Paris Fashion Week has come and gone with designers presenting their 2012 spring and summer collections. As usual, the elite talent of the fashion world mostly impressed with their various collections.

With the career of John Galliano in doubt, it was interesting to see how his replacement Bill Gaytten did. The consensus was that while he avoided the extravagance Galliano was famous for, Gaytten's collections for both Christian Dior and John Galliano were a success.

Karl Lagerfeld continued to delight and amaze with a collection that was both beautiful and suitable for daily wear.

Jean Paul Gauthier used tattoos as a theme. He created a series of gorgeous jackets, bustier dresses and trenchcoats in flesh-tone leather covered with old-school tattoos.

Rei Kawakubo, who designs for Comme des Garcons, bucked the trend of using brash colors and offered a collection dominated by white dresses that had an almost virginal appeal.

Meanwhile, the Yves Saint Laurent collection was mostly lovely and built around the idea of the weather and two fabrics - a textured jacquard and a gazarlike fabric called Marrakesh.

(Shanghai Daily/Agencies)

Jean Paul Gaultier

Backstage was front-and-center at Jean Paul Gaultier's spring-summer 2012 ready-to-wear show, where the models changed on-set and even the dressers took a lap on the catwalk.

Thankfully, the clothes measured up to the genial French designer's habitual brilliance and were the saving grace of a plodding, overheated exercise. The theme was tattoos, and Gaultier served up ravishing jackets, bustier dresses and trenchcoats in flesh-tone leather covered with old-school tattoos. Other Gaultier staples, like ultra wide-leg pants in liquid silk jersey and sailor striped tops, filled out the strong collection.

Two tattoo-covered non-models walked in the show, sparking the implausible but still uncomfortable thought that the garments had been made out of their own skin. (They hadn't, but still.)

But between the gorgeous clothes, the girls changing on scaffolding at the top of the runway and a photographer shooting them in a makeshift studio on the catwalk, there was plenty to watch.

Vivienne Westwood

The only rule at Vivienne Westwood is that there isn't one.

The British designer, who jumped to international fame by helping inject anarchy into fashion, delivered a free-for-all of spring-summer 2012 ready-to-wear collection that threw open all the doors and let everyone in.

The clothes appeared to have been put together from whatever bolts of leftover fabric were laying around: Satins, lames, brocades, prints, stripes, lace, argyle and tulle were heaped on the models' heads, tied round their waists, slung over their shoulders or draped in artful floor-length skirts.

Some models wore full clown-style face paint, while others sported Klein blue lips and eyebrows. They padded the raised circle-shaped catwalk in towering platforms, pausing in front of the photographer's pit to strike exaggerated poses or do little pantomimes as a 16-year-old pianist played his own compositions on a grand piano.

Comme des Garcons

It should surprise no one that, in a season overloaded with brash prints and saturated color, Rei Kawakubo, ever the contrarian, decided to go with pure white. "White drama" was her typically terse but never more dead-on description of her spring collection, which opened with an ivory satin long-sleeved dress, straight at front and a full bouffant skirt in the back.

The model, veiled and piled high with a solid white headpiece, proceeded at a snail's pace, her hands folded piously in front and appeared to be tied together at the wrists with a big, fat bow. Bound for marriage? Quite literally, in this case.

Kawakubo riffed on formal white dresses in ivory satin and embroidered white lace that are inextricably associated with brides and other virginal religious ceremonies. She painted a picture of romantic innocence, decorating her cartoonish proportions - sleeves that fell past the knee - like she was icing a wedding cake.

Yves Saint Laurent

Another season, another round of rumors with which Stefano Pilati must contend. The show goes on regardless of the gossip whirl, and on October 4, Pilati had a spring collection to stage.

In some respects, it was lovely, with elements of strength and lyricism, its essence rooted not in storyboard shtick but in ideas about cut, color and the essential updating of a revered and highly recognizable code. Pilati started as basically as possible: with the weather.

He began his research in chilly times and just couldn't get into an easy-breezy mindset. He started thinking about wintry colors for spring, ultimately incorporating rich jewel tones into his palette, and then about his fabrics, feeling for the decorative but not wanting to be mundane. Pilati thus built the collection around two primary fabrics, a tonal, textured jacquard and a gazarlike fabric called Marrakesh.

John Galliano

The first John Galliano ready-to-wear collection under the label's new creative director had all the trappings of a classic Galliano display, but none of the outrageous excess that was the heart and soul of the brand.

Galliano was ousted from his signature label - and from Dior, where he'd spent 15 years as designer - in the wake of a March scandal over anti-Semitic and racist ravings during a series of drunken spats. His longtime right-hand-man, fellow Briton Bill Gaytten, was named to succeed him as creative director of the house of Galliano and is also filling in at Dior pending the appointment of a new designer there.

Gaytten has since presented three collections, and his strategy so far has appeared to be serving up Galliano Lite.

For his first ready-to-wear collection at the helm of Galliano, Gaytten sent out flippy skirt suits and feather-light bias cut silk dresses and gowns. While it is extremely difficult to fault Gaytten for this more-than-respectable showing, it is also difficult to get truly excited about it either.

Christian Dior

Under Galliano, Dior took on almost superhuman proportions, with larger-than-life collections and shows to the scale of the British designer's prodigious talent. The house returned to human size with a scaled-down spring-summer collection from Galliano's replacement, Bill Gaytten.

Models in discreet makeup - not the extravagant war-paint of the Galliano years - sported pretty, wearable skirt suits in neutral shades of chiffon. Gone were Galliano's maxi-volumes and the over-the-top riffs on outrageous themes, replaced by an appealing array of wearable, sellable clothes.

Gaytten and his team drew on the time-honored codes of the label, sending out variations on the nip-waisted Bar jacket and tulip-shaped skirts in graphic black-and-white checks and soft sandy neural tones. The evening gowns, in powder blue and black organza, were of an understated elegance.

Dior executives have made it clear that Gaytten is to be replaced by a top-name designer. But Gaytten's strong performance takes the pressure off Dior to find a quick solution.

Chanel

Fashion serves many purposes, one being a mood-elevator. Arriving for Chanel at what could at this point be called Karl Lagerfeld's Grand Palais, one experienced individual and communal glee to the point of giddiness. It happened the moment you took in Lagerfeld's under-the-sea-scape, a wondrous, stylized environment enclosed in undulating walls.

Happily, the clothes lived up to the extravaganza. Lagerfeld delivered masterfully with a treasure trove of chic to keep his ladies enthralled. "Chanel makes clothes for daily life," he proclaimed in a preview. "There are no fish, no mermaids."

By that he meant no kitsch and no fish-tail red-carpet dresses. Rather, the clothes connected to the theme via a mostly pale palette rich with iridescence, shimmer and endless new ways to employ pearls: as borders, single-strand belts, hair and face decorations, even an exoskeletal spine down a girl's back.