Manish Arora fans tend to get their glitter on like they’re going to a fabulous exotic wedding in some fairy-tale world. But given the crush at the door of the American Cathedral, you’d think they were jostling for a front row seat to the Second Coming.

The singer, yoga guru, and Crazy Horse alum Aria Crescendo, a friend of the designer who appeared at his show a few seasons back, went all-out bridal, posing for photographers at the altar in a floral-strewn gown and spiky diadem. “I love Manish’s clothes because they’re always out of the ordinary,” she offered. “I’ve had enough of fashion people staying very safe in black and traditional colors. I just like craziness and color.”

She was in good company. With Finally Normal People, as Arora named his show, he delivered a “motley cru of Mad Max bohemians.” It’s unlikely that the designer actually intended to conflate his apocalyptic androids with a French oenological term, but you got the drift. In Arora’s world you can be sure that “dressing for the Armageddon,” as he put it, means stepping out in a psychedelic blaze‚ an all-out maximalist extravaganza that riffs on Jazz Age flappers, country-and-western Americana, survivalist desertscapes, Hollywood, and spiritualism. And that’s just for starters.

Parsing an Arora show is always one of Paris Fashion Week’s biggest sprints. With so much muchness dancing before the eye, you have to be swift or you might miss a masterful dégradé swish of sequins on a skirt that, in a more subdued setting (like maybe the red carpet?), could be a head-turner. Ditto the sleeveless jacket embroidered with peacock-feather motifs. In the era of the message tee, Arora also gets a nod for a couple numbers that seem to neatly sum up the mood of the moment, in the macro sense. One was a “What if this is all real.” But the hands-down winner was an ode to fashion’s current obsession with self-affirmation, and it’s going to be catnip to Arora’s base: “I am the one I’ve been waiting for.”