X-Files stars, Chloe Sevigny and Janet Jackson tunes: Fashion goes full ’90s

By Rachel Tashjian, CNN

Paris (CNN) — At the Paris fashion shows that wrapped this week, there were luxuriously plain black dresses and coats of the kind favored by Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, models strutting down runways with theatrical flourishes, and in some cases, no cellphones in sight. Gen-X icons, including actress Chloe Sevigny and supermodel Kristen McMenamy, walked the runway at Miu Miu — with a special appearance by star of the 1990s hit show “X-Files,” Gillian Anderson.

This is Paris Fashion Week circa 1998 — in 2026.

If brands spent the last few years plumbing the looks and vibes of the early 2000s — Miu Miu’s low-rise waistlines and Abercrombie’s prep and all that — ‘90s fever has now taken hold. Like much of social media and pop culture, fashion designers are enraptured with the style and culture of what’s been dubbed “The Last Great Decade” — or at least the last one before smart phones and the internet took over our lives. Now we have “Love Story,” fictionalizing the star-crossed romance of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette and the fabulous office politics of Calvin Klein; Gwyneth Paltrow is back on screen in Oscar-nominated “Marty Supreme”; and women are still rehashing the escapades of Carrie Bradshaw and her “Sex and the City” posse.

Rather than simply feeding the ’90s beast with subdued tank tops and pencil skirts, though, designers this week seemed more eager to recreate the feeling of the decade on their runways. It was a time when what happened on the runway, not the celebrity and influencer frenzy outside, was the big news, and when fashion houses offered distinctive looks rather than competing to make the most viral version of the same kind of dresses and bags.

At Junya Watanabe, models walked with a sense of performance rarely seen today except in old videos of couture shows from the 1990s, wearing gowns assembled of athletic equipment and tacky leopard and faux fur fabrics of the kind idolized by Limited Too shoppers.

Other creative directors packed their show spaces, recalling a bygone frenzied atmosphere wheren attendees craned their necks and squeezed into standing room spaces not to get that perfect iPhone shot but because the ideas were so exhilerating. Pieter Mulier’s final outing as the designer of Alaïa (before he heads to Versace) crammed guests onto benches pitched so close to the clothes you could almost smell the calf hair on bottle green and fire engine red coats. Schiaparelli’s creative director Daniel Roseberry put his models up on a raised, glossy black runway platform — an affectation rarely seen in the 21st century — and sent his spotlights spinning to a Janet Jackson soundtrack. “I wanted to do a show,” Roseberry said backstage. “I wanted it to be evocative of an era of glamour that was not referencing couture.”

The muses of these two shows felt titillatingly out of reach, an arch if mischievous contrast to the many designers droning backstage about wanting to dress real women (and then giving them completely boring clothes). “She is that bitch who is living that life,” said Roseberry of his Schiaparelli customer. “She doesn’t want boring. She doesn’t want classic.”

Indeed, the 1990s were a time when women could expect more variety and risk from their designers, which may be why so many creative directors are pushing in this direction. Provocative Paris-based brand Matières Fécales throw back to the era when cutting a mean skirt suit could be a subversive act, a la Alexander McQueen or John Galliano, by painting models’ faces white and styling them with such gimmicks as a ball gag made of enormous pearls. And Jean Paul Gaultier, showing its second collection designed by Duran Lantink, closed the circle of millennials longing for 1990s approval with Gaultier himself, a beacon of ’90s fashion, grinning in the front row at looks like a red velvet tubular gown and a pencil skirt tailored with an erection of chic jutting out the front.

Against the backdrop of ’90s theatricality, the most meaningful gesture of the week remains the banning of phones. Both Yohji Yamamoto and The Row have asked attendees for several seasons now to refrain from taking pictures or videos with their phones; Yamamoto’s suggestion to the audience was to “let the moment, the movement and the clothing speak to you – they are meant to be felt with your senses, not merely digitally recorded.” And The Row’s appeal at first seemed like a pretentious effort to keep the TikTok crowd from gaping at its founders Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s it-shoes and fab-drab tailoring. But now the effect is that it protects the purity of the Olsens’ thinking. Rather than looking for the most mass details of each collection, your own precious imagination gets pride of place, such that — come with me on this journey — your eyes roam over a woven leather suit trimmed with fur and you see yourself as socialite Deeda Blair on her shopping trips to Paris, or you lock in on a mink coat and matching skirt tufted into corduroy-like bands which sends you daydreaming about wallpapering a hallway in dupioni silk in the minkiest charcoal.

But what do all these feel-good throwbacks add up to? Miuccia Prada, who closed the week with her Miu Miu show, had the clearest answer. Aside from bringing back Sevigny — one of the first faces of Miu Miu when the designer launched the brand in the early 1990s — Mrs. Prada also sent out an extremely minimalist collection. This was not of the pared back but dressed up vibe that Bessette Kennedy admired, but the truly plain, pragmatic style of the 1990s, when optimism about the future combined with a distaste for ‘80s excess and created a streamlined, techy feel. The designer said she was inspired by the smallness of the human compared to the universe’s vastness. “It was the idea that a little is enough,” she said. “If you are not adorned, you are enough.”

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