Wearing woven hair masks that obscured their faces, the models at the Viktor & Rolf show on Monday looked a little like Hannibal Lecter in drag. On the soundtrack a woman's voice droned a series of threats from a text by the artist Bruce Nauman. "You can't have me," the voice said. "You can't reach me. I can suck you dry."

Suddenly from somewhere in the front row an editor piped up. "And I can eat you with some fava beans and a very nice Chianti," she said. Everybody nearby laughed, and that ripple momentarily swept away a developing sense that something truly creepy was in the air.

Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, as it happens, were not the first designers on this week's roster to present women with no discernible features. At Yohji Yamamoto's show on Sunday a number of mannequins were propelled onto the runway wearing hats so outsize that they swallowed up their heads.

Then late Monday afternoon Jun Takahashi put on his fall collection for Undercover in a legendary theater near the Place Pigalle. Out came models with their faces obliterated altogether, wrapped inside eyeless cloth hoods. Little metal punk chains were draped between where a nose would be and where an ear might be buried.

The effect was so sinister that it made the subjects Robert Mapplethorpe used to photograph in bondage hoods and mummy suits seem like Welcome Wagon neighbors showing up at the front door with brownies.

When a single designer chooses to efface his models, it's easy to slough off the stunt as creative license. But when a bunch of designers with no connection to one another are moved to eliminate the faces of the beautiful creatures they hire for the catwalk, it's clear something ugly is going on.

"It was a kind of a joke," Mr. Takahashi said afterward. "I didn't want any distraction from the line."

Picasso took a similar approach when depicting certain former wives and lovers. If one cares to see a man avenging himself on womankind, a good place to start is the retrospective here of Picasso's portraits of Dora Maar. The bitterer their battles, the likelier that he would depict Maar's head cloven. The less she interested him sexually, the more she was atomized into sharp Cubist planes. Sex wars get played out in many ways, even in fashion, and there is clearly one taking place now that has the odor of misogyny.....

Woman masked, bagged and, naturally, feared

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Not a lot of sexy, but more than a little sinister