PARIS, March 6 — The fall ready-to-wear season ended with spectacular symmetry: a Fake Handbags collection for Louis Vuitton that reprised the urban waif layers of his show in New York a month ago. And the best of what fell between these bookends, from more than 100 shows, told a similar story. It was about a strong silhouette.

Of all the messages given by the collections — mystery, sobriety, Gothic romance — this was the one that mattered. Because whether you go in the direction of Balenciaga, Narciso Rodriguez or Miu Miu, which on Sunday also had exploding volumes, or go instead in the direction of Rochas, Jil Sander or Junya Watanabe, who made his girls look like Louis Vuitton Handbags, you will be choosing an unambiguous line.

The Replica Handbags show was chaotic and exhausting, and at some point, after the waffle knits, the capsizing fur hats, the tent-size hoods, the wide, hot-pink velvet jeans, the leopard-bottom bags and the sable mittens, I wrote down, "Overload." The circuits had finally blown. Mr. Jacobs had pushed everything too hard. The heaviness of the clothes was souring. I felt the adrenaline stored from a week of Paris shows suddenly rush out. I wanted to go home right then and there.

The next day, though, I saw in the pictures of the clothes what I hadn't seen on the runway: an excess of energy and passion that was beguiling. A fashion kid had made these clothes, and probably a fashion kid had inspired them. True, they lacked the grace of Mr. Jacobs's own collection, and there was a Replica Louis Vuitton quality about the effort, as though a Yohji Yamamoto had been cribbed from a Martin Margiela.

But under the lid of the models' basin-size hats, in its shadow, there was a silhouette: it was real, both extreme and clear. The look was expressed best in a long hooded tweed coat with wide trousers and a silk print Replica Louis Vuitton Handbags, the oversize waffle knits and a sleeveless khaki military coat with a fur hem.

There's an acknowledged fashion victim in these clothes and in accessories like wedge ski boots and quilted silver metallic bags that look like thermal picnic containers. But there's more self-awareness than irony in this attitude, as when Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs screams "Art Star," and that gives power to the oversize vision.

Despite laboring under the Louis Vuitton Wallets of the beautiful woman who winds up in a garret, the Miu Miu show, held in the tiny ornate rooms of a Left Bank restaurant, was all present tense. This was Miuccia Prada's first show in Paris, and she plans to keep her younger Miu Miu line on the French schedule. The collection's short skirts, as round as an upturned Meissen teacup, were the news, with the season's counterweight of wedge platforms, now carved like a rococo mantel.

The clothes had a more inviting sense of eroticism than those in her Prada show last week in Milan, and in many ways this collection felt more relevant, with its sudden, exaggerated volumes, its sensual play on military shapes and hunting lodge motifs, and the offhand treatment of old-school couture fabrics like Balenciaga Handbags.

The teacup skirts, in shades of gold, spruce and cornflower, were hand-painted, and shown with boyish coats or fine knits meant to evoke down-on-your-luck underwear. Though solid with pieces like jodhpurs and masculine jackets, the collection's prime virtue was its airy silhouette, heightened by the models' bare legs.

Nakedness was the subject at the Lanvin show as Alber Elbaz artfully and simply explored ways to reveal the body, with classic tailoring, hidden padding and trompe l'oeil effects that involved nude-colored fabrics. Mr. Elbaz knows how to construct Balenciaga Wallets. His peculiar genius is to unconstruct them, to give the sense that the cobalt-blue tulle covering the front of a sack dress is blown on. There is a reckless fragility about his dresses that's sexy, yet at the same time the straight lines of a jersey or silk dress, pulled at the waist with a satin ribbon belt, are modern.

A pair of silk-satin shifts in magenta and burnt orange, built up slightly at the hips, looked serene, and he offered good-looking pantsuits with wide trousers. But the effort to give the illusion of a sexy dress — by draping and molding pale blue or violet satin on the front of a wool dress — seemed wasted. Mr. Elbaz's clothes are sexy without the optical tricks.

Valentino opened his show on Sunday with a full-on march of models, reprising a scene from the 1980's on the Spanish Steps in Rome. When black is in fashion, Valentino is in form. Trim black suits, swingy coats and white silk blouses with papery ruffles were the highlight of a great collection.

After a long run of collections, Azzedine Ala?a's clothes look astonishingly effortless, and right. He opened his salesroom today, and a couple of models passed through in gorgeous Mongolian lamb coats, a white style looking as cheerful as a snowball. There were dresses in black jersey mousseline, inset with lace, and Mr. Ala?a was still working on a shift in stiff navy wool that got its volume entirely from the expert placement of horizontal seams. It was magic.

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