Fewer and fewer designers are willing to take risks, or are even capable of it today. The creative desertification of luxury fashion is so real that you have to thank the outliers like Mulier for throwing out the rare intellectual challenge of looking at things you think you don’t recognize or compute as clothes. Possibly his commercial success in establishing Alaïa as a house that sells bags and wildly popular mesh Mary Jane ballet flats has had something to do with the confidence he has in taking his freedom to experiment.

And high order luxury it definitely was. Of course, there were belted leather coats, cropped jackets, and draped, side-knotted jersey dresses that were distinctively Alaïa-centric. One extraordinary slim tailored coat with a veil-hood made an outstanding meld of Arabic symbolism and Parisian tailoring.

But, fashion eyes being what they are, the spectaculars kept swallowing up the attention. There were astonishing feats of knitwear, somehow made in overlapping layered geometries seamlessly wrapping the body, or dripping in multi-scrolls in around a skirt. Whichever factories Mulier’s working with, their technology is spectacularly advanced.

Well, what was all this “about”? One thing not spotted among Mulier’s knits was red thread—but when it came to hearing his backstage debrief, that’s exactly what he was talking about. Rather than setting out to design an “out-there” collection, he explained that the “fil rouge” binding the shapes and textures together was their commonality across cultures and customs throughout the world, and centuries.

It would take a further ethnographic essay to link up the comparisons he drew between hoodies and coifs traditional to Northern Spain, 16th-century farthingale-rolls and African tribal (he was not specific about which) ceremonial dress, pleats from Polish folk costumes and the Alaïa skirts, and so on. “We minimized it all,” he said. Turns out there was a message about the unity of humanity underneath it all.