PARIS — It is a familiar scene, cartoonish in its intensity. One by one, on a plywood runway that rises at the center like a bridge through a garden, the models come out and stop under a spotlight swinging on a metal arm. It sweeps each woman’s outfit with light as the music, at first classical, dissolves in static.

What does it mean?

One model wears a wad of pink satin into which is embedded a teddy bear, as if the toys in a child’s bedroom have been swept onto the rug and prodded into a lump. Another model wears a flexible cage covered in doughnuts of black satin; still another, a kind of tire around her waist, held up by chain shoulder straps. Their headpieces resemble a charred landscape after a fire.

Meanwhile, the small audience of elite editors and buyers, squashed together like bugs, stares at this strangeness. No face seems to say, “Hey, what gives here?” There is fierce applause.