PARIS — Ten a.m. on a frigid Monday morning, the primary day of the couture reveals, and Kylie Jenner was strutting by the marble halls of the Petit Palais looking for her seat for Schiaparelli, shoehorned into spiky stilettos and a black velvet one-arm robe, a full-size tawny lion’s head jutting from the facet. It was if Aslan had taken a break from Narnia and caught his muzzle by a time-space continuum beneath her armpit. Or perhaps it was Take Your Stuffed Toy to Work Day?

Nope: It was a gown so sizzling off the runway it hadn’t even appeared on the runway but — although it was about to, together with a strapless faux-fur sheath with a snow leopard head jutting from the bust, its mouth open in mid-roar, and a giant, bushy black silk and wool coat with a wolf’s snout rising from the shoulder.

Painstakingly sculpted from resin, painted by hand within the couture atelier, the fake animal heads had been purported to signify the vices of Dante’s “Inferno” — lust, pleasure, avarice — in line with the Schiaparelli designer Daniel Roseberry. He used the poem as one thing of a metaphor for his personal expertise with the stress to create the brand new; to make everybody sit up in surprise.

To carve out an area within the consideration economic system. If social media and the purple carpet are the hearth of fame, Mr. Roseberry stated, couture has develop into vogue’s “gasoline”: pour it on high and the conflagration will get ever hotter. It’s “culture-making,” he stated. Or outrage stirring. Lately, the 2 concepts can appear one and the identical (file them beneath “provocation”).

So the faux animal heads collided with actual animal rights and Jenner/Kardashian mores, and for a time the explosion swallowed the digisphere complete. Have been the seems selling huge recreation looking, regardless that they didn’t come from nature, or had been they celebrating the fantastic thing about the wild, as PETA declared, and facilitating “an anti-trophy-hunting dialogue”? Have been they really a metaphor for going after the wealthy — looking them, consuming them, promoting to them — or had been they a gimmick gone fallacious?

Objectively, they had been form of foolish, and the entire hoo-ha verged on the surreal (which is smart for Schiaparelli, a home rooted in surrealism). However of their viral ubiquity, in addition they set the tone for the week, and the reveals that unspooled thereafter.

Not simply because Chanel additionally had an animal theme, courtesy of the artist Xavier Veilhan, who created a large movable plywood bestiary for the set, in reference to Coco’s favored menagerie. However as a result of the drive to seize not simply hearts and minds however eyeballs could clarify the designer Virginie Viard’s in any other case puzzling addition of circus-master bow ties and high hats to her flirty bouclé skirt fits; slender, floor-sweeping coats; and drop-waist chiffon and feather frocks.

Additionally the upscaling of Giambattista Valli’s rose-colored taffeta and tulle creations, which resembled nothing a lot as sugar plum fairies on steroids. Perhaps even Giorgio Armani’s 77 iterations of harlequins.

As soon as upon a time the couture was a closed world — that teeny tiny section of vogue designed to showcase the artwork of the handmade, dominated by arcane necessities and priced so excessive it was accessible solely by the only a few: the apocryphal 200 world shoppers who had been keen to pay the equal of an entry-level annual wage (and up) for a gown a lot of the world would by no means see. The value justified by artistry, know-how and the concept that what couture designers did trickled down into the wardrobes of everybody else.

Prepandemic, the occasion line was that couture was a social media-safe area, as a result of it demanded the intimacy of private expertise. Now, nonetheless, powered by the gaze of the worldwide crowd, it has begun to morph into one thing else. Darwin would perceive

Certain, there are nonetheless those that delight within the subtlety of a garment so mysteriously constructed it reeks of ineffable ease: the gold fil coupé Bar jackets and straight skirts Maria Grazia Chiuri provided up at Dior that one way or the other managed to retain their exacting form with no inside boning; her crushed velvet bathrobe coats, gleaming with plush insouciance. In a preview, Ms. Chiuri stated she had been impressed by the story of the previous Dior consumer Josephine Baker, and her set was wrapped in work by the American artist Mickalene Thomas of 13 barrier-breaking girls of coloration. It might have been heavy-handed, however as a substitute the gathering simply riffed on a Nineteen Twenties line, a smidgen of Jazz Age decadence woven into the fabric, the consequence sitting frivolously on the physique.

Such understatement has an influence of its personal, even in a second of boldface names in pursuit of the visibly fabulous.

However it’s the want to be, stated Jordan Roth, the theater impresario, collector and occasional mannequin, “a singular piece of artwork on legs,” that makes couture — particularly in January, as awards season will get underway — the final word celeb dress-hunting floor (and the final word place to hunt celebrities; see the crowds outdoors the present venues, which resemble nothing a lot as crowds outdoors live performance venues, shrieking and waving their smartphones). A well-liked recreation has develop into guess who will put on what to the Oscars/BAFTAs/Césars. Everybody can play.

At Dior, odds are the cowled sleeveless robes totally embroidered in gleaming gold and silver thread, the jewel-tone velvets channeling a siren draped languidly over a piano, will probably be coming quickly to a purple carpet close to you. Ditto Chanel’s filigree white lace quantity with a little bit of gold embroidery gleaming on the throat.

As for what one of the best actress nominee Michelle Yeoh, entrance row at Armani Privé, would possibly select from amongst all of the diamonds and ruffs sprinkled over a group that ranged from courtroom jester to Picasso by way of trousers flapping an additional material fin on the facet, caviar-bead cropped jackets and shimmering sequined robes, there have been some much less — properly — tough, choices.

However the hazard within the present recreation of one-upmanship is that the garments typically tip into the ridiculous. At Schiaparelli, Ms. Jenner (who additionally sat entrance row at Maison Margiela, the place John Galliano delivered his patented model of upcycled mayhem by mashing collectively tulle, tartan, fishnets, Mickey Mouse and Pendleton outerwear) and her lion head managed to overshadow not solely Doja Cat, who arrived coated in 30,000 ruby crystals like some kind of émigré from an Avatar-themed Met Gala, but additionally the very fact that there have been components of the gathering that verged on the elegant.

The opening look’s jacket, for instance, produced from lots of of encrusted sequins tracing a perfume-bottle silhouette, over easy black pants. A pinstripe trouser swimsuit that performed with proportions in order that jutting shoulders created the phantasm of a Mr. Pearl-size waist, however with out the rearranged organs. Breast plates produced from abalone, valuable stones and lemonwood marquetry that soared upward towards the throat and stretched the very definition of fabric.

As soon as all of the smoke from the wild kingdom controversy had cleared, they had been a reminder that typically, whenever you pour gasoline on a hearth, you threat getting burned.