French icons show styles – for next winter

After this year’s arctic cold snap in Europe, Paris Fashion Week designers rolled out sumptuous cashmere and deep fur to keep warm in style next winter.

Jean Paul Gaultier sent out a graffiti-inspired ready-to-wear line with coats that were an overt challenge to the anti-fur activists at animals rights group Peta.

On single models the French designer mixed up fox, mink, Mongolian lambskin – a deep, shaggy fur – and goatskin, while a stunning bright orange mohair coat had fur sleeves in the same tone, along with pink or blue fur jackets.

Britain’s fashion icon Vivienne Westwood imagined coats in Mongolian lambskin, to be worn over a tunic dress in dusty pink mohair and plat-form boots with chunky crocodile heels.

Deep coat hoods were there to hide from the cold, while tweed jackets had large lapels to keep the shoulders warm, paired with boyish leggings, buttoned along the inside seam.

Japan’s Tsumori Chisato took the fashion crowd skiing, with a playful collection inspired by a recent ski holiday in Switzerland.

“I loved the cable cars,” said the designer, who used her holiday snaps to create original prints for the collection.

Blouses and dresses were printed with child-like fir trees or a red cable-car, while photographs of snow-heavy tree branches or a ski run decorated dresses, like a tongue-in-cheek invitation to wrap up and get mountain-bound.

At Cacharel, where the Chinese duo Ling Liu and Dawei Sun were showing their second collection, the focus was on coats, warm outfits in wool or felt, and sensual knit dresses that wrapped up around the neck.

Chanel’s superstar designer Karl Lagerfeld turned Paris’ ornate Grand Palais into a crystal vault yesterday, sending out a look packed with trompe l’oeil tricks and glinting shades of violet and blue.

Giant spears of mock-crystal filled the vast domed space as the models filed past with crystal outlining their eyebrows, and clustered on the clear heels of shoes which crunched on a floor of glittering mineral dust.

US singers Alicia Keys and Katy Perry were among the stars who came to cheer the house’s latest autumn-winter fashion collection.

Paris Fashion Week comes to an end today.