The third row of menswear shows is what I like to call the Surgical Mask Fan Section—everyone is a super-fan, a “real head,” an obsessive likely to own a collection of high-fashion face masks—and they will likely be enthused about whatever the muse of fire jawns hands down from the highest heavens of invention. But a few rows up, the buzz was that this might have been Abloh’s best collection ever. At the end of the show, the designer emerged like a guru in sunglasses from behind the transparent curtain in the center of the show, and waved at his wife, children, and glowing parents in the front row. We’ve spent so much time talking about our chosen family—our brand ambassadors, our curated posses—that it’s nice to embrace our actual relatives.

Elsewhere in Paris, Jonathan Anderson, a totally different animal, was also thinking about doing less. Rather than producing a bunch of consecutive looks, this season of J.W. Anderson, he said in a post-show interview, “was more about, how do you slowly build these looks into different things?” Rather than like, 10 amazing coats, there were really just three: a kind of cloak that cinched at the front with a big chain, a flowing puffer-opera coat, and a skinny trench. There was just one shoe—a sort of Birkenstock-style clog with a cartoonishly jumbo chain across the top—and different riffs on an Elizabethan peplum top (more skater bro-friendly than it sounds). A number of men wear the women’s pieces from The Row, in admiration of its glorious coats and off-kilter, minimalist footwear; this collection is for them. (Maybe Anderson is an Olsen twin at heart!)

Anderson, the true intellectual dreamboat, put Arthur Rimbaud masks on mannequins dotted throughout the seats, so that the face of everybody’s first sapiosexual icon hovered in the back of nearly every runway shot (he called Rimbaud’s face “underground version” of the ubiquitous icon Marilyn Monroe). My Instagram stories were flooded with cool European editors’ selfies with Rimbaud. (Selfies with Rimbaud: the next Patti Smith memoir?) Anderson blinked his beautiful long eyelashes and told us he was thinking of artist David Wojnarowicz, too, and the romanticism of these two men across centuries: “It’s not just about having a political voice for the sake of having a political voice. It’s about, How do you [work] creatively through having a political voice? It’s thinking before you speak.”

Menswear has clearly entered a new age of self-actualization and restraint. Of course, this isn’t to suggest that menswear is going Goop; wellness culture, like everything else popular, has its charlatans, but these designers are the real deal. A few hours post-J.W. Anderson, Sies Marjan designer Sander Lak was showing his new collection in a casual presentation at his studio; his jewel-toned silks and knits are just getting better and better, and his coats so popular despite the effects of global warming that a Sies Marjan coat with just a T-shirt underneath is a key look on the streets of New York. Lak’s hair was in a romantic scrape; the cuffs of his burgundy shirt dangled. (Between our fashion designers and Hollywood, this poet thing really has legs.) I told him he looked relaxed: “If I look relaxed, it is because I really love what I do,” he responded. “I really love putting these collections together.” Designers are recalibrating their relationship to the work, and the work is becoming much better.

I’ve often thought that only in menswear could a true successor to the “Old Celine” emerge—that Phoebe Philo’s cool, in-and-out-of-time weirdness had more potential in men’s clothing, with its bizarre relationship to trendiness, than women’s. (It’s certainly been Abloh’s longtime obsession—when a Nike exec asked him to name his favorite visual artist at a 2017 Q&A, he said it was Philo.) Womenswear designers are still stuck in that mode of relaxed silhouettes and perky surrealism that approximates Philo’s canon, while menswear bogged down some of its best ideas by democratizing fashion through T-shirts and hype-driven T-shirts. Now, it seems, the industry’s heavy hitters are ready to fully unleash their zen.

Originally Appeared on GQ