Paris Heat hits coat sales

Paris closed its spring/summer shows this week in the wrong season. The city hit 28°C (82°F) while Saint Laurent billboards still sold a model in a thick fur coat, and the guests who actually showed up were in sleeveless tops and minis.

That mismatch is no longer a punchline. It is a sales problem. Fashion’s calendar still assumes autumn means coats, and coats are where the margin sits. Warmer Octobers push that demand later, which leaves retailers holding heavy stock and then marking it down. Pau Almar, a retail consultant who spent a decade at Zara, put it bluntly: the industry has to accept that the coat season has shifted later. At Louis Vuitton’s show on Tuesday, coats were scarce in the audience. One guest from Miami said her sales associate kept offering them and she turned them down as a waste. Nicolas Ghesquière said Europe’s heatwaves had a “strong influence” on the collection, which leaned on thin fabrics and airy construction. “The focus was on how do you do clothes that are like swimwear almost, like a second skin,” he told reporters.

At Dior, guests who had dressed for autumn overheated in the Tuileries even with fans over the runway.

The same week, the demand side looked softer too. Citi’s credit-card data shows U.S. spending on luxury brands fell 6 percent in September from a year earlier, the third straight monthly decline after 4 percent drops in July and August. Leather goods and ready-to-wear steadied a little; watches and jewelry weakened further. Citi flagged Tapestry, LVMH, and Ferragamo as the names most exposed to the American shopper, and noted that brands selling to the very top of the market should hold up better on equity-market wealth. The timing is awkward: the U.S. midterms are November 3, and LVMH’s next sales update is October 12.

Behind the runway, the management shuffle was quieter and sharper. Lacoste fired chief executive Eric Vallat shortly before its Paris show at the end of last week, three sources told Reuters. The brand confirmed the ouster. Vallat, formerly of Rémy Cointreau, had been in the job only since June 2025, hired to push the crocodile label upmarket and cut low-margin wholesale on the way to a €4 billion sales target for 2028–2030. Two sources said performance was not the reason.

Thierry Guibert, who ran Lacoste for a decade before Vallat and heads Swiss parent Maus Frères, is taking the CEO role back.

Retail capital is moving in the other direction. Frasers Group disclosed an 8.8 percent stake in Under Armour, extending a sports-brand push that already includes Puma stock, and this week folded its Burberry, Hugo Boss, and Mulberry holdings into a new luxury division.

Elsewhere, ASOS is investigating after app users received a notification claiming the company had been “fully compromised,” and shares fell about 10 percent.

On the clothes themselves, Paris spent the week dismantling the total look. Schiaparelli’s Daniel Roseberry wrote that signature gowns and necklines were being broken into tops and bottoms buyers can mix. Skirts dominated, fluid and long or inflated into the old Lacroix pouf. Chanel, under Matthieu Blazy, closed Monday in tiger-print tweed and sheer skirt suits, still one of the few houses whose recent creative reset is showing up in sales. Gabriela Hearst showed ikat and shisha-mirror embroidery, partly made with Afghan women artisans.

Next on the calendar: Lakmé Fashion Week in partnership with the FDCI runs October 14–18 at Taj Palace, New Delhi, with Manish Malhotra among the headline shows.