John Galliano Spring 2010 Men´s.

Something unexpected happened in John Galliano's latest show.

It was the usual wall-to-wall spectacle, with the usual cast of thousands, painted and garbed to resemble anyone but themselves.

But, for once, it sort of made sense.

The theme was Napoleon's rise and rise, and—the Napster being a character whom Galliano effectively identifies with—the show's arc had a real cinematic drive.

An early highlight was the transformation of skinny white boy Cole Mohr into a flashing-eyed, olive-skinned corsair, but the real business was the outerwear that the corsairs got to wear.

A new chapter brought flower-wreathed Hellenes in an idiosyncratic mix of tailoring and…not-tailoring.

Cole Mohr

Impressive indeed was the way that a sarong was actually the new Galliano shirt (his signature newsprint over-printed with flowers) knotted around a model's waist.

Ash Stymest

Muslin-shrouded desert rats looked like wraiths in their sand-colored suits, but there were also denim jackets with cuffs crusted with embroidery.

Napoleon's Sicily sojourn featured one more opportunity for someone to display Simon Nessman in briefs, this time with a gilded torso (do designers make a bathing suit specially for him?) followed by a finale that impressively re-created the Napoleon of Abel Gance's 1927 movie, and gave him the outerwear of the season—a romantic, floating, multilayered frock coat—to wear.

Paul

Galliano's eye for detail is always admirably served by his team, but this particular outing managed to have its eye on the production and the product.

Romulo Pires

Julian Hennig

Jakob Weichmann

Gen

Simon Nessman

Nils Butler

Vladimir Ivanov

Patrick Kafka

Taylor Fuchs

Versace Spring 2010 Men´s.

Versace's menswear has been disappointingly inanimate since Cloak's Alexandre Plokhov was brought in from New York to juice it up, but this season Plokhov shook it awake with a spectacular reminder of why he was originally considered worthy of the Versace gig.

You can't beat a good story, and Plokhov had one: French Foreign Legionnaire lost in sand dunes falls in with local tribesmen and adjusts wardrobe accordingly.

The mix of the uniform and the exotic created hybrid styles as airily appealing as a striped navy jacket over a djellaba; or an officer's shirt, sans sleeves, in a gauzy silk cheesecloth; or a parka in a translucent glazed cotton.

"Lightness, lightness, lightness."

Plokhov couldn't say it enough. His enthusiasm carried over into the ways his narrative allowed him to reenergize Versace's deluxe delights.

Even he could scarcely believe a jacket in matte alligator. He'd found militaristic toggle closings to tone down the excess.

The same toggles also toughened up a stonewashed linen suit.

Equally creative was a top with panels of leather treated to look like the cracked pattern of dried-up earth.

Sticking to the exotic theme, there were prints of python and tortoiseshell, and belts and jewelry that looked freshly plucked from a Tuareg market.

But this was no National Geographic exercise in fashion ethnology.

The eveningwear option of dinner jacket and djellaba made perfect sense as a union of two strikingly elegant dress codes.

James Sorrentino