Designer Riccardo Tisci says he wanted the brand’s new look to ‘celebrate eclecticism’

Riccardo Tisci’s Burberry debut shocked London fashion week in the one way no one expected.

An audience braced on Monday for Tisci’s trademark brand of catwalk scandal– men in dresses, women in sideburns, cars on fire, breasts bared – were confronted instead with sublimely elegant, Parisian-accented chic. Knife-pleated skirts were worn with blazers, high-waisted trousers with scarf-print blouses, and everything with neatly coiffed ballerina buns and high-heeled court shoes.

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Sex, gender and rebellion were what everyone was talking about – and designers with the most to say didn’t show clothes at all

My favourite part of a really good catwalk show often happens about three minutes after the last model has walked down the runway. There is the bow, the applause and then, amid the general rush for the exit, a breakaway group battles backstage (an inelegant bunfight, this bit) to pin down the designer, and record their thoughts on a swarm of iPhones.

Sometimes, the chat is about Harris Tweed; sometimes it’s about David Hockney. Sometimes it’s hard to tell, in the backstage din. One time, I thought Miuccia Prada said her collection had been about democracy and another paper’s fashion editor thought she had said it was about moccasins. Could very easily have been either.

No 10 reception is heavy on the suits as Brexit frays nerves of British fashion industry

This London fashion week focused on hard numbers rather than soft power, and closed with a businesslike Downing Street reception. The cocktail-hour celebration regularly held at No 10 was downsized this season to a 90-minute afternoon reception at which – unusually for a fashion week event – suits outnumbered party dresses.

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It is the turn of the ultimate corporate uniform, but with a twist

I’m not a fan of ironic fashion. “Isn’t it completely hilarious how I’m wearing clothes that ordinary people wear, when I am so very unique and dressing in this tongue-in-cheek manner because it serves to underscore my originality?” is way too much doublethink to swallow in one outfit. Also, it only really works if you have pastel hair and this season’s latest sleeve tattoo, so that no one can miss the humour with which you are wearing, say, a skirt suit, otherwise the joke falls flat. Just a thought, but if the joke revolves around finding people who aren’t as cool as you are intrinsically hilarious, doesn’t that make you a bit of a twat?

So, no, it’s not tongue in cheek, this skirt suit. And actually, I think it looks quite nice. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a little bit tricky to pull off wearing something so very sensible. The trouser suit has a clear role in fashion, rather than just office wear. A trouser suit is modern and feminist and grown up, but the skirt suit? Not so much. It never really graduated out of workwear.

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Milan’s Friday night headliner features legendary designer

Donatella Versace is the fashion industry’s very own rock’n’roll legend. She has survived addiction and tragedy and remains as blonde as Debbie Harry and as snake-hipped as Keith Richards, still holding her spot as Milan fashion week’s Friday night headliner.

But Donatella’s outlook has evolved, and Versace’s with it. The bulletproof glamour is unchipped and glossy as freshly manicured nails, but the designer’s salty, wry persona is more Stormy Daniels than Barbie these days. “When [my brother] Gianni was alive… there was a different kind of energy,” she told Harper’s Bazaar recently. “His women had something to say as well, but being a man he put accent on their bodies and their attitude. That was his way to spread a message about self-confidence and strength, but I am a woman and I live in a completely different world. Looks are important, but … [women] want to be listened to.”

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The ‘zigzag’ label has been led for 21 years by its founders’ daughter, Angela. She talks here about her designs on the future

To many people, the Missoni name stands for zigzags. But to Angela Missoni, who for 21 years has led the label her parents founded in 1953, the first word that springs to mind is “survival”.

“It feels like a miracle that we are still here,” said the designer in her Milan showroom, where she was finessing looks for a catwalk show and gala dinner on Saturday night to celebrate Missoni’s 65th year in fashion. “In my career, I have seen so many names come and go, including some that I thought would be around for ever.”

Plus-size models and the first black viscountess modelled in show that celebrated glamour in all its forms

It would be hard to make a case for Dolce & Gabbana as being politically correct. The designers have defended Melania Trump’s choice of a $51,000 jacket, called IVF babies “synthetic”, and been accused of fat-shaming and cultural appropriation. Yet they have become Milan fashion week’s greatest champions of diversity.

The veteran Italian actors Monica Bellucci and Isabella Rossellini, the plus-size model Ashley Graham, and Emma Weymouth, the first black viscountess in Britain, were included in a model line-up that celebrated glamour beyond the catwalk norm.

Julianne Moore and Cate Blanchett join Anna Wintour and Cindy Crawford for celebration of sustainable fashion

The greatest misconception about the Green Carpet awards, which brought Milan fashion week to a close with a celebration of sustainable fashion, is that they are an alternative to the traditional red carpet. The true aim of the Green Carpet project is to rip the red one up entirely and replace it.

“People called last year’s Green Carpet awards the Oscars of sustainable fashion,” said organiser and ethical fashion campaigner Livia Firth. “I hope that soon we will just be the Oscars of fashion.”

Related: Dolce & Gabbana: Milan fashion show's unlikely champions of diversity

Designer Maria Grazia Chiuri took a stand against body tyranny at Paris fashion week

Feminism has become an ace to be played on the catwalk. A slogan T-shirt, a low-heeled shoe and a few choice words about female empowerment can be all it takes to occupy that sweet spot where the zeitgeist meets the moral high ground.

But for Maria Grazia Chiuri, feminism is not just a game. Two years into her tenure as the first female designer to lead Christian Dior, her project to transform Dior from a bastion of old-school femininity into one of new-wave feminism is becoming bolder with every show.

Designer Alessandro Michele revels in his wicked skill at confusing people

Concierges at hotels all over Paris this weekend have been bemused by the invitation to Gucci’s catwalk show – a clear plastic pouch of assorted spring bulbs. But then Gucci has become a fashion week hot ticket through designer Alessandro Michele’s wicked skill at confusing people.

The venue, a disused theatre with a shady past as a hedonistic 1980s nightclub, was not what guests might have expected from the first Paris fashion show by the most powerful brand of the moment.

Milan fashion week is known for seduction and glamour, but even the home of molto sexy dressing is dialling things down. What’s behind the big cover up?

The talent all great fashion designers have in common is the ability to read a room. You do not get into the history books by making pretty dresses. The best designers at any fashion week are the ones with a fingertip to the breeze, judging which way the wind is blowing. Like standup comics, they divine precisely how far they can push the audience out of their comfort zone to keep their attention without alienating them. And by sticking a pin in a map to illustrate where we are now, their clothes make us sit up and realise how fast the world around is spinning.

For decades, the mantra of Milan fashion week has been that sex sells. Paris does intellectual and chic, London does weird and innovative, New York does polished and commercial, and Milan does sex and glamour. Simple. But the impact of #MeToo, working in an unlikely pincer movement with the rise of the modest pound, as luxury fashion’s Middle Eastern customer base continues to outpace other markets, is pushing sexy dresses on to the wrong side of history. The ciabatta-e-burro of this city’s catwalks has gone stale.

Related: 10 of the key shows from Milan fashion week – in pictures

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Brutally slender, polished to perfection and a fastidious kind of after-dark decadence, the first show under Hedi Slimane’s tenure signals a new direction for the French fashion house

At the most anticipated show of Paris fashion week, with Lady Gaga, Karl Lagerfeld and Catherine Deneuve watching from the front row, Hedi Slimane launched a blitzkrieg on Céline, which for a decade under Phoebe Philo embodied the female gaze in fashion. In the shadow of Les Invalides, the site of Napoleon’s tomb, Slimane jettisoned elegant trousers, silk blouses, understated knitwear and unstructured trenchcoats for dolly-sized sequin micro shifts and tiny leather skirts.

The day of the Kavanaugh hearings in Washington arguably not being the patriarchy’s finest hour, it was an uncomfortable moment for Slimane to raze to the ground the female design philosophy of a house which, for a decade under Philo, was notable for not equating a woman’s power with her sexuality.

Related: Celine and the mystery of the vandalised posters

Can you make surrealism real? That is the question for the house of Schiaparelli. The Paris couture house founded by Elsa Schiaparelli almost a century ago has launched its first collection of ready-to-wear clothes and handbags. For a label that has always celebrated the fantastical rather than the wearable, it is a concept almost as far fetched as Elsa Schiaparelli’s famous hat in the shape of an upturned shoe.

Yet despite its long history of eccentricity, there is something very modern about this fashion house. The aesthetic is emoji-like, all lobsters, hearts and eyes. Schiaparelli designed the first jumpsuit, in 1930, and was the first designer to set a catwalk show to music. It was Schiaparelli and her friend Salvador Dalí who invented the art-fashion collaboration, as currently espoused at Calvin Klein and Raf Simons with US artist Sterling Ruby. (Legend has it that Dali wanted the lobster-embroidered evening gown he and Schiaparelli created to be displayed in the salon with a dressing of real mayonnaise, but he was overruled.)

Demna Gvasalia show offers hovering cocktail dresses, square shoulders and comfort

Balenciaga stands for the weirdly elegant and the beautifully odd. Its founder, Cristóbal, gave fashion the puffball skirt and the sack-back coat. On Sunday morning at Paris fashion week its current designer, Demna Gvasalia, offered cocktail dresses suspended on boned straps so that they hovered in space around the body, and broke the design world’s last remaining taboo by cutting-and-pasting the storied Balenciaga name into Comic Sans font.

Gvasalia’s take on Balenciaga, where he has been in charge for three years, is like the new album you wish your favourite band would make. Not a lazy rehash, but not throwing the baby out with the bathwater either. Like Cristóbal Balenciaga, Gvasalia is obsessed with silhouette. He has pulled puppet-strings behind the trends for hoodies, for oversized coats, for leg-hugging sock boots.

The first looks on to theis catwalk had an hourglass shape to the waist. Not tight, though: like the house founder, Gvasalia is more interested in shadowing the shape of the body than cinching it. The shoulders that sat haughtily square and wide, as if hung from a spirit level. In fact, they were almost weightless, moulded using a new form of 3D printing developed by the ateliers.

The British designer’s latest muse is Annemarie Schwarzenbach – who was a ‘spectacular looking woman’

The British designer Clare Waight Keller scored the biggest fashion triumph of 2018 five months ago when the Duchess of Sussex walked down the aisle of St George’s Chapel in a boat-necked Givenchy wedding dress. No Paris catwalk show, even one that brings city traffic to a standstill on a Sunday evening and scores the starriest front row of the week, could hope to compete.

Focus on accessories at Paris fashion week suggests the brand has its eye on the commercial prize

For the first time in her 21 years at Paris fashion week, Stella McCartney took her catwalk bow not only as designer, but as the sole owner and unchallenged boss of the brand.

Neat jackets and A-line dresses grace Louvre courtyard catwalk as designer ‘obsessed with empowering women’ closes fashion week

“Every piece that I designed for this collection, I asked the question: is it powerful for a woman to wear this? Does it give her strength?”

You don’t get to be the designer who closes Paris fashion week without having something to contribute to the cultural conversation. Nicolas Ghesquière, whose collection for Louis Vuitton was staged on a catwalk in one of the elegant internal courtyards of the Louvre, said this show was “about my obsession with empowering women. In the last two months the question of what it means to be a woman has felt so important so, this time around, I wanted to make that the only criteria. There is no other narrative to this collection, no story. It’s just about dressing women to empower them.”

If you have never been to one of Ghesquière’s catwalk shows for Louis Vuitton, try picturing what Coco Chanel might wear to a Star Wars convention, and you start to get the idea. Elite Parisienne travels to space is Ghesquière’s signature aesthetic. “It’s not an armour, it’s more like a shell. It’s architecture, it gives strength.” The silhouette is always neat, as if mindful of economy of space, although the travel theme that dominates the history of Louis Vuitton is more often than not abstract these days: where once it sold steamer trunks, the house now sells miniature suitcases barely larger than a passport, and clutch bags in the shape of spaceships.

As Paris rounds off a month of fashion weeks, which of the standout looks – from incredible tailoring to plunging necklines – will make it into your closet?

Fashion week can be about many things – for much of this weekend in Paris, thanks to Celine’s show, the catwalks took a back seat to a righteous backlash against the patriarchy – but in the end it is always about our wardrobes. What is on the catwalk has an impact on what I wear and what you wear. That’s the whole point. That is literally what makes it fashion. Otherwise, it’s just clothes.

We are at the end of Paris fashion week, the final stop in the month of fashion weeks, which means it is time to zoom out and focus on the wood, not the trees. We have to start with Celine, because that was the show that everyone talked about. It was interesting to me that an audience of women who might a decade ago have bowed before whatever new look creative director Hedi Slimane revealed (and perhaps that was what he assumed would happen this time) rose up in resistance, furious at their taste being ignored in favour of a 50-year-old man’s version of what looks hot on an 18-year-old model.

The former fashion director on her eclectic style, the myth of age-appropriate dressing – and life after burning bridges

Lucinda Chambers has the kind of style you just can’t buy. That illusive je ne sais quoi that’s eye-catching without being attention-seeking. See today’s sparkly, dangly earrings worn with her fine blond hair twisted into a perfectly imperfect messy bun. She can make an outfit that sounds chaotic on paper (say, a pleat skirt with a bright print blouse, ribbed socks, chunky pool slider shoes) look a match made in heaven, and make perfectly ordinary pieces (a man’s white shirt and black trousers) look exquisite by dint of a just-so sleeve roll and the ideal number of buttons undone.

The house where she has lived in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, for 30 years is the same. Grand and yet slightly scruffy, it has one room painted pink and another yellow, and yet, somehow, an air of quiet harmony. My visit falls on one of the last warm, sunny mornings of the great summer of 2018 and Chambers has the doors open from her kitchen (garden flowers on the wooden table, seating nooks patchworked with cushions, holiday postcards cheek by jowl with classic photography) on to a veranda, white wooden boards foxed and flecked with age, where wicker chairs look on to a long, green garden. An antique silver candelabra with neon-yellow candles sits in front of a faded curtain of rose and white ticking stripe fabric.

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I’ll always love the thrill of shopping, but I care about the planet, too. Where do I begin?

I love fashion. I love going to catwalk shows. I love getting dressed up. I love the illicit thrill of some frippery I can’t really afford, accompanied by the rustle of tissue paper in a crisp shopping bag – a sound bested only by a champagne cork popping. And that’s not even the half of it. More than anything, I love the thrill of the high street chase. I love stopping a woman on the street to ask where her dress is from, and hunting it down and ordering it from my phone at the bus stop. I have been known to go weak at the knees over new suede boots and I will never, ever have enough earrings.

But you know what else I love? Living in a climate that doesn’t fry me alive. Oceans with fish and icebergs in them rather than plastic. Mars is a long way – and besides, Elon Musk? No thanks. Which means I need to love clothes in a way that doesn’t create huge amounts of waste and use a disproportionate amount of the world’s carbon budget. It is obscene that 300,000 tonnes of fashion waste goes into landfill each year. It is the opposite of progress that the average number of times a garment is worn before it is retired has dropped by 36% in the last 15 years. (In China, that figure is 70%.) Loving clothes shouldn’t be a system based on throwing them away. Fashion isn’t rubbish.