Within the intensely deliberate aesthetic universe of Lemaire, today’s show represented two significant shifts. There was a lot more color, for one. Whether it was a yolk-yellow turtleneck T-shirt worn under a high black peacoat, a dense green shirt above russet wide-leg serge pants, or a shirt in scarlet cotton that created a horizontal shazam that bisected two roomy black pieces, these pops, while hardly extravagant, were fresh ground for a label that tends to stick the blues, blacks, brown, and grays of work and formalwear. Lemaire is anything but ostentatious, and makes clothes that the beholder must truly behold to see the beauty and exactness in.

Change number two was a widening and a lowering of suit jackets, and a marginal widening of pants—one pair of which had so many pleats on it was (almost) kissing plissé territory. As often, Lemaire used meticulously fine fabrics of modest provenance—jersey, serge, drill—to create lab-perfect specimens of workwear pieces: multi-pocket gilets, artist’s jackets, work shirts, parkas, as well as his this-season swollen tailoring and outerwear selection. It was a deeply clean collection powerfully affected by the soundtrack, a collage of British government agency telephone operators speaking to a silent caller in search of benefits. This bit, agreed Lemaire backstage, was “about the loneliness of dehumanization,” which was kind of a downer, although brilliantly assembled by his musical collaborator, Pilooski. The clothes though were serene.