High Fashion Finds Its Man

PARIS - Jocks like Victor Cruz may not seem like the obvious target market for high-end fashion designers. Yet the wide receiver, who last year signed an estimated $46 million contract extension with the Giants, is a banner example of where exactly we find ourselves in the ongoing evolution of men's wear.

Mr. Cruz loves fashion. He said so himself before the start of the Lanvin show, held at the venerable École des Beaux-Arts early on a drizzly Sunday. That a pro ballplayer like Mr. Cruz would elect on his off-time to flit around Paris amid a crowd mostly of men who think nothing of wearing skorts or skirts or dropped-crotch trousers is itself an indicator.

'I've learned so much from designers,' said Mr. Cruz, who has been a consistent front-row presence not just at shows by mainstream designers but also at those of insider darlings like Dries Van Noten and Rick Owens. 'It's really helped me reveal my life and my personality through clothes.'

Young, rich, handsome, confident in his masculinity, Mr. Cruz is representative in most senses of an observation the Dior designer Kris Van Assche made about the 27-year-old athlete's generation. Secure enough financially to indulge in fashion, culturally liberated from any stigma that might once have attached to guys who expressed serious interest in clothes, he is an emblem of the future.

'Take a plane and look who's sitting in first and business,' Mr. Van Assche said backstage before a show that opened with three tuxedos and then tried to set up a lively dialogue between formality and informality. 'It's not some 70-year-old.' When the tension between the sports- and formal-wear held - a suit in white denim comes to mind; oxfords with boat-shoe grommets - the clothes seemed just right for well-heeled highfliers. When it didn't - the blander suiting and some overliteral references to boating - even the post-pubescent models seemed aged by the clothes.

If the Paris season has been about anything, it is an attempt by designers to capture a market share made up mostly of men who turn left by instinct when boarding a plane.

Though flights of artistry were rare here, travel was clearly on people's minds. At Louis Vuitton, the designer Kim Jones used research accumulated on a recent trip through the Indian Desert region of Rajasthan to put together a tonally assured show of trench coats, double-breasted suits, field jackets and flight suits in luxury fabrications rendered ordinary-looking through workroom trompe l'oeil.

Mother India lays dangerously seductive traps for Western designers. They visit and come back drunk on visual clichés. Pink, for instance, is no more the navy blue of India than is olive drab or mud brown. In conversation Mr. Jones blithely recycled that old saw attributed to Diana Vreeland, and yet on the runway he proved himself more discerning, deploying bright colors with caution, as punctuation, particularly notable in a flamingo-hued flight suit inspired by Maharajah Hanwant Singh of Jodhpur, a passionate early aviator killed when his small plane crashed into power lines.

Is it a stretch to suggest that in a masterly show built around boro, the traditional Japanese patchwork fabrics worn by workers, Junya Watanabe was also exploring themes of travel? Mr. Watanabe is, after all, Japanese. Yet so seldom have his collections made much in the way of specific reference to his country's peerless crafts traditions that he seemed to have embarked on a homecoming tour. At the show, set in a schoolhouse from the era of Napoleon III, against a backdrop screen evocative of the Edo dynasty and to a soundtrack that blended sumo wrestlers' grunts with American jazz, the suits and jeans or barn jackets and trousers in blue and also gray and cream patchwork were a kind of extended essay in cultural hybridization.

It also accomplished something unexpected. A show by a Japanese designer in Paris may not seem like the most obvious example of the universal influence the United States has exerted on fashion. Yet consider that Mr. Watanabe showed his clothes with flip-flops and the story shifts. Americans were the first to democratize all forms of work wear, Levi's being the most universal example. It follows that the notion of it being acceptable, even cool, to wear flip-flops (or zoris, as the original Japanese versions are called) with a suit is a distinctly American one.