PARIS, March 8 — Crocodile tears, ovations, post-divorce recriminations and, oh, fashion designs that were less compelling than industry shop talk marked the fall 2004 season, which ended here with Tom Ford's final show for Yves Saint Laurent on Sunday night. If there was a single dominant narrative in Europe these past two weeks, it was one of goodbyes.
Death claimed two well-regarded fashion industry personalities: the designer Stephen Sprouse and the critic Amy Spindler, both strongly identified with the 1990's, a gaudy, boldfaced era in fashion. "This collection is dedicated to the loving memory of our friend Stephen Sprouse," read a card inserted into the program for Sunday's Louis Vuitton show, designed by Marc Jacobs. And hardly anyone there needed a reminder of how Mr. Sprouse, in collaboration with Mr. Jacobs, messed up the primness of the Vuitton logo with his Graffiti handbag and thus seriously boosted the fortunes of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
At the Gucci Group, the not-quite-news of the departure of Tom Ford and the chief executive Domenico De Sole was soon followed by a spate of trash talk from parties on both sides of the issue. Mr. Ford implied in interviews that Serge Weinberg, the chief executive of Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, which owns 67.3 percent of Gucci, was a philistine with little to teach the world about luxury. Mr. Weinberg effectively called Mr. Ford a liar in The International Herald Tribune.
Most people who care about these things are aware by now that Mr. Ford's duties at Gucci are likely to be redistributed and that his replacement will not be another high profile designer but that paradigm of quiet corporate culture, a team.
Mr. Ford's emotional farewell sortie on Sunday after the show for Yves Saint Laurent, a Gucci subsidiary, made for good theater. That was to be expected. Mr. Ford began his career as an actor and it is no stretch to say that playing a fashion designer was the role of his career. "Tom wanted to go out with a bang," Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, said before the Saint Laurent show. And if the bang was followed by a collective whimper, well, these are weepy times.
Concluding his final stint at Celine earlier in the week, Michael Kors took to the catwalk with the noble composure of a beauty pageant also-ran. He hugged his models. He looked emotionally shaken. The audience of editors and buyers, perhaps primed by the first of Mr. Ford's farewells after the Gucci show a week earlier in Milan, obligingly leapt to its feet. Sob! Julien Macdonald also seemed to get in the spirit when he cinematically caught a kiss from the last model to sashay down the runway at Givenchy. Mr. Macdonald's own kiss-off from Givenchy is considered imminent.
Of course, not everyone in fashion despaired at seeing Mr. Ford walk into the Los Angeles sunset, where, he has said, he wants to direct films. Ever since the Gucci Group acquired majority control of Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche in 1999, Pierre Bergé, Mr. Saint Laurent's partner, has reveled in taking potshots at his successors' regime. Having controlled the business end of Mr. Saint Laurent's phenomenal career for four decades, Mr. Bergé has had some very public problems letting go.
So it did not seem altogether coincidental when Mr. Bergé stole some of Mr. Ford's thunder by inaugurating the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation at the retired designer's fabled couture house on the Avenue Marceau on Friday.
The foundation is designed to conserve and display an unparalleled archive consisting of 3,000 garments and 15,000 accessories, drawings and fashion-related ephemera produced by the designer. Its first exhibition is called "Yves Saint Laurent: Dialogue with Art," but it could just as well have been titled "Pierre Bergé: Argument with Tom Ford" since the clothes on view were pointedly selected to demonstrate the differences between what Mr. Bergé, in an interview, called a "real designer in the tradition of Chanel, Balenciaga and Vionnet," and an uncommonly shrewd marketing man like Mr. Ford.
"I am happy for Tom Ford because he is a nice guy and, as a designer, probably a wonderful D.J.," Mr. Bergé said last Thursday. "But, just because you're a good D.J., that doesn't mean you're Elvis Presley."
One might observe of the runway season just past that the important elements of a fashionable woman's new wardrobe next fall should include anything with pleats, any thin belt worn tied rather than buckled, any coat with a jeweled collar, anything printed with leopard spots, any tarty cloth pump that has high heels, a gathered vamp and rounded toes, and any kind of fur, but especially ones that come with price tags that call to mind phrases like mortgage refinance.
It was "a season of great coats," as a longtime observer of the scene remarked. And the greatest of those coats were designed by Alexander McQueen. Mr. McQueen's outerwear tended to be made of shearling and to have exaggerated collars from which a woman's head emerges like a flower atop the stem of her neck. The effect was heightened by wigs as tightly coiled as the unopened bud of a ranunculus.
Mr. McQueen's show made abundant, if somewhat abstracted, reference in its soundtrack, lighting and accessories to Mars. As it happens, so had Miuccia Prada's excellent presentation in Milan just a week before. Mars, scientists report, probably once had water. Now it has fashion, besides.
Naturally enough, a call has gone out for models to suit the new interplanetary look, that is, for women who resemble aliens. The latest types to find favor with designers have tiny heads, upturned noses, enormous eyes and undeveloped chins. They are said to "look 50's," as do many of the season's clothes. If so, it is not the 1950's of ripe cinema goddesses but the decade of the adorable Z-movie geeks who appeared in films like "Plan 9 from Outer Space."
To a baby boomer, the Australian Gemma Ward, the Canadian teenager Heather Marks or the current Italian Vogue cover girl Lisa Cant also bear some resemblance to the waifs painted by the kitsch master Margaret Keane, as well as to subjects favored by the painter John Currin, whom some might call the Margaret Keane of the Whitney Biennial set. A younger eye might see references to Japanese manga characters like Major Motoko Kusanagi or to the creatures turned out by Pixar Animation Studios. Other models have a more direct way of describing fashion's new favorites, girls who seem to be garnering all the jobs. They call them "the bugs."
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but thankyou for the article! 
