies" in the Hermès logo. Takahashi's clothes capitalize on that phenomenon at the same time that they elevate it and, perhaps just a little bit, politicize it. You can't buy a T-shirt with LED lights on its front and back or a clutch-cum-wristlet flashing words like a miniature billboard from a vendor on the street. We are all just walking billboards. That's the kind of thing that could keep a thinker like Takahashi up at night.

"The contradiction in the world and the contradiction in myself" was his starting point, he explained backstage. Takahashi doesn't seem eager to render judgment; quite the opposite—there was nothing sneering about the collection. But he did send people out the door with some deep thoughts to accompany their shopping lists, and that's a rare enough occurrence that it deserves applause.

BRAND: UNDERCOVER  |  UNDERCOVER OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Alexis Mabille hit upon an intriguing starting point for his new collection: He was reimagining Rosie the Riveter as a Vargas girl, a kind of pneumatic tomboy pinup. That gave Mabille some depths to plumb, especially given his historic interest in ultra-feminizing masculine signatures. Here, that modus operandi was evidenced in a myriad of slinked-out and/or be-flounced adaptions of workwear, such as the military jumpsuit and the denim dungaree.

Some pieces worked better than others; the flounced trenchcoat, in a sheer laminated nylon, was indeed very cool. And the show-opening khaki silk jumpsuit nailed the sex-bomb tomboy inspiration right on the head. Elsewhere, though, there were some head-scratching looks, like the one-shoulder dungaree romper or the crystal-bedazzled rodeo shirts or the atavistic racerback tank tops and dresses.

There was a very scrambled take on Americana going on in the collection—a kind of fantasy of hardy American girls—but Mabille never really rose to the occasion of exploring that theme properly. Some of the embellishment looked like decoration for decoration's sake.

The simplest looks came off the best: This season's standout for Mabille was a navy gown, almost monastic in its covered-up-ness, with an Empire waist, three demure buttons at the collar, and a jaw-dropping amount of volume in the skirt. The gown wasn't particularly literal to Mabille's theme, but it expressed it, somehow.

BRAND: ALEXIS MABILLE  |  ALEXIS MABILLE OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Phillip Lim got deep into geology this season. And when asked, after his show, what got him so interested in the earth and its elements, the designer replied, simply, "standing on solid ground." Hmm.

The comment was interesting not only because it was pretty opaque but also because the thing Lim got at really well in this collection wasn't earthen solidity but flux. That was especially true of this season's standout looks, which featured geode-inspired embroidery on organza.

Geodes, for those readers who haven't visited a natural history museum in a while, are those rocklike mineral formations that split open to reveal swirls of many-hued crystal; they are a record of a moment of becoming. Lim's embroideries captured that, as did (to a lesser degree) his geode-inspired silk prints. Elsewhere, Lim took on the variegated palette and texture of seemingly monotone landscapes, translating that quality into metal-mottled, patchworked, and pearlized leathers.

The pieces themselves never felt obnoxiously literal, though; women are going to like a fluid, knee-length skirt made from contrasting leathers whether they get the backstory or not. And Lim being Lim, there were a ton of garments here that were all about commercial rather than conceptual appeal—to wit, the wide-leg cuffed trousers or the pieces in sherbet-toned jacquard. Lim is an avid explorer; he just chooses to do his exploring close to home. On terra firma, as it were.

BRAND: 3.1 PHILLIP LIM  |  3.1 PHILLIP LIM OFFICIAL WEBSITE