Paris Fashion Week: Escapism, innovation and hints of joy

In late February last year, Paris was quietly falling into the clutches of the coronavirus pandemic as packed runway shows took place at locations around the city during Paris Fashion Week. Event attendees joked uneasily about adopting the fashion cliche of air kissing, and applied extra lashings of hand sanitizer as they compared notes about who was being allowed back into the office or had been asked too quarantine at home "as a precautionary measure." Despite it all, the event was largely uninterrupted and most attendees went about the business of fashion in what we now recognize as careless naivety.