Clothes to remember, from John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaulter and Valentino, to close the haute couture season

Marcel Proust proselytised about the importance of recherché-ing your temps perdu. Fashion, obsessed with history and reviving styles from the past again and again, has never had any problem with that notion. No time is lost in fashion, if you search hard enough. Maybe that’s why Proust is such a touchstone reference for so many designers. Or maybe it’s because Proust both glorified and skewered the moneyed matriarchy that then, as well as now, cluster to Paris buy prohibitively expensive clothes from the haute couture.

However, memory manifests itself in unusual ways. It can be the outright revival of a period - like Jean Paul Gaultier’s ode to his own misbegotten youth in the late seventies and early eighties. Or it could be the subtle, time-smudged evocation of a means of working, such as that employed by John Galliano at Maison Margiela, in homage to the labels’ founder. Both have a power - indeed, both delivered strong and memorable shows on the closing day of Paris’ spring/summer 2016 haute couture season.

Gaultier revived Le Palace, a Parisian nightclub populated street life and fashion designers in equal measure, for a show that paid tribute to Edwige Belmore, “queen of Paris punk”. It was a giddy, over-excitable spectacle rather than the legendary sangfroid of Le Palace’s denizens - the giddiness is trademark Gaultier, as were many of the clothes, like cuffed pajama trousers, belted robe jackets, lingerie dresses, and gags like tailcoats trailing to the ground, silk dresses tie-dyed like skinhead denims, or a mink bomber coloured the virulent orange of an MA-1 lining. At the end, the models came dancing out to disco, like the Faye Dunaway vehicle Eyes of Laura Mars, filmed in 1978, the year Le Palace opened.

That film - then at the cutting-edge of fashion, featuring the work of fashion photographer Helmut Newton - now feels dated. So did this Gaultier collection. Which doesn’t mean it wasn’t enjoyable - it was a laugh riot. It just didn’t feel especially relevant. The daywear, with it’s skinny, sharply-tailored jackets and wide mannish trousers, as well as that louche robe stuff, caught a whiff of the fashion moment. But it felt like it was entirely coincidental. Gaultier is dancing by himself. He’s happy, and when he does it well - like today - it’s hard not to get caught up in his enthusiasm.

I’ve worried that, perhaps, I’ve been caught up in the enthusiasm for John Galliano’s work at Maison Margiela - grateful to have a fashion maverick back creating, perhaps giving him an easy ride for clothing that, ultimately, is neither here (the present, on people’s backs) nor there (an outright ode to the undoubted and enduring influence of Martin Margiela, who retired in 2008). His spring/summer 2016 “Artisanal” collection, however, felt pulse-throbbingly contemporaneous. It was the best he’s delivered since he joined the house in October 2014.

This collection was great because it truly fused Galliano’s sensibility - a magpie eye, with a taste for grand theatrical gestures - with Margiela’s legacy. In the past, they’ve seemed to fight - here they worked together in harmony. Margiela’s “Artisanal” collection was originally based on the notion of the found object, a Dadaist conceit. Here, what Galliano found were the ideological similarities between his work and that of Margiela, and bound them together. A pair of trousers were blown up super scale, but then wrapped into an evening dress; a lamé beaded dress was attached to a laser-cut leather cape; an army parka was compressed, restitched into a fitted jacket.

The final outfit was the best example: Galliano ditched the brides of his previous two shows, the traditional final to a haute couture fashion show, and instead showed a vast bomber-jacket, whose ubiquity suggests them as the garment of the fashion moment. His version was larger-than-life, exploding with multicolored panels of jacquard cloqué. In a simultaneous instant, he recalled the oversized jackets made by Margiela himself (one memorable collection was oversized by various percentages - most 100 per cent or more; the sweeping opera coats of Galliano’s Dior days; and the fresh bombers, after both fashions, by new Parisian label Vetements which is causing such a fashion furore. That was something to remember.

What will you remember from Valentino? That Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli make fluid clothes to a rigid template. They cast off the shoes today, but not the shackles, as their barefoot models drifted by in Fortuny-inspired melanges of pleats and panels of chiffon. It was pretty but, speaking of memory, haven’t we seen these dresses before? Like last season. And the season before last. And…

And elsewhere. Chiuri and Piccioli have been enormously influential, and their work is frequently echoed by other designers. It’s ferociously influential, this Valentino malarky, these long transparent dresses so friendly to so many international haute couture markets. A woman shuffled by me dressed in a traditional Japanese kimono to take a seat before the show; another with a strong Russian accent and a stronger jawline was wearing a beaded floor-length evening gown, at 6.30pm. Diamonds glittered. They’ll be buying.