The mountain and the mix

PARIS — It was raining in Paris on Sunday, just days after Europe had been colder than the North Pole. Extreme weather! We’re living it. At Balenciaga, Demna Gvasalia dove right in.

Actually, what he did was build a giant faux mountain, covered with graffiti and spray-painted tags and rising out of a runway of spun-sugar snow. It took four weeks to construct in a large warehouse in St. Denis, on the outskirts of Paris. The show notes called it a “snowboarding paradise.”

Then he built a collection to match, for both men and women.

From the base of straight black trousers and a stretch velvet turtleneck, the arms extending into integral gloves, he draped the torso in tiny minidresses, added long jackets and single- or double-breasted coats with three-dimensional sculpted hips that stood out on their own, the effect created via precision molding and digital fitting. Floral pleated skirts were fused to suit jacket tops, and blanket plaid jackets were given a tentlike curve in the back via a pleat at the shoulder blade — and then all the ideas and fabrics and snowboarding colors layered up so that the neck disappeared like a turtle into a shell. Rarely has the cocoon coat been taken so literally, while maintaining its gracefully ironic profile.

Amid it all were some shirts and fanny packs splashed with the slogan “Saving Lives, Changing Lives,” a reference to a new partnership with the World Food Program. Along with the clothes, it put us squarely back on the issues-as-inspiration space.

At Givenchy, in her second ready-to-wear collection jointly for men and women (this is really taking hold, and it makes sense), Clare Waight Keller was feeling it, too.

Backstage before the show she said she had been inspired by Berlin in the 1980s, when the wall between East and West was still up and a kind of aggressive hedonism ruled the club scene. “It kind of seems like that today, doesn’t it?” she said.

She had been watching the David Bowie ‘80s horror film “The Hunger.” And it took her to kind of a dark place, one filled with oversize fake furs and jutting New Wave shoulders; leather “Star Trek"-like tops and pleated leather pants; asymmetric oil-slick silk skirts; big, in-your-face bows on black tie separates and swinging silver fringe.

Waight Keller this year had a breakthrough couture collection for Givenchy — one that described a certain modern elegance without fuss or favor. This collection didn’t quite rise to that level; it traded some subtlety and sophistication for trend. But she should be given credit for refusing to bow to the shadow of Audrey Hepburn, and blowing up (proportionally) the clichés of the brand.

There’s a power in that rebellion, if not necessarily always a flattering line.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.