Sex Is Back on the Table in Paris

Balenciaga starts the heavy breathing. With shimmies from Hermès, Stella McCartney and Victoria Beckham.

Under the golden dome of Les Invalides, the 17th-century monument where Napoleon is entombed, and on the penultimate day of fashion month, Balenciaga built a giant black box — the better to house a 154-foot long (47-meter) wooden dining table, polished to a high sheen.

Not because, as some guests posited, the brand’s mononymous creative director, Demna, wanted to issue some pointed social commentary on who gets a seat at the table (Answer: Nicole Kidman, Katy Perry, the WNBA player Cameron Brink, various brand pooh-bahs and various editor in chiefs). And not because Demna was hinting this was his last supper, though given the freneticism of the rumor mill currently spinning in fashion, it would not have been out of character for him to juice it a bit.

But because, he said backstage afterward, as a teenager he was endlessly drawing fashion collections and showing them to his family at the dining table, and that was “the beginning of my, I don’t know, obsession, or what I would call a marriage, to this job.” It is, he said, “probably one of the longest relationships I’ve been in.” Maybe that’s why he started the collection with a white lace bra, girdle, garter belt and stockings.

Sex, it seemed, was back on the menu. Spicy.

This wasn’t the first time a tabletop had become a runway — Dries Van Noten did it in 2004 — but it has been awhile.

It has also been an oddly neutered season. The in-your-face-with-my-flesh naked dressing prevalent not that long ago has practically disappeared from the catwalks. Maybe it’s simply a backlash to what came before or maybe it’s due to a general free-floating anxiety about the state of — well, almost everything — that has created a sort of big-brand paralysis. Or maybe it’s the widespread tiptoeing around about what sexy is and who gets to define it, but there has been more covering than uncovering when it comes to the body. Even the lingerie touches popping up in various shows are not so much provocative as polite; about a certain kind of dressing, rather than undressing.