Gold Medal Looks in Paris

The question of inspiration has always been a little cringey when it comes to fashion: Designers offering up “mood board” collages backstage to turn even the genesis of their collections into content and connect them to some deeper meaning that can often seem either ridiculously convoluted or drippingly banal. Hence Miranda Priestley’s famous “Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking” moment in “The Devil Wears Prada.”

It was a moment that came to mind at the beginning of the Paris couture shows, when guests entered the Dior tent at the Musée Rodin to see the walls covered in 32 mosaic murals of sprinters and surfers and soccer players, recreations of works by the American artist Faith Ringgold (who died in April, at 93). And again, at the beginning of the Thom Browne show, when two teams of white skirt-suited men picked up a long braided rope and engaged in a theatrical tug of war, encouraged by a coach whose head was swathed in a golden laurel wreath.

Sports? During an Olympic summer in the city hosting the Games? Groundbreaking.

And yet the result, at least when it came to these two collections, actually was. Welcome to the age of athcouture.

It’s one way to take fashion’s most hidebound art — the made-to-order styles for the .001 percent; the laboratory of fashion, where a lucky few designers get to play to their hearts’ content — and make it relevant.

The whole idea of athletics got Maria Grazia Chiuri of Dior, for example, thinking about freedom: the freedom of the body that comes from sports wear (as opposed to sportswear), the freedom that cycling granted women in the late 19th century, the freedom that not focusing on the New Look could give her. And that, in turn, got her thinking about jersey, a material with industrial overtones that she had never used in couture.