At Paris Fashion Week, Different Ideas of Glamour  The Row and Balmain showed individual gestures of luxury.

In a lot of ways, they are like the Dutch of the 17th century, the so-called Golden Age, when Vermeer was making his portraits of domestic life in his native Delft. At the time, the court of Louis XIV of France was the showiest in Europe. It was learning how to become the fashion leader. But the Dutch, while rich and successful in their own right — from shipbuilding, international trade — refused to make a display of it. Their clothing was relatively simple, in solid hues of brown, black, Delft blue and deep red, with starched white collars and shirts that evoked the cleanliness that the Dutch admired. Today, the French are still showing off with their giant fashion-show tents planted in the middle of Parisian public spaces.

There’s a major Vermeer exhibit now at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.  When I looked at The Row’s long and austere ponchos, its coats with an extra wrap at the shoulders, a slim dark turtleneck dress with a square-cut yoke, its classic pantsuits in gray and black with open-necked white shirts, and a single blood-red coat, I saw the gestures and tones of Vermeer. That’s just a surmise, of course, but it’s another way to understand the difference of the Olsens’ work in our own aggressive age.

Although they revealed the body with a long evening shift in pale-green organza (it looked like it was made from clusters of folded paper) and strapless wool (or cashmere) dresses, the collection was mostly covered up, to the point of being hidden, with black oxfords and two styles of low-heeled pumps that were once standard feminine dressing but have become almost impossible to find. The Olsens evidently know that. They’re also attuned to discreet gestures of sex and glamour, be they European or the kind the American novelist John O’Hara brilliantly invoked — that of a woman wearing a plain wool coat and clutching it shut with one hand and wearing a pair of those nice-girl, low-heeled pumps. Could she have nothing underneath? Quite possibly.

In general, there’s been a stripping away of material effects. We saw it at Prada with those stark black dresses and trim wool pants and pullovers; at Dior, which was a reduced version of the house’s historical Tulip Line and full-skirted romance, drawn from life in Paris in the austere ’50s. Although Dries Van Noten’s show in a concert hall failed to adequately convey the sense of intimacy he was after, the collection itself did the job, with pieces that looked mended, rich but faded fabrics, and a natural ease in the fit.

Apart from a finale of archival ’60s dresses at Paco Rabanne — a nod to the pioneering designer who recently died — and a noisy passage of metallic and plastic frocks of his own, the brand’s creative director, Julien Dossena, also toned things down a bit. He based a visually strong group of long dresses on Dalí’s paintings, with references to the rugged landscape of Cap de Creus in Spain.