WOWWWEEEE.

Or, to put it perhaps more-measuredly in context: Some shows you can barely remember by the time you get to the next one. That’s just the pits.

The majority of shows at least contain clothes and ideas (although not always both) that merit the effort to assemble some kind of sense of them—for good or ill, right or wrong. Then there are the big-house, big-production, big-budget, claquer-thronged jamborees that you know are going to drag you into their slipstream of hype, regardless of what’s on the runway. They can be great, and they can be meh, but they will always splash.

Rarest of all, though, are shows such as tonight’s from Dries Van Noten, shows that you know immediately will linger in the memory years after, thanks to the gut-punch of their impact. That’s incredibly rare in fashion. So why does tonight’s rank up there? Well, the venue was a major factor—afterward Van Noten said that he had been trying to secure it for 15 years: “Every year we applied and applied and applied, and every year they said ‘No.’ But then they said ‘Yes!’ ” The invitation read the Palais Garnier, that outrageous froth of Louis-Napoléon schlock-baroque in whose foyer and gallery Stella McCartney and Pigalle have both held shows before. This time, though, we had to go around the back of the building, through a heavily screened security foyer. Instead of clacking up a marble staircase framed with putti and gold, we creaked up a rough and splintery wooden one. Ushered through a small door we were suddenly on the eccentrically tilted stage of one of the world’s greatest opera houses. Onstage.

The Garnier stage is particular. It tilts forward at an angle—ballet dancers have to reconfigure their compass to master it. The sound of them landing on that stage makes it creak so much staff say it sounds like there are rats in the woodwork below. Tonight the audience flanked left and right. The main curtain rose to reveal the photographers—stage front, for a deserved change—with the yawning gold and velvet eye of the auditorium behind them. They waved and we whooped. Then the curtain rose, releasing a through-draught as the building exhaled, to reveal a phalanx of models, waiting.