As the girly look fades from fashion, the women who embraced the frilly and even childish styles in their 20s, are looking for clothes that keep the lightness but cut the sweetness.
Significantly, it is often women designers, using themselves and their needs as a fashion role model, who are creating a new image for their own generation.
Hannah MacGibbon, the new designer at Chloé, is 37 and her mission is to reinterpret that child/woman prettiness she created during five years as assistant to the former Chloé designer Phoebe Philo, when both women were twentysomethings.
Chloé has had a bumpy ride since its earliest days as the frame for Karl Lagerfeld's softer side. It might have been wiser for MacGibbon to go right back to the roots of what the French call le flou, or fluidity, now that drapes are the liquid version of the current sculpted geometry.
Fashion has to be of its moment, which is why, although Chloé's scalloped sleeves on tailored coats had a graphic prettiness, the romper shorts, gathered at the waist like a laundry bag, seemed lumpy, as did a pair of shiny copper pants of a vast size. The shade of those pants was a part of an interesting palette of "off" colors, including shrimp, umber and orange, to tone with beige.
"Cool!" said the designer, when asked the difference between a London and a Paris woman. True to that spirit, MacGibbon took her bow in shorts and knee-high boots, with a hooded top tossed over it all.
In the show, what may have been amusing in an earlier girly era looks indulgent in the current crisis. But Chloé can be developed as a brand, using the square-cut dresses given a more sophisticated fit, as MacGibbon settles into her new groove.
Limi Feu is a 34-year-old designer who is creating for her own generation of independent Japanese women. As a mixture of professional models and women cast from life strode the runway, each had a "headset" made out of hair, as if the braided earpieces were an elegant way to shut out the world.
The clothes that these women wore were strong but never simple, when even a basic white cotton shirt might be elongated to coat length. Currently fashionable pieces were given original treatment, as in overalls falling from a gathered high waist or a tiny, tailored jacket deliberately paired with a roomy lower half.
The finale of two lattice crinolines might have been a little too obvious a reference to Feu's father, Yohji Yamamoto. But the designer had ideas of her own, including a palette that was primarily black and white, but also embraced the shock of color, like scarlet lips or a mix of fuchsia and scarlet.
Pitched between the childish, cutie-pie "kawaii" Japanese girl and the conservative grown-up woman, Feu, in her third Paris showing, is carving out a niche for herself and her peers.
