Karl Lagerfeld at the Chanel showcase – Paris Fashion Week 2009

“I believe it’s supposed to be Marie Antoinette’s play farm at Versailles,” remarks a colleague as we enter the Chanel show and are confronted by a vast barn decorated with double C’s, like a set for a road-company production of “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” sponsored by Chanel. I assume she is being ironic, since I know she shares my view that when it comes to revolutions, French or otherwise, the side to be on is not the one occupied by decaying royals and their sycophants.

But once again, I am way off the mark — Karl’s not kidding around. In fact, according to Women’s Wear Daily, which is being distributed at the French shows even though it’s in English, Lagerfeld employed 38 sculptors, painters, carpenters, and metal workers to assemble this humble dwelling inside the Grand Palais, and tossed in 700 cubic feet of hay, 500 feet of floral garlands, and two tons of clay trimmed with raffia to simulate grass. As if that weren’t enough, in the middle of the show (which features, one must admit, an array of adorable ensembles in hayseed colors) a platform rises out of the ground bearing an entire rock band, which is headlined by someone I think may be Katy Perry, since I know she is in town, but turns out to be Lily Allen. And if that weren’t enough, the show ends with a barefoot bride (Lara Stone), a groom (Karl’s boyfriend, who looks like an Eastern European skating champion), and a deeply androgynous model dressed like a page taking a literal roll in the hay before the two ladies wind up in a make-out session. And all this before 11 in the morning! What’s next, flying monkeys?

Alexander McQueen showcase; Plato’s Atlantis – Paris Fashion Week

Well, almost — not monkeys, actually, but snakes with something naughty on their minds. They are crawling all over a nude Raquel Zimmermann and she’s writhing in ecstasy on the giant video screen Alexander McQueen has mounted as part of his spare-no-expense (what recession?) extravaganza entitled “Plato’s Atlantis” at the Salle Marcel Cerdan on the Boulevard de Bercy, a venue so difficult to get to in a car (I scammed a ride) that it might as well be Atlantis. (I find out later that it’s, like, 10 minutes from central Paris if you lower yourself and take the Métro.)

Alexander McQueen showcase; Plato’s Atlantis – Paris Fashion Week

You have to agree to be filmed before you can even get into the place, since it is being live-streamed on Nick Knight’s SHOWstudio.com. (The site crashes, apparently because Lady Gaga’s new single is being premiered along with McQueen’s smoke and mirrors.) The goofy cameras employed to facilitate all this — spooky black affairs that look like cannons with Cyclops eyes — swing around and photograph the audience. (But only the first few rows, so not me in row 90.)

Maybe it’s the latest of the hour, or the rampant vapidity that has characterized Fashion Week in all four cities this season, but this presentation, which features models in shoes of a height not seen since the days of Venetian doges, and some kind of optical illusion that makes it seem as if the models are walking off the screen and onto the runway, is completely nutty and exhilarating and wonderful. Oh, and the clothes look pretty good, too.

PHOTO CREDIT: Francois Guillot/AFP/Getty Images, Patrick Kovarik/AFP/Getty Images, Antonio de Moraes Barros Filho/WireImage, Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images,