A week or so back, I got in touch with our Fashion Director's sharp-as-a-tack executive assistant to find out what her boss's schedule was looking like for Paris. The document she sent back was dizzying. One day consisted of ten back-t0-back appointments in ten hours; another had him booked in with one Very Important Brand for the entire day.

All images by Jessa Carter

On the day that we finally managed to wedge ourselves into Jeffrey Kalinsky's agenda, he had started with two morning runway shows including Junya Watanabe before hitting Ann Deulemeester's showroom and then Rick Owen's showroom.

Back-to-back; straight no chaser.

Good thing, then, that the Dries Van Noten showroom serves a beautiful lunch.

As soon as Jeffrey and his buying team, David Rubenstein and Oskar Moguel, swooped into the bustling yet visually tranquil mid-Paris location, beautiful plates of tuna niçoise salad and something described as an "Italian quesadilla" (it sounded better with a soft Belgian/French accent) appeared.

But Jeffrey's crew was business first; they swooped in on the collection, waiting to get a few bites in only after they had gone through two room-length racks of gorgeously hued and printed pieces.

"I've been buying this collection for ..." Jeffrey said, pausing to do the math, "21 years, and Dries has really stayed true to his original vision. What he's producing now is similar, in the best way, to what he has been doing all along."

"What I love about his collections is that the pieces are very special but they're exceptionally easy to wear. Like that, there," he says, pointing to a shirtdress, "that's a beautiful and very easy thing to wear for the summer."

As he and the team watch as models try on their favorite pieces for fit and context, I learn more about the collection's background. It was born inside the idea of contrast- contrast in color, contrast in history, contrast in volume, construction, gender and more. It's about the Victorians, and also about Japanese tradition.

But for Jeffrey it really comes down to the individual pieces.

"It's about the categories," he says, with the same sentiment that Jennifer Wheeler expressed the other day after the show. "The coats, the dresses, the shirts, the pants, the shoes; they're all just always right."

Which has to make doing Jeffrey's job-even on a day like this in the middle of Paris Fashion Week-all the more enjoyable.

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-Laura Cassidy