Paris Fashion Week: menswear

Hermès, Spring/Summer '09 (scroll down to read the review)
Hermès
Véronique Nichanian said her new collection for Hermès had a 'casual elegance': in place of suits, she proposed blazers or blousons, cut in unlined poplin as light as a shirt. Nothing matched, instead colours like desert, brown and shades of blue were mixed and matched, along with subtle stripes, micro checks, patterns like rubbed-out florals on shirts and shorts, 'H' jacquards so fine they were little more than texture, geometric spots, and squares reading like a fine chequerboard. Nichanian sees summer as 'the time to play with pattern and print' for men.

She proposed wide boat-necked knits to be worn over shirts or directly on the skin for something 'more sexy', and best of all, a china blue v-neck with a faux collar below, giving the illusion of two sweaters with the lightness of one.

Leathers should be touched to be believed - supple glove weight lambskin, nubucked alligator and right on trend, suede lambskin perforated with tiny squares, proposed as a shirt or hooded blouson.

Accessories were kept to the bare minimum, just shoes and the odd Cape Cod watch. Most wanted were the sandals, in Etriviere, a kind of sanded leather, that Pierre Hardy, designer of Hermès shoes, described 'as like a belt round the foot'.