Vivienne Westwood brings beauty from chaos and dying sunflowers in Paris

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PARIS (AP) — Light streamed through the stained glass of the Institut de France onto a surreal stage: a lone cellist playing a melancholy air, next to an upside-down umbrella and a rotating tableau of dying sunflowers. It was a theatrical overture for Saturday's Paris Fashion Week. This was spring — Vivienne Westwood style.

Andreas Kronthaler, who has helmed the house since Westwood’s death in 2022 and whose name joined the label in 2016, leaned hard into the madhat energy that made the brand a legend. Leopard-print men’s underwear sat alongside sheer, ribbed tunics with a medieval air. Punk flashed in a jeweled veil and glittered lapels. Models strode in floppy, swashbuckling ’70s boots that turned the grand academic setting into a carnival.

The lineup spoke fluent Westwood: draped and deconstructed silhouettes, gathered dresses with double skirts, tailoring cut just off balance. Colors clashed on purpose, with sour greens near reds — until the eye adjusted and chaos clicked into order. One jeweled necklace made it literal: “CHAOS.”

Westwood made her name on King’s Road in the 1970s, wiring tartan, corsetry and ripped tees into the grammar of punk. That outsider spirit still drives the house, even as its reach has gone mainstream. Since Sarah Jessica Parker’s iconic Westwood bridal gown in “ Sex and the City,” the label’s wedding business has boomed — a point underscored by the hundreds of noisy fans thronging the Institut de France on Saturday, jostling for a glimpse.

Kronthaler has long thrived on turning bourgeois classics inside out — warping jackets, loading corsetry into knits, twisting tartan into punk romance. That maximalist urge can tip into excess, yet it is also the house’s lifeblood, keeping Westwood’s language loud and elastic rather than embalmed.

Much of Westwood’s power has historically come from mining and mutating the archive — the ’80s corset legacy, Napoleonic swagger, Shakespearean drama. Since Westwood’s passing, Kronthaler has shifted from careful custodian to provocateur, forging new hybrids instead of simply quoting the past. Saturday’s show advanced that shift: historic tunics, technical fabrics and second-skin underwear collided by design, not accident.

The finale gave the collection a human punch. Heidi Klum closed the runway to loud cheers. Kronthaler stepped out with a bouquet of sunflowers so heavy he had to rest it on the floor before handing it over — a wry echo of the revolving sunflower still life and a tender nod to the house’s stubborn romanticism.

If the collection lacked order, it didn’t lack conviction. Few labels turn visual discord into persuasive beauty. Westwood still can — under stained glass and that glinting necklace, it did.