Five striking trends emerged from the first days of Paris Fashion Week, which ended yesterday.

DECADENT DANDIES

The front-row guests at Dries Van Noten’s sumptuous show were ready to give their (redone) front teeth for anything from what Vogue called this “spine-chillingly elegant” collection of leopard-spot suits, gold lame coats and poison-green furs. The standout show of the opening days drew on 1930s aristocratic dandies and the Marchesa Luisa Casati in particular, who never left home without her pearls or a pet cheetah or two.

Van Noten offered a wonderfully sensuous take on Edwardian aristocratic decadence, with pearl-encrusted fur jackets and silky leopard-print trousers and suits. You almost imagine the cross-dressing writer Rita Sackville West wearing this gear as she returned at dawn from a party.

The Belgian designer said he was inspired by the passion between the Italian heiress Luisa Casati, who famously said, “I want to be a living work of art”, and the writer Gabriele d’Annunzio.

THE WILD WEST

Paris has rounded up the wagons and gone West for inspiration. Chloe riffed off its classic hippie-dippy look with cowboy-gaucho capes and floaty frilly dresses that saloon girls could only dream of, while the (East) Indian designer Manish Arora created a line of super-colourful punky tribal squaws that would have given even Vivienne Westwood the vapours for his “Hell’s Belles” show.

And Anne Sofie Madsen set off too into the lost Native American heartland in search of Elvis Presley’s Cherokee roots.

Westwood declared her husband Andreas Kronthaler “the world’s greatest designer” as he emerged from her flamboyant shadow on Saturday with his first solo Paris show.

As guests cheered his |chutzpah, Westwood confessed to reporters that Kronthaler – |who is 25 years her junior – had long been the power behind the throne.

Kronthaler, who’s worked closely with Westwood for years both as a model, stylist and muse, sent a dizzying array of disparate looks down the runway in the show billed as “Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood”.

All were in one way or another gender bending, with priestly girls, men in gold lame dresses and snakeskin-effect boots, and women in oversized Alpine jackets from his native Tyrol.

Some of his models looked like senators emerging from a Roman bathhouse in blood-red togas, while others wore long trailing Tibetan monk’s hats, but all – male and female – wore platform shoes and boots.

MINI EQUALS MINIMALISM

With fashion in the something of a more-is-better spiral, Courreges brought it sharply back to the basics of its 1960s minimalist roots. As well as its headline-grabbing self-heating coats it went big on miniskirts, which the brand claims to have co-invented, a trend picked up by Anthony Vaccarello among others.

The French label Courreges announced the dawn of the “new era” last Wednesday, “an era when the garment will come alive”.

“Who has never dreamt of being warm in the winter?” its designers Sebastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant declared. “This transition is possible if technology responds to our primary needs – wellbeing and comfort.”

Three of its chic full length autumn-winter wool coats have been fitted with a slim-line heating system, much like the ones which warm up cars seats on winter mornings. “By simply applying pressure” on a button, they said, “you give the coat life.”

The brand, one of the pioneers of futuristic 1960s style under its visionary founder Andre Courreges, vowed that this was only the beginning of its voyage into hi-tech clothing.

Co-president Frederic Torloting said that as yet the move was “symbolic”, but they had ambitions to go much further.

“Technology has been a very tricky subject for fashion. It’s often seen as antithetical, that hi-tech isn’t glamorous,” he said. “But that’s wrong. It can be made glamorous!”

BIKER CHIC

While Paris has only tentatively followed Milan’s lead on thigh-high boots, it has gone hell for leather on a rebooted biker look, with Paco Rabanne, Anthony Vaccarello, Carven Ready and Wanda Nylon all looking to “Easy Rider” in the rear-view mirror. Chloe even dedicated its collection to the 1970s motorcycle adventurer Anne-France Dautheville.

SEE-THRU DUNGAREES

See-through is usually synonymous with sexy – until it’s applied to a pair of dungarees. New takes on workwear are everywhere on the very practical and wearable Paris catwalk, with Wanda Nylon turning out nifty see-through denim-type jackets.

Her dungarees, though, will never hold a candle to blue-jean real things worn by Beatrice Dalle in “Betty Blue”.

It was back to the future on the Paris catwalks Tuesday as Chanel cleverly tweaked its back catalogue only for Saint Laurent to revive a look that some thought best forgotten.

In what could be his last show for the label, designer Hedi Slimane – the man credited with the skinny black jeans look and making grunge glam – was judged to have given the brand “the finger” by parodying its founder Yves Saint Laurent’s least glorious period.

The hugely-influential Women’s Wear Daily was scathing about his collection which went hell for shiny snakeskin leather for late 1980s vamp, claiming that it was drawing on a time when “Yves Saint Laurent was well past his creative prime”.

Slimane sent out a succession of very short one-shouldered dresses with gigantic bows, belts and black angel or bat wings that would not have looked out of place in “Miami Vice”.

Their full-throttle glamour had some style editors shifting awkwardly in their chairs, each of which carried a brass plate onto which their names had been engraved.

Vogue, however, was complimentary, hailing “Slimane firing on full on Eighties glam… clubland style” and particularly adoring a “cropped smoking topped off a skintight sequin catsuit”.

The verdict on social media was mixed. While one style editor wryly described one dress as “Batwoman”, a red heart-shaped fur coat provoked another fashion fan to tweet: “I can’t believe Saint Laurent murdered Gossamer from Looney Tunes to make a coat” – referring to the hairy red monster who is always trying to eat Bugs Bunny.

“It must have been parody – as in giant middle-finger parody,” Bridget Foley of Women’s |Wear Daily wrote of the show staged late Monday in a Left Bank mansion.

“‘Hey,’ Hedi Slimane said with every look, ‘you who didn’t love my indie-druggie-grungy-disaffected LA youth routine these past four years. How ’bout Eighties camp couture?… The parody didn’t play nicely.”

She was not a fan either of the exaggerated padded shoulders of his coats. “Just how silly can a shoulder treatment get? Answer: Pretty silly.”

There was no such controversy at Chanel, where designer Karl Lagerfeld, who was only hitting his stride in the 1980s, continued his modernising riff on the brand’s core looks, with lots of boucle |wool jackets, coats and skirts, |and piles of pearls and big necklaces.

The Kaiser, as Lagerfeld is known, created an old-fashioned couture salon inside the French capital’s Grand Palais.

His models strode down the aisles in front of stars that included singer Pharrell Williams in riding hats that had a little of Bertie Bassett about them.

While Coco Chanel loved to sport a boater, Lagerfeld told AFP that the hats were “something you could nearly wear on your bike and on your motorbike because they can protect you.

“They are quite tough… but at the same time they have a frivolous note with a piece of jewellery of a flower there,” he added.

A strong equestrian theme ran right through the collection with the hats decorated with rosettes and black riding boots open at the ankles.

Despite the set evoking the nostalgia of an old couture show, Lagerfeld, 82, said there was nothing old school about his clothes.

“These dresses are not old couture, the collection has a more street attitude,” he insisted.

The models were not tottering in high heels he said, because these clothes “were made for walking, like Nancy Sinatra’s song” – “These Boots Are Made For Walking”.

Move over, models of the moment Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner. The real star of Paris Fashion Week is a wisecracking 94-year-old New Yorker.

“Someone once told me, ‘You’re not pretty and you never will be,'” Iris Apfel joked to reporters as she was whisked with the occasional aid of a wheelchair between a reception in her honour and yet another catwalk show. “‘But it doesn’t matter. You have something else – you have style.'”

The flamboyant interior designer, a fixture on front rows of Paris fashion shows for half a century, is again the toast of the town.

Her very individual style is the subject an exhibition at the posh Parisian department store Le Bon Marche and she’s the star of a new advertising campaign for the carmaker Citroen, as well as the face of the Australian label Blue Illusion’s “Ageless” range.

A fashion institution immediately recognisable by her oversized owlish glasses, Apfel saw her fame spread beyond the style pages after the success of Albert Maysles’ 2014 documentary about her, “Iris”.

It helped turn her into what she calls a “geriatric starlet”, with everyone from Alexander Wang to rapper Kanye West declaring themselves fans of the world’s most chic nonagenarian, best known for her love of baubles.

In a year when mature women have been a common sight on the Paris catwalk, dominating the Undercover and Manish Arora shows, Apfel trail-blazed for the much older woman.

“She represents the epitome of style and elegance. She’s perfection,” American model Leigh Lezark told a French TV channel after meeting her at the Dries Van Noten show.

Belgian designer Van Noten was equally effusive, telling Apfel he was thinking about her when he was creating his much-praised collection. “She’s an idol and an infinite source of inspiration for me,” he told Canal Plus. “I want everyone to live like her, with grace and style. She wears the most amazing things. And she never wears the same thing twice.”

Never one to shy away from colour or unconventional shapes, Apfel urged young women at one gathering to abandon the modern “uniform of black tights or jeans with a sweater, boots and a leather bomber jacket”.

Instead, she told them, “Dare to be different. Be yourselves, be individual. If you wear something and it doesn’t work, don’t worry – the style police aren’t going to arrest you.”

Museums have been trying for years to show the huge collection of couture Apfel has amassed. |It fills two floors of her apartment in Manhattan with work by the great designers of the 20th century.

New York’s Metropolitan Museum staged the first major retrospective of her wardrobe in 2005, with Apfel admitting she was as likely to pick up interesting jewellery in a Harlem junk shop as at Tiffany’s.

The key to enjoying life, she says, is to never stop working. “I haven’t,” she told guests at a reception in her honour at the American embassy in Paris.

“If I sat down it would be a disaster. People just roll over. Life can be very grey. You have to look at the better side of it and do things that help you and the |world.

“Try new things. Don’t let age and numbers frighten you. You have to find your own bliss, be as individual as you can, and don’t go with the herd.”