At Lanvin, Bouchra Jarrar’s New Dawn

Bouchra Jarrar’s decision to show her first spring/summer collection for Lanvin at midday on Wednesday in a light-filled salon of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris is worth considering, for a number of reasons.

Not just because Lanvin’s former creative director, Alber Elbaz, always showed in the evening, or because his deeply romantic aesthetic for the house turned on the axis of tender is the night.

But because the time indicates an entirely new focus for the brand — daywear is to be Lanvin’s plat du jour — and reflects the overall shift wrought by Ms. Jarrar, the 45-year-old French designer. Gone is the cocooning, all-black office of Mr. Elbaz’ tenure: Ms. Jarrar had it painted white. White voile drapes hang from the full-length windows, and there are green plants perched on high wooden tables; a ceramic tortoise peeks out from under one.

“For me, Lanvin is femininity,” she said a few weeks before the show. “I want there to be lightness, to be pleasure, because we all need pleasure in our lives. And sensuality — a drape in the back of a dress say — but always with a twist, so there is self-assurance and there is modernity.”

At the moment, she needs all the self-assurance she can get. There is a lot riding on her petite shoulders.

Not only is she one of two female designers suddenly elevated to the highest creative echelons of heritage couture houses for the first time in decades (Maria Grazia Chiuri at Dior is the other), but Ms. Jarrar takes the helm at Lanvin’s women’s wear after a period of particularly bitter internal strife that played out in the public domain. Last October Mr. Elbaz was fired after 14 years spent breathing new life and luster into what is the oldest Parisian couture house in continuous existence.