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PARIS (AP) — Loewe’s latest VIP-filled collection dazzled at the Paris Fashion Week runway Friday, presenting an explosion of flowers and form that captured designer Jonathan Anderson’s innovative spirit.

The Northern Irish designer again showed his talent for infusing theatricality into his designs, showcasing whimsical creations like a surreal giant hoop skirt that lent the display an eccentric, circus-like feel. A stunning white gown adorned with vibrant floral prints radiated energy.

Here are some highlights of spring-summer ready-to-wear shows:

Loewe’s twists

Unexpected lines and twists on classic silhouettes dominated the runway, with the giant hoop transforming floral patterns into eccentric spectacles. Anderson expertly wove together historical inspirations from the Renaissance with the carefree looseness of the 1920s, mixed with surreal structured skirts and peplums that evoked a rich sense of heritage. All designs had something off-kilter about them.

A standout piece, a beautiful feathered poncho featuring a Van Gogh print, dazzled with its artistic flair. It illustrated Anderson’s ability to transform art into fashion and resonated deeply with camera-ready audiences. Each piece seemed to challenge the viewer’s expectations, daring them to reconsider the boundaries of traditional fashion.

In its exploration of bold concepts and mind-bending forms, the display occasionally veered into the overly conceptual. But Anderson still delivered a wealth of wearable pieces. The collection included striking items like a black trench coat with a fashion-forward midriff cut-out, which exuded rock-star magnetism and exemplified the brand’s leather heritage.

The piece, along with others, showcased Anderson’s mastery in balancing creativity with practicality.

Schiaparelli shines with bold whimsy

Daniel Roseberry’s latest collection for Schiaparelli focuses on blending high fashion with refreshing accessibility. Though it featured less of the Surrealism associated with the late, great house founder Elsa Schiaparelli, the collection still celebrated whimsy, albeit a dialed down version.

Gone are the days of celebrity-driven runways. Instead, Roseberry crafted an eclectic mix of bold silhouettes and playful designs. Standout pieces included denim with a unique U-shaped dip at the waist, paired with curve-hugging ivory bodysuits that highlighted an hourglass shape. This motif, evident in a zip-front dress and sleek halter top, appeared throughout the collection, showcasing Roseberry’s knack for redefining femininity.

With fewer embroideries this season, the designer emphasized texture and details. Models strutted in gathered mesh jersey dresses, with fabric coiled like a braid, and dresses accented with suede for added luster.

Footwear also stole the spotlight, featuring Roseberry’s signature trompe l’oeil sneakers alongside leather babouche slides adorned with golden toe rings — transforming everyday items into artistic statements.

Roseberry drew inspiration from the women in his life who crave statement pieces that are effortlessly chic, with daring patterns, exaggerated shoulder pads, and bold floral motifs.

In a fashion landscape often driven by commercial pressures, Schiaparelli’s latest show carved out a dynamic space for creativity. Roseberry proved he can balance artistic whimsy with wearable elegance.

Issey Miyake’s papery beauty

Issey Miyake’s latest collection unfolded like a poetic exploration into the art of simplicity and craft. Much like the house’s previous offerings, this collection combined innovative techniques with tradition — a hallmark that has continued under the vision of Satoshi Kondo and the design atelier.

This time, the team explored paper as a medium and inspiration, delving into its textures, lightness, and nostalgic feel. If previous shows dabbled in geometry and fluidity, Friday’s collection was about the fragility and strength of paper through airy, pleated garments and origami-inspired folds.

The collection began with kamiko pieces — garments made of traditional washi paper — that paid homage to Japan’s centuries-old crafts. This nod to the past didn’t come at the expense of wearability.

The Fold-to-Form pieces were nothing short of architectural brilliance, with angular, origami-inspired folds. It felt like a natural extension of the Miyake legacy: one part innovation, one part reflection on the past.

The house’s fixation on textiles sometimes tipped into over-conceptualization. The EAU series, with its water-like transparency and fluidity, had all the ethereal beauty one could expect, but the weight of its metaphor — garments flowing like water — felt familiar.

Marketing madness

As Paris Fashion Week unfolds, so too do the latest gimmicks. The newest trend and subject of front-row chatter was the introduction of Uber Fashion cars, designed in collaboration with fashion house Coperni. The vehicles feature a metallic sheen inspired by the brand’s Swipe Bag.

Fashion-conscious riders could book a free ride in these cars by selecting the Uber Fashion option in the app, and each ride even comes with a custom playlist to enhance the Fashion Week experience, according to Uber. However, availability is on a first-come, first-served basis, meaning that many may be unable to secure a ride amidst the event’s chaos. It’s yet another example of how the fashion industry seeks to capitalize on Fashion Week’s excitement.

Victoria Beckham blows in a new breeze

Victoria Beckham’s latest collection swept through Paris with the force of a Greek myth, evoking the Victory of Samothrace as a twisted cropped vest opened the show. It billowed like a gleaming shard of fabric, as if it were poised to take flight off the runway — setting the tone for a collection that danced between poetry and practicality.

The windswept aesthetic was unmistakable throughout, from a sheer pastel top that exposed nipples in a diagonal cascade down the torso, to loose-waisted signature trousers with a billowing slit. Beckham’s recurring play with proportions was here, albeit with a softer, more sculptural touch, subtly nodding to her signature focus on elongating the body. This time, her references to Ancient Greece gave her collection a new kind of dynamism that felt almost ethereal. Gigi Hadid, draped in a gleaming green gown with a gathered skirt, moved like a sculpture come to life — a striking moment that embodied this unexpected, but highly welcome, more poetical direction for the former Spice Girl.

But amid the billowing silhouettes and minimalism, Beckham deftly anchored designs with the staples that have made her brand so popular. Florals made an appearance — subtle, yet essential — as did her commitment to relaxed, modern tailoring. While the poetical gestures floated through, the bread-and-butter of the house remained: practical, wearable luxury.

Yet the collection walked a fine line between creativity and wearability — a line Beckham has navigated with mixed success in the past. While the draped, windswept garments invoked a sense of playful experimentation, critics of her previous work may wonder if her eccentricity is in danger of overpowering the brand’s practical core. Beckham’s last few seasons have seen her balancing the theatrical with the everyday, but the sheer pastels and sculptural gowns here flirted with pushing that envelope a little too far.

Still, Beckham has proven her command of deconstruction and silhouette, and here it paid off. The architectural approach she’s honed, from slashed jackets to exposed backs, found new life in this Grecian motif. Her ability to expose and conceal in the same breath, to deconstruct and rebuild, once again highlights her strength in mastering complex garment construction—a talent honed across her Parisian shows.

NEW YORK (AP) — The eclectic annual Fall for Dance festival is a beloved tradition among dance fans, not least for its $30 tickets — still quite a deal in New York, even if they began at $10 two decades ago.

But the best thing about it is still the variety it brings to the stage, with 15 acts over 11 days this year from artists around the world. This year’s highlights have come from as far as the Kyiv Opera House in Ukraine, and as close as a few blocks away.

You could call it a veritable United Nations of dance — which is exactly how the president of New York City Center, Michael Rosenberg, described it this week, introducing the third of five programs. He didn’t explicitly refer to the ongoing U.N General Assembly happening a bit further east, wreaking its usual traffic chaos.

There was a happier chaos happening onstage, a mishmash of extremely different styles of dance. As usual, the audience seemed to love it all — especially the more out-there elements, like dancers stalking the stage on stilts in the first program, courtesy of choreographer Andrea Miller and her Brooklyn-based Gallim company.

Fall for Dance has always lured a mix of known names — some of them trying out something new – with names unknown to most of the crowd. Among the familiar faces this year so far have been much-loved ballet stars Tiler Peck of New York City Ballet and Herman Cornejo of American Ballet Theatre, both choreographing this time (with Cornejo dancing, too).

The emotional highlight, though, was the two-night appearance of the National Ballet of Ukraine, a troupe that has managed to remain operating in Kyiv despite huge hardship. In its first New York performance in decades, the company opened the festival with “Wartime Elegy,” an evocative piece by one of the world’s leading choreographers, Alexei Ratmansky.

Currently an artist in residence at New York City Ballet, Ratmansky has a deep connection to the material. Born in St. Petersburg to a Russian mother and a Ukrainian father, he grew up in Kyiv. When he premiered “Wartime Elegy” at Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle in 2022, he unfurled and held aloft a Ukrainian flag during curtain calls. In program notes for Fall for Dance, he joins the dancers in honoring their colleagues who have fallen in warfare.

The piece, featuring four male and four female dancers, both began and ended on somber tones. But in the middle, men who’d been dressed in black suddenly appeared in folk costumes. The moody (and gorgeous) piano and strings music by Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov shifted to spirited tunes, and the men leaped into folk-style dancing with abandon.

The audience laughed along. But soon the dancers’ bodies seemed to be collapsing, as the choreography again reflected pain, not joy. The curtain closed with one woman standing in arabesque, leg raised behind her, as if to say, quite like the troupe itself, that she wasn’t going anywhere.

Peck, who has been starting to build an impressive choreographic resume as she continues to lead NYCB as one of its top ballerinas, presented one of three pieces commissioned by the festival: “Piano Songs,” a spirited solo for ABT dancer Aaron Bell, to the music of Meredith Monk. The 81-year-old composer delighted the crowd by appearing for a curtain call.

The highlight of another program was “The Specter of the Rose, by Cornejo, the Argentine dancer who recently celebrated his 25th anniversary with ABT. It was a reimagining of the short Fokine ballet about a young girl who returns from a ball in her gown and dreams of the spirit of the rose, who materializes to dance with her. Here, it was modernized, with Cornejo bare-chested and in jeans, and his partner, sprite-like ABT ballerina Skylar Brandt, in little jean shorts.

The dancing was everything you’d hope from two classical dancers at the top of their game, with Cornejo showing that the years have not diminished his high-flying leaps and turns — even in denim.

The festival continues through Sunday.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

LONDON (AP) — Maggie Smith, the masterful, scene-stealing actor who won an Oscar for the 1969 film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and gained new fans in the 21st century as the dowager Countess of Grantham in “ Downton Abbey” and Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films, died Friday. She was 89.

Smith’s sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, said in a statement that Smith died early Friday in a London hospital.

“She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother,” they said in a statement issued through publicist Clair Dobbs.

Smith was frequently rated the preeminent British female performer of a generation that included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, with two Oscars, a clutch of Academy Award nominations and a shelf full of acting trophies.

She made her film debut in the 1950s, won Oscars for work in the 60s and 70s and had memorable roles in each subsequent decade, including an older Wendy in Peter Pan story “Hook” (1991) and a mother superior of a convent in Whoopi Goldberg’s comedy “Sister Act” (1992).

A commanding stage actor, she played Shakespearean tragedy — 1965 adaptation “Othello” — and voiced Shakespeare-inspired animation in “Gnomeo & Juliet” (2011).

She remained in demand even in her later years, despite her lament that “when you get into the granny era, you’re lucky to get anything.”

Smith drily summarized her later roles as “a gallery of grotesques,” including Professor McGonagall. Asked why she took the role, she quipped: “Harry Potter is my pension.”

Richard Eyre, who directed Smith in a television production of “Suddenly, Last Summer,” said she was “intellectually the smartest actress I’ve ever worked with. You have to get up very, very early in the morning to outwit Maggie Smith.”

“Jean Brodie,” in which she played a dangerously charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher, brought her the Academy Award for best actress, and the British Academy Film Award (BAFTA) as well.

Smith added a supporting actress Oscar for “California Suite” in 1978, Golden Globes for “California Suite” and “A Room with a View,” and BAFTAs for lead actress in “A Private Function” in 1984, “A Room with a View” in 1986 and “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” in 1988.

She also received Academy Award nominations as a supporting actress in “Othello,” “Travels with My Aunt,” “A Room with a View” and “Gosford Park,” and a BAFTA award for supporting actress in “Tea with Mussolini.” On stage, she won a Tony in 1990 for “Lettice and Lovage.”

From 2010, she was the acid-tongued Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, in hit TV period drama “ Downton Abbey,” a role that won her legions of fans, three Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe and a host of other awards nominations.

But she chafed at television fame. When the show’s run ended in 2016, Smith said she was relieved. “It’s freedom,” she told The Associated Press.

“Not until ‘Downton Abbey’ was I well-known or stopped in the street and asked for one of those terrible photographs,” she said.

She continued acting well into her 80s, in films including the big-screen spinoff to “Downton Abbey” in 2019, its 2022 sequel “Downton Abbey: A New Era” and 2023 release “The Miracle Club.”

Smith had a reputation for being difficult, and sometimes upstaging others.

Richard Burton remarked that Smith didn’t just take over a scene in “The VIPs” with him: “She commits grand larceny.” However, the director Peter Hall found that Smith wasn’t “remotely difficult unless she’s among idiots. She’s very hard on herself, and I don’t think she sees any reason why she shouldn’t be hard on other people, too.”

Smith conceded that she could be impatient at times.

“It’s true I don’t tolerate fools, but then they don’t tolerate me, so I am spiky,” Smith said. “Maybe that’s why I’m quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies.”

Critic Frank Rich, in a New York Times review of “Lettice and Lovage,” praised Smith as “the stylized classicist who can italicize a line as prosaic as ‘Have you no marmalade?’ until it sounds like a freshly minted epigram by Coward or Wilde.”

Smith famously drew laughs from a prosaic line — “This haddock is disgusting” — in a 1964 revival of Noel Coward’s “Hay Fever.”

She repeated the gift for one-liners in “Downton Abbey,” when the tradition-bound Violet witheringly asked, “What is a weekend?”

King Charles III and his wife Queen Camilla paid tribute to Smith, who was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire, the equivalent of a knight, by the late Queen Elizabeth II in 1990.

“As the curtain comes down on a national treasure, we join all those around the world in remembering with the fondest admiration and affection her many great performances, and her warmth and wit that shone through both off and on the stage,” they said in a statement.

Fellow actors paid tribute to her on Friday. Hugh Bonneville, who played the son of Smith’s character in “Downton Abbey,” said “anyone who ever shared a scene with Maggie will attest to her sharp eye, sharp wit and formidable talent.”

“She was a true legend of her generation and thankfully will live on in so many magnificent screen performances,” he said in a statement.

Rob Lowe, who co-starred with her in “Suddenly, Last Summer,” said the experience was “unforgettable … sharing a two-shot was like being paired with a lion.”

“She could eat anyone alive, and often did. But funny, and great company. And suffered no fools. We will never see another. God speed, Ms. Smith!” Lowe wrote on X.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer called Smith “a true national treasure whose work will be cherished for generations to come.”

Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Ilford, on the eastern edge of London, on Dec. 28, 1934. She summed up her life briefly: “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, one’s still acting.”

Her father was assigned in 1939 to wartime duty in Oxford, where her theater studies at the Oxford Playhouse School led to a busy apprenticeship.

“I did so many things, you know, round the universities there. … If you were kind of clever enough and I suppose quick enough, you could almost do weekly rep because all the colleges were doing different productions at different times,” she said in a BBC interview.

She took Maggie as her stage name because another Margaret Smith was active in the theater.

Laurence Olivier spotted her talent, invited her to be part of his original National Theatre company and cast her as his co-star in a 1965 film adaptation of “Othello.”

Smith said two directors, Ingmar Bergman and William Gaskill, both in National Theatre productions, were important influences.

Alan Bennett, preparing to film the monologue “A Bed Among the Lentils,” said he was wary of Smith’s reputation for becoming bored. As the actor Jeremy Brett put it, “she starts divinely and then goes off, rather like a cheese.”

“So the fact that we only just had enough time to do it was an absolute blessing really because she was so fresh and just so into it,” said Bennett. He also wrote a starring role for Smith in “The Lady in the Van,” as Miss Shepherd, a redoubtable woman who lived for years in her vehicle on Bennett’s London driveway.

However extravagant she may have been on stage or before the cameras, Smith was known to be intensely private.

“She never wanted to talk about acting. Acting was something she was terrified to talk about because if she did, it would disappear,” said Simon Callow, who performed with her in “A Room with a View.”

Smith married fellow actor Robert Stephens in 1967. They had two sons, Christopher and Toby — who both grew up to be actors — and divorced in 1975. The same year she married the writer Beverley Cross, who died in 1998.

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Hilary Fox and Pan Pylas in London contributed to this story. Associated Press writer Robert Barr contributed biographical material to this obituary before his death in 2018.