Who Won Fashion Week?

A Conversation With Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick and Ben Diez on Demna’s Archetypes, Duran Lantink’s Subversion and The Death of House Codes

I often say the best conversations are the ones that don’t follow the brief. When I sit down with Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick and Ben Dietz, my pre-scripted notes become irrelevant within minutes, a launching pad we abandon for far more uncharted territory. Call it the alchemy of genuine dialogue, or the inevitable outcome when three minds refuse to stay in their lane. Either way, it’s infinitely more revealing than anything I could have scripted, and I am happy it turns this way.

You see, this time, I asked them to share their thoughts on the hot topics and designer debuts the fashion world has been obsessing over all month. Given past conversations, it seemed like the obvious thing to do—and of course, we didn’t just talk about fashion.

In our collective view, genuine criticism transcends dutiful reportage by drawing lines between seemingly disparate subjects that reveal the hidden currents that actually shape how we dress, consume, and perform identity. So we sat down to discuss who actually won the showdown, whether online criticism matters, and if fashion is truly dead (or just having a really bad day).

The Debut Showdown: Who Actually Won?

Kyle: To me, and I think a lot of people said this as well, it was Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta. That debut felt effortless—a continuation of what was happening, yet different and innovative in many ways. It didn’t feel like a debut at all. It felt like it had always been that way, which is very exciting.

My controversial take? I actually quite liked Lázaro Hernández and Jack McCollough’s debut at Loewe. It was a shock to the system for many people, similar to how J.W. Anderson and Matthew Williams were. It felt like what debuts usually are—a little bit awkward, the old suggesting the new. I could see their Proenza work in there, but it was also very J.W. You could see the ships passing. That’s what made me excited about the potential.

Honorable mention to Demna at Gucci. I had very low expectations—I wasn’t expecting him to actually pull it off. And Pierpaolo Piccioli at Balenciaga deserves recognition, too. He had a really tough assignment. Of everybody, when it comes to house codes and paying them off, he was the most diligent student. He showed the whole history and left you waiting for his spin on it. That’s a genius way of doing it.

But top of my list: Louise, then Loewe, then a joint tie between Demna and Pierpaolo.

Ben: I have a controversial take. Duran Lantink won. He won last fashion week with the prosthetics, and he won this one with Jean Paul Gaultier. Luke Leitch in Vogue Business called it “a dose of poison against nostalgia.”

Let’s call this what it is: the whole week is spectacle. As Rachel Tashjian alluded to in her Post-Runway newsletter, what really matters is what sells. You either lean into what sells and be unabashed about it, or you go off the deep end and do something really weird. Duran is the only person who did something truly weird and subversive.

Obviously, JPG is not going to sell many sheer body hair dick suits to its female customers—but that’s not what it’s for. It’s for brand awareness and thumb-stopping power. He won in that regard.

Close second: Demna. The ultimate manifestation of a luxury brand is existing multimodally across different platforms and formats. THE TIGER, the archetypes, the translation of Alessandro Michele’s Gucci with enough of Demna’s own twist and wit—that was it. I care more about the marketing, the presentation, and the storytelling than I do about house codes.

Ilia: Demna made a very clever move by presenting customers with their archetypes. He’s essentially telling them where they belong—or where they won’t belong. It’s a smart way to start your tenure at a house. And he didn’t even have a traditional show! It was just a film, images, and a celebrity premiere. He still dominated the conversation in a way nobody else did.

I saw that when checking online discourse, Demna and Duran Lantink were the most frequently mentioned names on X and TikTok. He merged all those worlds without even inviting every influencer to a show.

Can You Critique What You Haven’t Seen?

Ilia: This raises an important question that Edward Buchanan posted about: Is it valid to criticize when you don’t see the clothes up close or experience the show in person? How can someone who didn’t go to Paris have an opinion on Louise Trotter’s collection or the new Chanel?

Ben: I’m very strongly in the camp that it matters. These brands need to build lifetime relationships with customers to eventually get them to the point where they might spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. If you don’t allow participation in the short term, you cut off one of the main avenues to that eventual point.

Beyond that, you rob yourself of feedback from outside your own filter bubble—the self-reinforcing environment of your atelier that tells you you’re doing the right thing all the time when you could be fifteen degrees off. Designers need to be confident in their vision, but if they don’t have exposure to what’s happening outside, they’ll make bad decisions.

Kyle: I agree. But I do think social media creates a context collapse. The ability to say “I think this” while sitting in your apartment shouldn’t necessarily be the end-all review. That said, every show should be able to be taken at face value. You shouldn’t need to understand decades of brand history for it to click. It doesn’t need to be straightforward—it can be abstract, conceptual—but it needs to stand on its own.

That said, there’s value in seeking context. Go to Vogue Runway, zoom in on the materials, read other people’s thoughts, and then form your own opinion.

The Bald Model Phenomenon

Kyle: A good example of needing context: There was a noticeable trend of Black models being bald at shows, particularly in Milan and Paris. At the Tom Ford show, there was talk about it being futuristic and AI-influenced, but all the Black models being bald was an expression of futurity without actually making these people look futuristic. They’re just normal. This is an ongoing conversation about race, and it seemed strange.

Ilia: Some people offered the explanation that hairdressers struggle to style Afro hair, so brands prefer models with short hair to avoid working with specific products and techniques.

Kyle: But here’s the thing—you’re a multi-million, if not billion-dollar brand. You cannot invest in understanding how to do a model’s hair? You expose why the fashion industry is suffering and out of touch. If you can’t treat someone with a different hair texture properly, you’re showing me how you treat garment workers and everyone else. You’re not to be taken seriously.

On the flip side, friends pointed out that models are keeping their hair short because they don’t want someone who doesn’t understand their hair texture to ruin it. That’s a valid point. What seemed like a trend is actually a statement on the industry and sociopolitics appearing on the runway without even meaning to.

Is Fashion Dead?

Ben: This ties into the broader “fashion is dead” discussion—not about someone being mean on a Tuesday, but about the larger industry failing to evolve. Whether it’s adapting to work with models properly, paying living wages to garment workers, or innovating beyond repetition.

Kyle: Demna is getting at that, questioning what fashion can be and evolving it by divesting from old models. But we’re reaching a point where the public and shoppers are realizing these are just corporations. It doesn’t necessarily matter anymore, which is why numbers are down.

When people were talking about Jonathan Anderson leaving Loewe, I thought: Why would he go anywhere? He should just build out J.W. Anderson. Why do we need to keep upholding some of these houses? A lot of them have just lost their identities. Louis Vuitton is the perfect example.

The re-rise of Mugler was exciting, but the latest show? The joy is lost. Many houses are just parading around heritage without purpose. The only person who successfully revived a house was Haider Ackermann at Tom Ford—that seemed like a baton truly being handed over.

So many houses have lost their identities. Many don’t want to admit they’re becoming mall brands, especially when H&M, COS, and fast fashion brands start encroaching on fashion week territory.

Ben: Speaking of Louis Vuitton and mall brands, I just saw a photo of Pharrell in the Sprezza newsletter wearing bootcut jeans with a weirdly long rise and giant trainers. He looks like a mom at the mall. It’s very weird. He’s wearing Sacai x Carhartt—great brands, great collaboration—but the styling with the pink cap, bootcut jeans, and giant sneakers carrying a Louis VuittonIt’s a great statement on masculinity and gender, maybe. Is it actually cool or fashionable? I don’t think so.

Kyle: It reminds me of Copenhagen street style—I thought it would be so cool, but it just looked like everyone I went to high school with, in a negative way.

The Future of Heritage Brands

Ilia: As Alexander McQueen once said when asked what should happen to his brand after he died: “Burn it down.”

Kyle: Perhaps he had a point. The question isn’t just who won fashion week, but whether the entire system—the endless debuts, the house code recycling, the spectacle without substance—still makes sense.

Fashion month is over. Until the next one begins somewhere else in the world.

What are your thoughts on this season’s debuts? Let us know in the comments.