Fifty years after Elsa Schiaparelli presented her final show in 1954, the house of Schiaparelli has returned to the Paris catwalk. Diego Della Valle, the Italian tycoon who bought the brand in 2007, has hired designer Marco Zanini to give the kiss of life to the brand Zanini has described as "fashion's most attractive sleeping beauty", beginning with this summer's haute couture line.

As dramatic pauses go, 50 years is extreme by any standards, let alone in the context of the relentless forward churn of the fashion industry. But the exaggerated drama of the timeline befits Schiaparelli, a house which takes daring to be different as the very cornerstone of its aesthetic.

Elsa Schiaparelli died in 1973, but her maverick approach to fashion – one dress for the Duchess of Windsor featured a lobster painted by Salvador Dali – has made her a folk heroine to many contemporary designers, including Miuccia Prada and Marc Jacobs.

Zanini's rebooted Schiaparelli was a visual feast, and executed with intelligence. The Schiaparelli archives are groaning with ideas and heritage, most of which is little-known due to the name's long dormancy. And Zanini resisted the temptation to produce a karaoke version of the label.

A straightforward homage might be respectful in a literal sense, but it would be a betrayal of the fearlessness which was the central philosophy of a designer who shocked Italian society by publishing a volume of erotic poetry, an eyebrow-raising move for a 24-year-old female aristocrat in 1904.

Instead, Zanini positioned the new Schiaparelli in a tradition of Parisian fashion flamboyance which runs from the Belle Epoque, includes John Galliano and Christian Lacroix, and ends with the quietly subversive Phoebe Philo, whose furry slippers and pool sliders for Céline were referenced in this collection.

Draped and cloud-puffed silk sleeves and floorlength ruffled skirts harked back to the silhouettes of a century ago; cropped trousers and flat shoes nodded to the avant-garde legacy of the Japanese designers in Paris. The crumpled Napoleon hats, high-arched eyebrows and geisha-stained lips recalled Galliano's collections for Dior, while the bold mix of pastels and strong colour brought an echo of Lacroix. (Shocking pink, the colour with which Elsa Schiaparelli is closely associated, was nowhere to be seen.)

But while it captured the freedom and eclecticism of Schiaparelli, this show did not feel like a coherent collection. It was a mood board of ideas rather than a wardrobe. This is not a deal breaker at haute couture, which is designed around standalone pieces, but presenting a clear seasonal point of view will be crucial to Zanini's success in ready to wear, which shows in just six weeks.

The sense of rigour absent at Schiaparelli was in stark contrast to the spare, disciplined collection by Raf Simons for Christian Dior, shown later the same day.

Simons said he wanted to dig deep into the feminine side of haute couture this season, focussing on "the emotional experience" of couture and "the personal, almost private and unseen world of women." To this end, Dior created a venue where the masculine, high-shine, boxy exterior concealed an organic, cave-like interior, all pebble-curved lines and chalky softness.

At haute couture, femininity tends to mean ribbons and ruffles. But that is not how Simons sees the world, and his success at Dior is rooted in the strong sense of self which he brings to the job. His vision of an ultrafeminine collection was spectacularly detailed three dimensional embroidery, and elaborate fabric techniques which involved a knitted dress so light it appeared at first to be made of chiffon.

But the silhouettes were clean, based around the stark, guillotine-sliced strapless dresses Simons has revived as a Dior classic and sporty T-shirt shapes. Off-white, navy and black predominated, and silk evening gowns were worn with crystal-embroidered trainers, enhancing the sense of cool, understated confidence which suffuses Simons' Dior.