Welcome to the HERO SS15 daily roundup – the most important shows, themes and concepts, contextually curated for your reading pleasure. The best place to understand the week’s events in fashion.

Before Paris officially began, Gosha Rubchinskiy conjured one of the most thrilling moments of the season. His intimate show, the Russian’s first ever Paris catwalk, took place in the 11th, bringing his gang of friends and street castings with him, emblematic of a new Russian generation and attitude.

Known for his own take on skate clothes, the designer/artist added more tailoring than ever this time – something he is able to do with the help of Comme des Garçons, who produce the young vanguard’s collection.

His tailoring was in red PVC and fake fur spliced with jersey, however – a wry take on aspiration and status from a tribe that find such trappings daft. Plaid was chopped into patchwork for shirts, there were great skeleton-graphic t-shirts and knits and Rubchinskiy even gave his own take on American workwear, complete with a logo all his own.

Here a pure spirit touches everything, not least the way clothes are styled. Rubchinskiy clashes Western youth references in every look without awareness or stigma. His work is fascinated with both the culture of his homeland and a new panoramic, post-Soviet outlook. In 20 years time, people will lie and say they were at this show. His authenticity, entirely biographical, is rare and magnificent.

The Belgian designer Raf Simons knows a thing or two about authenticity and the biographic, creating some of the most influential menswear of our time. He is in a fascinating position as his life shifted from outsider to establishment, from a punk intellectual to a couturier at Christian Dior.

Presenting at a decaying Place Vendôme space, Simons scrapped the seating plan and invited guests to stand anywhere they liked outside gaffer-taped pathways on the polished concrete floor. An email from the designer’s team earlier in the day told us about specific lighting that doesn’t tolerate flash photography on cameras and phones.

The keystone in this collection was a photobooth picture, passport-style, not Apple Mac, of a shaggy-haired youthful Simons. It appeared on a shirt underneath a leather RS/RS patch – which was itself a disruption of the designer’s collaboration with the artist Sterling Ruby for FW14. And then reappeared in amongst the image collage the designer is synonymous with, on the back of sailor collars attached to beautifully tailored coats and jackets.

Raf Simons SS15: Look 40

Simons’ father was in the military. A picture of his parents, courting and in love was another clue in the image haul. As the models snaked their way through the venue under red and green light, walking by more than once (repetition fascinates Simons), you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved – or a little perturbed. Raf’s band of mini-mes (some wore collaboration Stan Smiths, the designer’s favourite trainer) put it out there: we’re all empty vessels, collecting, processing; collecting, processing; collecting, processing. EXPERIENCING. We carry that everywhere, every second of every day.

To another kind of outsider, as Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri considered freethinkers in the grandeur of the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild.

Their notes talked of “individuals who stand outside movements, groups and schools; artists for whom innovation is an authentic, spontaneous gesture rather than a pose. They elicit an effortless masculinity, but also a subtle taste for silent sedition.”

Valentino SS15: Look 38

They have taste, alright. We’ll put a tenner on heaven looking like this venue filled with these immaculate clothes. From Camubutterfly brocades swarming army field jackets to studded cognac suede jackets with peacock appliqués on the back. “Reality, with a dash of magic,” the designers summarised. Just a dash?

At Balenciaga, Alexander Wang offered his twist on reality, with modernist belted jackets and close-up spraypainted prints. A grey sweatshirt had the historic Balenciaga couture stamp rendered in 3D detail on the back, above the shoulder blades. A drawer full of those would be pretty wonderful.

Check out our roundups of Paris days two, three, four and five plus London and Milan.