On Tuesday 30 September 2014 the unthinkable happened: feminism entered the realm of high fashion. In the finale to the most anticipated show of Paris fashion week, Chanel models strutted down the catwalk brandishing placards demanding women’s rights, in a faux protest that was simultaneously hailed as a breakthrough for a new wave of feminism and decried as consumerist claptrap.

Under the soaring roof of the Grand Palais, along a catwalk fashioned to look like a chic Parisian boulevard, Karl Lagerfeld’s models swapped handbags for banners; pouts for protests against machoism. The world’s highest-paid models Gisele Bündchen and Cara Delevingne shouted through megaphones – encased in lush leather padding, and heavily branded with the Chanel logo – but when they used the traditional rally cry: “What do we want?”, the answer, according to those in the audience, was indistinct.

Towards the rear of his impossibly beautiful troupe a lone man held up a placard with the slogan “He for She”, a nod to the UN solidarity movement fronted by actor Emma Watson, which is pushing for men to speak out in support of gender equality.

Coming little more than a week since Watson’s impassioned and widely reported speech on feminism, the show was further proof of the movement’s momentum, said Trish Halpin, editor-in-chief of Marie Claire, who watched the show unfold. “I think it just emphasises the fact that feminism is having a very, very good year – the movement has an incredibly high profile at the moment, which culminated in the Emma Watson speech at the UN,” she said.

While Halpin noted that Lagerfeld was known for his sense of humour, the show was not, she thought, simply a joke. “I think he was harking back to Coco Chanel’s feminist values – she was very much a strong and empowered woman. I think this just shows that fashion, feminism and empowering women do not have to be mutually exclusive.”

Others in the fashion press hailed “the fashion industry’s feminist battle cry” with fashion bloggers such as Amy Odell, editor of cosmopolitan.com, tweeting: “Awesome feminist statement at Chanel – for once do not care a flip about the shoes because THIS IS EVERYTHING.”

But some established feminists accused the designer – who has previously criticised the singer Adele for being “a little bit fat” and stated that “no one wants to see curvy women” – of jumping on a feminist bandwagon in order to sell designer handbags. Writing in the Guardian, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett suggested that the movement had been appropriated by the designer and his fashion house. The slogans held up by models – including “Boys Should Get Pregnant Too” and “Make Fashion Not War” – could be the “inner script” of a “talking feminist Barbie doll”, she said. “It is the fate of any counter-cultural movement to become co-opted and repackaged. The market dictates, and the market has decided feminism is cool.”

Natasha Walter, author of Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism and founder of Women for Refugee Women, called the mock protest “quite amusing” but warned that using feminism as a trope could backfire. “It is great to see more young women engaging with feminist ideas all the way from talking about them on social media to actually getting active, but real change requires huge social, economic and political shifts. If people start thinking that feminism is suddenly fashionable, then the danger is that the next moment they will say it has fallen out of fashion,” she said. “There is a cynicism here – Lagerfeld is recognising that feminism has an energy at the moment, but is just using that to flog expensive clothes.”

She also noted that the women carrying “feminist placards” - one declared its carrier to be “Feminist But Feminine”, while another stated “Ladies first” – were mainly white, and uniformly beautiful and thin – an image that did little to dispel the idea “that we have some how failed if we don’t live up to that idea of beauty”.

In a world where feminists, according to Watson’s UN speech, are seen as “too strong, too aggressive, isolating, anti-men and unattractive”, having some of the world’s most attractive women declare their support for the cause was welcome, said the feminist campaigner and writer Caroline Criado-Perez.

“I don’t think this suddenly means Karl Lagerfeld has renounced misogyny and embraced feminism, but I think we have to be positive about people wanting to talk about feminism, which has become such a part of popular culture that we are even seeing it in fashion shows,” she said. “I think we need to embrace anything that highlights the fact that women should be equal, but they aren’t.

“We live in a culture where young girls are scared of being identified as feminists, so anything that shows feminism isn’t this scary horrible thing run by man-hating women has to be a positive thing,” she said.