More than half of the 48 looks Véronique Nichanian showed for her fall 2016 Hermès men’s wear collection – staged against the inky-blue night sky of Paris as seen through the glass-walled Maison de la Radio – were worn with sneakers in Hermès orange. The high-end trainers are a new introduction at the home luxury leather-goods founded as a saddlery to the French carriage trade.

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Five of the first looks at Alessandro Sartori’s show for Berlutti – staged in the gilded Pavillon de Marsan at the Louvre Musée des Arts Décoratifs – included thick-soled brogue trainers or formal shoes brought own a peg with topstitched patterns created by Scott Campbell, a New York City tattoo artist  with a super-celebrity phone tree.

Virtually everything that the designers Kris Van Assche presented in his Dior Home show – staged in a swank tennis club founded in 1895 – drew inspiration from clothes inspired by street style, the kind of utility grab the skate rats who hang out around Supreme tend to wear.

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As technically impeccable, in a way, as were the clothes design by these three unalike talents, something about their shows went collectively amiss. Likely it had to do with the assignment.

It has been a while since the home luxury of goods started a mad scramble for ways to part the young new rich from their money. The formula they’ve tended to settle upon is the old high-low: that million-dollar suit worn with a pair of Stan Smiths.

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A problem develops when, instead of being reasonably priced kicks with a great heritage back story, the sneakers you offer also cost a million bucks. Irony is essential to high-low dressing: it works only when something exclusive and costly is taken down a notch by something cheap enough for hoi polloi.

Sometimes the pleasures of contrast are lost when all a designers can come up with are cargo pants or jackets in lumberjack checks or huge trousers with little design logic beyond the fact that volume is a theme of the season – accompanied by a canned spiel about street inspirations, as at Dior Homes.

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And it’s less than satisfying to see abundant tailoring talents of someone like Mr. Sartori at Berluti diverted toward such trickery as a jacket with double layers of lapels, a gimmick one critic refer to as the shoplifter look.

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