What Should You Expect at Paris Haute Couture Week FW 26-27?
Couture is risky. When it comes to couture, there's a clause built into the format that ready-to-wear doesn't necessarily have. There are real clients, real fittings, real money, and a federation that can strip the word "couture" off a house's name if the craft isn't actually there.
To even call a collection "haute couture," a house has to maintain specific guidelines such as keeping an atelier in Paris, hand-making every garment to a client's measurements, and answering to a federation that can revoke the label. Some may even argue that couture gets judged on whether the hand behind it actually knows the rules well enough to bend them. To me, it is a fairytale. Let me tell you why.
Paris Haute Couture Week for Fall/Winter 2026-2027 opened yesterday, and on paper it looks like four days, huge house names, and a crazy heatwave over the city that is still going rather strong. But it is worth beginning our discussion with three designers to keep an eye on.
Matthieu Blazy is showing his second couture collection for Chanel. In his case, the follow-up matters more than the debut, because we're arguably past the honeymoon stage now. Typically, a first outing can run on good will, while a second show has to have a cohesive and captivating point of view. His first couture collection was built on reduction, working directly on the body with no sketches at all. The real test now is whether he can prove range without abandoning his philosophy of intimacy that he just spent a season establishing.
I woke up on this lovely Tuesday morning to @stylenotcom’s live updates about the show, and WOW. The response Blazy has given us is "Gaby and the Beanstalk.” Blazy found a copy of a book of fairy tales in Gabrielle Chanel's own library and cast her as the heroine of an imagined fable, opening the show with a deconstructed tweed suit rendered in sheer mousseline, with a model carrying Chanel's actual book in one hand. Poisonous camellia flowers appeared tangled up with thorny vines throughout reflect Blazy’s concept of the fairy tale as something that is unsettling rather than comforting. So instead of introducing a new structural pole to prove range, he went deeper into the same fairytale-intimacy thread from January. The looks were classically Chanel, from ample tweed to floral appliqués, but given life by Blazy’s new fairytale.
Haute Couture in itself is a fairytale. These incredibly precise and expensive pieces come together with the bibbidi-bobbidi-boo of magical hands, and possess the power to enchant the beholder. So by transporting viewers to the mystical land of Chanel, where Gabrielle herself is the heroine amongst walking scarecrows and organically placed beanstalks, Blazy is continuing her legacy and relying on our ability to believe that impossible labor can look effortless. A dress that took three hundred hours to hand-finish has to walk out looking like it grew that way, the same way fairy tales play tricks on children. Even the fact that the bride moved out of the finale, because it was never going to be Chanel's fairy tale, resists Gabrielle from being handed a fictional narrative. Instead, he closed with the classic little black dress as perfect revenge.
Courtesy of Chanel
Pierpaolo Piccioli is also showing his first couture collection for Balenciaga, stepping into a house whose recent identity was built almost entirely on shock timing and spectacle staging, and doing it in the one format that has no room for a viral moment to cover for a weak silhouette. Every collection he's shown since taking over has leaned on the natural elements and Cristóbal's own archival gazar fabric as construction, so I am leaning towards another reverent collection. Duran Lantink debuts his first couture for Jean Paul Gaultier, and I'm expecting something technically flawless. Gaultier loves provocation. His ready-to-wear debut split the room between those who called him the true heir to Gaultier's spirit and those who called it shock value without the construction to back it up, so couture will be a very interesting way to test him out.
Giorgio Armani Privé also returns to the calendar for the first time since Armani's death last September, which makes it the week's one collection being judged less on ambition and more on whether the house can hold its own hand steady without him. Can the people already there keep the line exactly where he left it? Using the precedent of someone like Elsa Schiaparelli and Daniel Roseberry, I want to see a successful blending of past and future rather than a new anatomical take on something that was already revolutionary once.
I attended Paris Haute Couture Week in 2018, and my favorite part of the week was, without a doubt, the fittings of designers like Adeline André. Watching art come together in real time, on a real body, hours before anyone outside the room sees it, is a privilege most of the industry never gets. It's also the part that is rarely photographed, although it is proof of whether a house can still do the thing it's named after. That's what I'll be watching most attentively for this week.
With thirty houses showing over the next three days there will be much to discuss.
Au revoir for now
Xoxo,
Annie
