See Inside the Versace Runway Show in L.A. and the Top Paris Fashion Week Shows Revealed

This week, WWD has your front row seat to the Versace runway show in Los Angeles. Also, we reveal buyers favorites from Paris Fashion Week. Plus, Summer Fridays’  Marianna Hewitt and Lauren Ireland discuss celebrating five years in business and what's next for the brand and Tom Ford honors plastic-free designers.

Retail Buyers List Their Favorites From Paris Fashion Week

The buzz is back in Paris, and buyers were feeling it this season.

Retailers cited the energy and excitement of having a packed calendar with shows and parties galore, the thrill of finding new talent, as well as designers focusing more on clothes and less on gimmicks. Paris Fashion Week — like those in New York, London and Milan — is in the midst of a vibe shift, moving from slouchy street style into a more tailored and refined moment.

“The aura is elegance, and the undercurrent is wearability — but nothing is boring about the more commercial spirit of the Paris collections,” said Rickie De Sole, women’s fashion director at Nordstrom.

Read on here for the full story.

Versace’s ‘Almost Couture’ in Los Angeles

Donatella Versace staged a Hollywood moment at magic hour in L.A., with a strong collection pushing power tailoring, pure shapes and a lot of black — for men and women.

The Milan fashion house wanted to decamp pre-Oscars to Hollywood, the place that literally and figuratively has given it so much over the past 40-plus years in the way of inspiration, red-carpet moments and campaign faces.

Beyond gathering 520 guests for a Versace-branded gold carpet, no fewer than 120 of them VIPs dressed by the house, the mission was to elevate.

“It’s almost couture,” Versace said of the collection in the backstage scrum Thursday afternoon.

Read on here for the full review.

Marianna Hewitt, Lauren Ireland on Summer Fridays’ Fifth Anniversary and What Comes Next

OG influencer brand Summer Fridays has turned five years old.

Founded by lifestyle bloggers Marianna Hewitt and Lauren Ireland in 2018 with one stock keeping unit — Jet Lag Mask, now a Sephora bestseller — the brand is marking its fifth anniversary with its first New York pop-up, open from March 10 to March 12 at SoHo’s Upside Pizza.

“It’s rewarding to create an immersive Summer Fridays experience; you can kind of get an understanding of the brand on our Instagram or website, but to be able to see the brand in a physical space with other community members and getting to meet Lauren and I — that’s something so special,” said Hewitt.

Read on here for the full story.

Plastic-free Innovations Stuck in Pilot: Can Tom Ford’s 2023 Hopefuls Change That?

The Tom Ford Plastic Innovation Prize hopes to shake things up — revealing three plastic-free prize winners.

More than five million metric tons of thin-film plastic pollute the ocean every year, according to data from UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. Since 2020, Tom Ford has partnered with Lonely Whale to put on the prize. Today, it is one of a handful of projects focused on scaling up plastic-free, degradable and marine-safe solutions to polybags within current supply chains.

This final selection was made from eight finalists, announced in March 2022 (pared down from 64 total submissions). Over the past year, finalists engaged in a year-long material testing phase sponsored by Nike.

Read on here for the full story.

Check out more of this week's top stories here:

• WWD Report Card: What Should the Oscar Nominees Wear on Sunday?
• A Saks Casino: Gauging the Impact to the Luxury Brand
• ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Costume Designer Shirley Kurata Has Deep Fashion Roots