Finally, after four weeks, hundreds of shows and countless hours of waiting, the spring/summer 2008 season ended with a joke. It began like this: “A guy walks into his office...”

“And he just picked up the phone and called me and said, do you want to work together?” This is Richard Prince, the American “appropriation” artist who is currently the subject of a Guggenheim retrospective, and the guy he is talking about is Marc Jacobs, who was calling about maybe collaborating with Mr Prince on something for Louis Vuitton, the brand that closed the Paris shows on Sunday. “Collaborating isn’t something I normally do – I normally work alone,” Mr Prince said. “So I thought it would be interesting, and I gave Marc lots of ideas, like I wanted to do an Iggy Pop sort of thing with the logo. But then it turned out most of them had been done before, including the Iggy Pop thing.”