3 Key Takeaways From Haute Couture SS26

The world is a confusing place right now. So much so that editors at haute couture week in Paris debated whether it’s OK to be posting on social media from the shows at all, for fear of coming across as flippant. But the runways offered a respite. “We need beauty precisely when the world feels most frightening,” said Lauren Amos, owner of Atlanta concept store Antidote, and a couture client. Collections and designers put their best foot forward, delivering high-caliber collections — some were uplifting, others were thought-provoking, most were both.

Spring 2026 Couture Week, which ran from January 26 to 29, featured 28 houses, instead of the 29 initially announced in the provisional couture schedule (due to the cancellation of Giambattista Valli’s show). The calendar included the first couture shows of Jonathan Anderson at Dior and of Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, as well as Valentino, only a week after the passing of founder Valentino Garavani, Giorgio Armani Privé (by Silvana Armani, following the passing of the maestro), Schiaparelli, Viktor & Rolf, Gaurav Gupta, Alexis Mabille, and Julie de Libran.

“The week offered both beautiful craftsmanship from established haute couture ateliers and a performative aspect of fashion,” fashion curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot says. Regarding the latter, he highlighted Viktor & Rolf’s “groundbreaking performance”, Valentino’s “playful set and theatrical collection”, Stephane Rolland’s “circus act at the Cirque d’Hiver where Jean Paul Gaultier and Mugler presented some of their most iconic collections in the ’80s and ’90s”, Robert Wun’s “cinematographic presentation” and Schiaparelli, “which sets the bar higher and higher, season after season with technical virtuosity, innovation and elegance”.

Even with award season in full swing, the celebrity game was strong. Fresh off an Oscar nomination, Teyana Taylor attended the Schiaparelli show wearing a replica of the crown jewels stolen from the Louvre last year. She sat between Demi Moore and Jodie Smith, while the newlyweds Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez Bezos also sat front row. Rihanna, Josh O’Connor, Challengers co-star Mike Faist, and Jennifer Lawrence were in the audience at Dior; A$AP Rocky was at Chanel, alongside Dua Lipa and Nicole Kidman. Elton John and Kirsten Dunst turned up to the Valentino show.

Other standouts this week included the Saint Laurent Men’s show, where creative director Anthony Vaccarello continued to explore what masculinity and maleness can mean for Saint Laurent. Heated Rivalry’s Connor Storrie, a new friend of the house, was among the guests, sending the internet abuzz.

On the sidelines of couture shows, Victoria Beckham was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture at an intimate ceremony, Swedish cult label Toteme staged a ready-to-wear show, and couture collector Mouna Ayoub auctioned off 131 Dior pieces from her wardrobe.

Here are our takeaways from Paris Couture Week.

A tale of two couture debuts

The week’s most anticipated collections were those by Jonathan Anderson for Dior and Matthieu Blazy for Chanel, who were both presenting their first haute couture shows for their respective houses.

Anderson, a master of sharing his creative process, approached his first foray into couture as an explorer, setting early the intention to open up the practice to the world. An exhibition titled Grammar of Forms is on display at Musée Rodin (the same place the show took place) for the rest of the week and is open to the public. It features additional haute couture pieces Anderson designed to complete this latest collection, alongside designs by Christian Dior and work by the ceramicist Magdalene Odundo, whose work he collects. The house has also announced partnerships with higher-education fashion institution Institut Français de la Mode, as well as high schools and primary schools across Paris.

The starting point for the collection was a bouquet of cyclamen gifted to Anderson by his Dior predecessor John Galliano, who attended the show. It appeared in the form of silk petals on skirts, shoes, and realistic-looking chandelier earrings. This was also a strategy play, marking the first couture collection for the house to include accessories. There were bags in new shapes as well as classic models like the Lady Dior, jewelry made of meteorites and fossils, charms inspired by each dress in the collection, and shoes made of yarn and the same upcycled 18th-century fabrics as some of the bags. (As usual during couture, Dior opened its Villa Dior, a place for Dior’s very important customers (VICs) to see, try on, and order from the collections.)

At the LVMH annual earnings conference held the next day, chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault beamed. “Dior is benefitting from this creative renewal; its products are in very high demand at the start of the year, so it’s getting off to a strong start,” he said. (The first Dior pieces designed by Jonathan Anderson started arriving in stores on January 2.)

The Chanel show took place in the historic Grand Palais, set against a whimsical, fairytale-inspired backdrop of oversized pink mushrooms and pink weeping willows rising from a candy-pink carpet. The show opened with a transparent silk mousseline suit in a tender color palette of nudes and pinks. Then, “the women at the center of the collection begin to transform into birds”, according to the show notes: “raven black looks, to colored plumage evoked in embroidery, layering, pleating, and weaving, where the feather is often conjured, yet hardly used”.

“Matthieu Blazy builds on these foundations [of Chanel’s unique ecosystem made of haute couture ateliers and maisons d’art] as a field of experimentation, pushing boundaries with new materials and techniques,” Bruno Pavlovsky, president of fashion and Chanel SAS, told Vogue Business.

“A great sense of sprezzatura!” Olivier Gabet, director of the decorative arts department at Le Louvre, quipped. “Such a couture collection is a lot of work, craft, design, fabric — but the real elegance is to avoid showing off all those efforts.”

People also commended the model casting choices, which included mature women, as well as Bhavitha Mandava, the Indian model who closed the show as a beaming bride.

Couture as a counterpoint to the scrolling mindset

The debate following a Chanel show of great lightness and delicacy was: must couture be loud and capture attention on social media? Or is couture, at its core, the antithesis of the culture of constant scrolling?

“I think clothing has been so heavy for such a long time, because it’s been about the still photograph or the social media moment, and this was so much about movement — this idea of freedom that seems so important to Matthieu Blazy and to Chanel right now,” Rachel Tashjian, senior style reporter at CNN, said after the show.

Content creator Bryanboy concurred: “Haute couture is not a Project Runway dragcon extravaganza by default. It never was. The magic is that it can look quiet and still be vicious in workmanship. Haute couture is not what you clock in a screenshot,” he wrote on his Instagram.

It felt like a theme of the week. On the Schiaparelli show, Antidote’s Amos said: “It was couture as emotion rather than spectacle, and it felt sublime.”

Meanwhile, in his second couture show for Valentino, creative director Alessandro Michele brought back the Kaiserpanorama, an entertainment medium regarded as an early predecessor of cinema. Why make guests look at the clothes through a small peephole? “What I was trying to say is that we need to go back to look at the things and not just watch very quickly. Haute couture is a good way to take your time and think of how human beings can be fantastic with their hands, looking at the shine of the beautiful fabrics, the embroideries... Stop and look.”

The show opened with a tribute to Valentino Garavani. “I was dreaming about movie stars, about everything beautiful in the world. My mom said, ‘you are a dreamer, you always dream, dream, dream, dream’,” we heard the late designer say in a clip from Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary Valentino: The Last Emperor.

“I was thinking of the existing bridge between the brand and Hollywood,” Michele explained backstage. “I went through the voice of Valentino in the [documentary], and he said: ‘I am a fashion designer because I love the silver screen and movie stars.’ I come from the same place because I grew up with a mom who worked in the [film] business. Couture is such an amazing playground.”

A new world

Guests at the Alexis Mabille show watched videos of a runway show entirely created using AI. The designer collaborated with AI specialists from French production company Gloria Pictures to develop this virtual yet hyperrealistic couture collection.

“It’s a new approach that really resonates with the new generation of clients,” Mabille explained backstage. “In the end, we spend most of our time doing video calls and sending samples back and forth. Sometimes clients only come to Paris once, just to try on the final piece. Basically, that’s how people work everywhere now, and what they actually want.”

Loriot called the experience interesting. “Only a select few are invited to the shows while the rest experience them virtually — why not everyone?” he asks. “But it’s a bold move for clients and the press. It raises an interesting question about producing and promoting these pieces.”