FROM RICK OWENS’S ragged T-shirts and canvas shifts to the giddy ornamentation of Alessandro Michele’s Gucci, all glitz and blitz and reconstituted Elton John costumes, the spring collections appeared to not have a common thread between them — a seemingly bipolar mix of downtrodden, derelict styles and escapist fantasies. Rei Kawakubo’s Boschean excess at Comme des Garçons — clashing Renaissance paintings and Japanese cartoons as prints and reconstituted pileups of tacky plastic children’s toys as headpieces — was a stark contrast to Miuccia Prada’s comic-book-print warrior women and the tatty gewgaws and currency-​war patterns of Demna Gvasalia’s Balenciaga collection. There, the idea of luxury was debased and devalued with gaudy dresses, blouses and skintight pant-boot hybrids cut in post-Brexit-inspired euro-note and dollar-bill patterns.

So, what is it with fashion at the moment? Designers appear to have assumed a fight-or-flight response to these uncertain times, which, to some — especially those with a flair for the dramatic — look a lot like the end of days. “Fashion is a reflection of the way we live,” said Gvasalia backstage at Balenciaga. “I wanted to create a feeling that something dangerous was going to happen.” He was talking, specifically, about the sturm-und-drang mood at his show, which took place in a blacked-out venue filled with smoke and the boom of ominous trip hop music. The message was less “apocalypse now” and more “apocalypse soon.”

Art, literature and film frequently tackle themes of end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it destruction — in 2017 alone, there was the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which felt eerily prophetic; Kara Walker’s towering Goya-esque murals shown at New York’s Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in September, which depicted the unfolding of a modern, racially charged civil war; the artist Jonathan Horowitz’s doctored photo of President Trump playing golf while the sky above him burned; and, even, a sequel to that earlier neon-fizzed end-times nightmare, “Blade Runner.” But apocalyptic naysaying is less frequently found in fashion, an industry that trades on optimism, fantasy and, most importantly, an ability to predict the future. But in moments of great distress, even clothing tends to reflect our troubles. Immediately prior to the outbreak of war in 1939, there was a surfeit of Austrian and Bavarian influences in the industry; in the late ’80s, Black Monday gave way to the rise of a movement dubbed “deconstruction” that originated with the Belgian designer Martin Margiela, whose leitmotif was the unfinished hem and the inside-out seam. His clothes were purposefully made to look poor — because the world suddenly was. It was a volte-face to the excess of the early ’80s, the dancing-on-the-lip-of-the-volcano styles of Christian Lacroix and his archaic indulgences of crinoline pouf skirts and Second Empire extremes.