In Paris, the Hunt for Real Emotion

PARIS — When, at 12, Grayson Perry began covertly dressing in women’s clothes, he assumed in his innocence that the impulse must have something to do with wanting to be a member of the opposite sex. For decades he pursued his cross-dressing adventures, first in private and then very publicly as a Turner Prize-winning artist whose performances increasingly incorporated his feminine alter ego, Claire.

It wasn’t until 2000, the year he turned 40, that Mr. Perry experienced an epiphany about his cross-dressing. It was, as it turned out, really “about me putting on the clothes that gave me the feelings that I wanted,” he has been quoted as saying.

The most joltingly direct and concentrated emotional hit, he found, came from wearing frilly, flouncy, beribboned frocks, the kind of confectionary stuff you picture when you think of Little Bo Peep. Classic preadolescent dresses, in Mr. Perry’s mind and also in his polemics, came to symbolize the antithesis of the macho. And it was Mr. Perry as Claire that came to mind often during the week of men’s wear shows that ended in Paris on Sunday, and not only because Mr. Perry is the subject of an excellent exhibition at the Monnaie de Paris, or Paris Mint (“Grayson Perry: Vanity, Identity, Sexuality,” through Feb. 3).

While emotion has hardly gone out of style, it has definitively gone out of fashion. It is difficult to imagine a more bloodless season than this one, or a more generally cynical one. Still, there were exceptions.

Thom Browne — who staged one of his typically stylized and glacially paced shows (“Sponsored by FedEx,” one front-row wag quipped upon encountering a bubble-wrap set) — is a designer whose inner erotic life, like Mr. Perry’s, appears to have been arrested around puberty.