That’s the thing with the Paris show schedule: From designer to designer, show to show, a mood shift is positively guaranteed. That was certainly the case when going from the bravura maximalist theater of Alessandro Michele’s runway debut for Valentino to the cheery, welcoming calm of Margaret Howell’s showroom, where Howell and her design directors, Rosamund Ward (she oversees women) and Ioannis Cholidis (and he men), were on hand to talk through the collection.
It was a very desirable, considered, and effortless mix of linen button-back dresses, belted raincoats, slouchy (to a degree) trousers, and layers of shirts (some cut to a new longer length), as well as unconstructed jackets with the ease of shirting, wide shorts, and sweaters that felt classic yet were imbued with a newness of fit, being that little bit looser and that little bit shorter. All of this came in a palette that felt traditional—browns, black, grays, a chalky white, and the softest greens—yet also reimagined to feel new, as if striving to find previously unimagined shades. (I loved that the pale blue-gray was, apparently, the result of a turnip-dyeing process.) All were worked across the likes of linen, Swiss cotton, denim, cotton drill, cashmere, and crisp wool.
Yet despite the obvious aesthetic differences between Howell and the label that showed before her, something unites them: How you bring the past into the present, make it resonate, make it sing, make it feel alive. Howell is well versed in that. It’s a tribute to her intelligence and sensitivity as a designer that she can revisit elements of what she has done before because she can see how they connect to the everyday reality of how people dress in the here and now, often triggered by her noticing how people are dressing and putting themselves together.
Howell’s aesthetic might sometimes reverberate with the past—her own or from some period of the 20th century (spring 2025, for instance, had some touches of the 1920s; the tunic-y patch-pocket shirt, say, or the collar on a sweater)—but the attitude and mindset are rigorously and undeniably of today. I’ve often thought she sees time as part of her creative process quite differently from other designers; plenty of the latter will tell you they want constancy while actually always wanting to relentlessly (and needlessly sometimes) move the hands on the clock forward, convincing you to discard everything that went before.
Howell, on the other hand, is no stranger to introducing newness while preserving what went before as absolutely relevant to where she is as a designer right now. It feels more cyclical with her. It might be the only showroom appointment I’ve done where a decades-old design—the most perfect belt in exquisite leather with a sterling silver hallmarked buckle—was shown as enthusiastically as something designed in the past few months. To my mind, this can only be a good and welcome thing.
As Howell, Ward, and Cholidis walked through the collection, dates and anecdotes came flooding out: The first look was a dress Ward had discovered in the archive that Howell had designed in the ’90s and retooled by putting less buttons down the back; another dress was based on one Howell had worn constantly since she introduced it in a collection roughly a decade ago, so it was welcomed back into the fold. A terrific bomber jacket, with its waist tabs and buttons switched from the front to the back, was originally from a collection in the ’80s that Cholidis had loved and wanted to bring back…and so on and so forth. Then just to throw it off a little, Howell’s ongoing collaboration with Japanese sportswear brand Mizuno—a zip-front vest, an anorak—was folded into the mix, reminding you that when it comes to Howell, the past, present, and future can speak together with absolute fluency.
