PARIS — The morning of Jacques Chirac’s funeral the sun came out. There was an autumn crispness to the air and Paris was, on Monday , as it is wont to be at such times, gleaming with pomp and a sense of circumstance past. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was in town; so was President Bill Clinton . So were a number of other world leaders, come to pay their respects to a man who once led France.

As a crowd gathered for the Sacai show in the Grand Palais, a motorcade went by. The fashion gang watched the black cars and the accompanying vehicles, and then filed upstairs to discover — George Clinton, the Parliament Funkadelic founder , sitting front row. It was a less jarring segue than it sounds.

The designer Chitose Abe had taken the band’s album, “One Nation Under a Groove,” as the inspiration for a collection that was effectively an argument for unity: of big oversize trousers and hard-core trench coats and sheer, weightless blouses spliced into a single jumpsuit; of many, many different size polka dots; of cartographic prints, flickering hither and yon on the points of scarf dresses and suits.