It’s official: the fashion calendar year is closed! The September shows are wrapped, and we can all hibernate until we’re back in Paris in January for menswear (it’ll be here sooner than you think). Every city dished out its own notable moments, and the trends set to shape womenswear dressing next summer followed in very similar footsteps to menswear. This season it was about lightness, dressing with a sense of ease and liberty, while also dressing for the everyday, but in a topsy-turvy version of reality. It was about the possibility of the unknown and the myriad of lives one could live; it was about using art as the eternal muse, and it was about bringing joy back to dressing. Without further ado, here’s the debrief…

That wardrobe you think you know so well is getting a makeover, but only just. This season saw designers take everyday garments and distort them with subtle, or sometimes very obvious, twists. Loewe subverted classical Americana dressing with the sensual spirit of a summer spent in Andalucía. Everyday archetypes were distorted into something new; polo shirts were worn backwards as if strewn off in the heat and recklessly thrown back on, layered atop shirting, while classic basketball jersey silhouettes were transformed into beaded chiffon slip dresses.

Miu Miu followed suit, transforming the simplest of silhouettes with an air of the off-kilter. Miuccia had “real clothes” on her mind, transforming your nip to the shop uniform into something you could literally nip anywhere in. Halter necks were paired with track pants and flip-flops; tartan blazers were worn over mesh sportswear, and your average gym shorts were cut to the tiniest length possible. This season’s Jean Paul Gaultier – a brand rarely associated with everyday dressing – arrived with a distinct touch of wearability. Seemingly traditional pieces featured off-kilter touches: blazer lapels fashioned in origami-like folds; sandals inverted; signature leather cone bras spiked from beneath outerwear.

Now, it thankfully wasn’t as hot as it was in June menswear, but that theme of lightness remained. At Dior, the mist that rose from the Bassin Octogonal of the Jardin des Tuileries was as weightless as the clothes that hit the runway. Jonathan Anderson asked, “How light can a garment be?” and answered with a series of signature house silhouettes distilled in the most diaphanous of fabrications: silk mousseline, organza, double duchess satin, printed jacquard plissé and Chantilly lace. Nicholas Ghesquière’s Louis Vuitton adopted that same sense of airiness, creating malleable and light garments in the face of the heaviness of “modern concerns.”

Balenciaga changed its approach this season; often delivering a collection of heavy, structured silhouettes, Pierpaolo Piccioli favoured something lighter. Sheer gowns underpinned the core of the collection, light in both colour and form, with Anok Yai closing the show in a wash of baby pink chiffon. At Prada, Miuccia and Raf didn’t put a single pair of trousers on the runway, lightening the load with a collection solely built on skirts, while at Hermes, Nadège Vanhée was inspired by a year spent travelling through Los Angeles, Asia and a scorching European summer, dressing for heat and ridding the layers one look at a time.

It can be seemingly impossible to imagine fashion without art, and vice versa, but this season it seemed more prevalent than ever. In London, Talia Byre turned to the work of British artist Dillwyn Smith. Notably, the translucent fabric creations from his ongoing series of Placebo Paintings, a body of work that dissects the liminal space of transformation – a sentiment translated into the shape-shifting identity of Talia’s woman this season.

At Burberry, Daniel Lee dissected the work of legendary British textile artist Celia Birtwell. An artist whose bold Picasso and Matisse patterns defined the look of the 60s and 70s, here, Birtwell reimagined Burberry’s distinct nova check into a glitching gingham or dissolved stripe. Meanwhile, at Lanvin, Peter Copping washed his collection in a colour palette inspired by the work of Georgia O’Keeffe, and at Kiko Kostadinov, Laura and Deana Fanning focused on the work of Nanda Vigo.

In a similar vein to the lightness felt this season, a lot of designers stripped things back to basics. At Givenchy, Sarah Burton’s singular note on her offering read: “I wanted a sense of balance and clarity. A wardrobe to bring precision and simplicity to dressing as we speed through the multiple perspectives and perpetual motion of all our lives.” Delivering a collection of sleek tailoring, repurposed menswear silhouettes and a colour palette of simple colour blocking.

Simone Bellotti continued his ongoing dissection of minimalism at Jil Sander: “You take things apart to understand what you want to keep. Then you put them back together,” said the designer. When putting those things back together, he created a collection that frames tailoring as the base on which to unravel, distorting traditional suiting with an asymmetric line or altered in volume, rarely straying from a monochromatic colour palette. Calvin Klein followed the same path, with Veronica Leoni, turning to American Minimalism, specifically its “discipline of removal.” The collection offered a complete wardrobe, reinviting key Calvin pieces over and over through a contemporary lens, with finely cut tailoring and delicate knits acting as the foundation to build one’s closet.

At Chanel, Matthieu Blazy honoured the woman Gabrielle Chanel was while imagining the many lives not only she but the universal Chanel woman will live in their lifetime. A true dissection of the self: “Throughout their lives, women become multiple selves, different faces of the same coin. It’s like a game of exquisite corpse, where one identity leads to another,” said Blazy. Directly translating into the clothes on the runway, the designer charted the brand’s ever-changing archive and Gabrielle’s personal wardrobe, taking cues from everything from the introduction of Edwardian corsetry to the designer’s defining work on the post-war suit.

Alessandro Michele took that idea of multiple selves in a different direction, meditating on the beauty in the unknown. Dissecting the Japanese practice of tsundoku – the habit of buying books and letting them pile up without reading them – Michele honoured the immeasurable value in knowledge not yet acquired. On the runway, Michele thought about the transient nature of clothing in the same way books pile up on your shelf. Much like the possibility of an unread book, “Many of the garments that we see in a fashion show belong entirely to the realm of potentiality. Their significance is not exhausted by the definition of use value; rather, it extends to what they make conceivable,” said the designer.

Fendi revelled in reflections: “We exist in relation to others, to what surrounds us,” said Maria Grazia Chiuri. Analysing the way clothing can alter the way we perceive not only ourselves but one another, and how one’s inner desires can appear in plain sight in the right outfit. Tom Ford acted on a similar train of thought, creating a collection that dripped with possibility. Staged in a space lined with mirrored panels, reflecting back at one another, the intimacy of perception translated into a typically seductive portrait of Ford’s characters.

Dressing up should be fun, and the clothes you wear should be made with love in mind; that’s what this season proved above all. Michael Rider’s Celine was an ode to “emotional dressing.” Since he arrived at the house, joy has been high on his agenda, bringing a sense of fun back to getting ready, remembering the “moments that made us love fashion,” and creating clothes with a shared sense of sentimentality. Simone Rocha’s collection was quite literally titled I’m trying to love you, studying the thoughts and work of Caravaggio, opening her show notes with the quote, “I bury my head in the pillow, and dream of my true love… I am rowing to you on the great, dark ocean.”

Meanwhile, Anthony Vaccarello soundtracked his tenth anniversary show to the words of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116. The most famous of the playwright’s meditations on love, the sonnet depicts true adoration as an unflinching force of consistency, not dissimilar to the unwavering devotion of Vaccarello to Saint Laurent, who has, for the last ten years, honoured six decades of history while penning a defining chapter in the house’s future.