Much has been written about the contemporary relevance of haute couture, a rarefied dressmaking medium that is built on tradition and strict rules (to call yourself a couture house, you must adhere to those set out by La Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode). It remains best defined by its impossible flights of craft – each garment must be stitched entirely by hand in a process that can take hundreds of hours – and its elite cortege of clients, which numbers (by estimate) around 5,000 worldwide. ‘Couture is really a dying craft; it’s nearly extinct. There are only a few houses doing it,’ said Jonathan Anderson at his Dior couture debut this week. Such is its need for protection, he asserted, that after the show, he would open ‘Grammar of Forms’, an exhibition in the runway space allowing visitors to see his work in conversation with original designs by Christian Dior. ‘[I want] to demystify couture and inspire the next generation to ensure its future,’ he said.
The standout collections of Haute Couture Week S/S 2026
Dior’s ‘Grammar of Forms’ exhibition at Musée Rodin, which allows visitors to see Jonathan Anderson’s first couture collection in conversation with garments by Christian Dior (until 1 February 2026)
Though rarely has Haute Couture Week – which concludes in Paris today (29 January) – demanded so much attention. This was largely down to its two new custodians, Anderson at Dior and Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, both of whom would show their first couture collections during the event (their respective houses, two behemoths of Parisian style, are synonymous with haute couture, its design language filtering down to everything from ready-to-wear to cosmetics and perfume). Both seemed to shake off the weight of expectation in collections that expressed converging visions of contemporary couture – Blazy instilled everyday garments with an ethereal lightness through meticulous acts of craft (think: a hand-painted silk mousseline trompe l’oeil pair of jeans), while Anderson presented a ‘Wunderkammer’ of ideas in a bold collection full of intriguing forms and bold flourishes, from pom-pom cyclamen earrings to enormous coloured stoles.
Elsewhere, Daniel Roseberry’s latest Schiaparelli collection revelled in the joy of creation; Alessandro Michele staged a ‘peep show’ at Valentino; and at Armani Privé – in the first couture show since Giorgio Armani’s death – Silvana Armani, Mr Armani’s niece, took the reins this season in her own debut show. Here, we unpack the best shows of the week.
Schiaparelli
There is an enjoyable sense of spectacle to a Schiaparelli show, which in its 10am Monday morning spot heralds the start of Haute Couture Week. The models – who always seem to be having fun – parade around the Petit Palais in American artistic director Daniel Roseberry’s always theatrical creations, striking poses that spark nostalgia for the more outré runway shows of the 1980s (there is always good music, too: this season, the euphoric Jamie XX remix of Robyn’s ‘Dopamine’). This season, those creations spanned sculpted tops that sprouted spiking horns or enormous scorpion’s tails; sharp, wide-shouldered blazers adorned with plumes of feathers reminiscent of a bird’s wing; and delicate lace flowers that hovered and floated away from the body. There were some beautiful details besides: a flared dress in millefeuille tulle, which looked as if it had been cut away in chunks, and floating panels of degradé organza, dyed as if by bleeding ink.
Roseberry said that this season he had been inspired by a recent trip to the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo’s famed ceiling: ‘a wild, visually rambunctious, vulnerable and romantic imagining of God, religion, faith, and the human condition’. The eclecticism of this season came from a desire to replicate the ecstatic feeling of the creative act, one that he imagined Michelangelo experiencing as he created his most well-known fresco. ‘I stopped thinking for the first time in years of how something should look, but instead about how I feel when creating it,’ he said. ‘That was it. The entire emotional heartbeat of this season became not what does it look like, but how do we feel when we make it? What a relief that was. What a revelation.’
Dior
There was a palpable anticipation in the room for Jonathan Anderson’s first couture collection for Dior, one compounded by Rihanna, whose late arrival only upped the anticipation. Under an upside-down meadow of wild cyclamen – inspired by a posy brought to him by former Dior creative director John Galliano – the collection that followed was a bold ‘Wunderkammer’ of ideas, which began with the curved form of a vase by ceramic artist Magdalene Odundo (a longtime collaborator of the designer). Her work inspired the ballooning shape of the opening gowns – constructed from ultra-lightweight silk and wire, they seemed to levitate away from the body – while the rest of the collection drew on creative mementoes, from Galliano’s posy of cyclamen (which here transformed into pom-pom earrings) to a series of found objects that became embellishment, whether historic cameo brooches or shards of meteors and fossils.
The idea, said Anderson, was for a dialogue of the past: an elevation of the precious and the rare (after all, haute couture is all about the singular and the one-off). ‘There’s this element in the show of how to upcycle things,’ he said in a preview before the show. ‘Like, how do we take something and reinvent it? Things are found, and then reassembled.’ This idea of reassembly ran throughout: sinuous bias-cut gowns recalled Galliano’s signature silhouette during his time at Dior, while a sculpted black coat, jutting out at the waistline, seemed to nod to Raf Simons’ own couture debut at the house (the Belgian designer was womenswear creative director from 2012-2015). But other pieces felt entirely Anderson’s own: inspired by nature, looks became sculptural marvels: satin protruded from the waistline of a skirt; flared gowns were constructed from delicate shards of pearlescent mother-of-pearl, while bell-shaped tops ballooned around the body to create otherworldly forms.
‘I think what is nice is that [as a team] we’re exploring – it is not about working out the idea before we start, or working out the end customer, because ultimately, we don’t know what people want,’ he says, likening the couture arm of the house to a creative ‘lab’. ‘That’s the whole point. I think the idea of designing things is to make people want something they didn’t want. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt at Dior, it’s just about putting ideas out [there].’
READ: Jonathan Anderson’s historic Dior couture debut was a bold ‘Wunderkammer’ of ideas
Chanel
Matthieu Blazy’s brief tenure at Chanel so far has seen the French-Belgian designer embrace joy and levity over the weight of history. ‘I just wanted to have fun,’ he said after his debut ready-to-wear show last October, a feeling immortalised by model Awar Odhiang’s twirling runway finale, one of the year’s most memorable fashion moments (she wore a skirt adorned with hundreds of kaleidoscopic silk feathers).
With his first haute couture show, he sought a similar feeling of lightness, staged amid a fantasy-land set of enormous mushrooms and toadstools, as well as fluttering candy-pink trees. In the collection, that lightness was physical: the opening looks saw the classic Chanel suit rendered in featherweight silk mousseline rather than its usual tweed, while trompe l’oeil silk mousseline trousers were painted to recall denim jeans (a version of the ‘2.55’ handbag was also constructed from the fabric).
He said it came from an impulse to strip it all away and attempt to get to the heart of what Chanel is: ‘What makes Chanel, Chanel? What is the essence and essentialism of the house? How do you bear its soul?’ As such, he largely eschewed the theatrical towards the simplicity of a wardrobe – these were clothes that women could actually wear – though elevated through truly extraordinary moments of craft. There was tweed that sprouted with plumes of feathers; bouncing streamers of fabric at the hems of skirts; or the final bridal look, a simple collared shirt and skirt adorned with hundreds of petal-like mother-of-pearl paillettes.
Blazy said it was an ode to what he sees as the heart of Chanel – the communion between maker and wearer. As such, each model chose something personal to be stitched into their look – from a treasured initial to a symbol of luck. ‘[I] consider this collection almost as a break,’ said Blazy. ‘Something magical, something that makes you dream, something poetic, a calm moment of quietness, almost like a Sunday morning.’
READ: At Chanel, Matthieu Blazy lets the light in with a fairytale first haute couture collection
Armani Privé
It was to be the first Armani Privé show without Giorgio Armani at the helm: this past September, he passed away aged 91 after an extraordinary 50 years in fashion. Like at the Giorgio Armani menswear show in Milan – which was helmed by longtime creative partner Leo Dell'Orco – this was a Privé collection not of divergence but of continuance, mining previous signatures of the haute couture offshoot, from sinuous crystallised gowns to Eastern influences (heavily inspired by Japan, Mr Armani saw his design vernacular as a conversation between East and West).
Away from the more high-profile debuts at Chanel and Dior, this too ushered in a new design lead: Silvana Armani, Mr Armani’s niece, took the reins this season, having worked alongside her uncle for over four decades. She titled the collection ‘Jade’, using the precious stone to inform the collection’s largely green palette, shifting from Armani-esque tailoring (for their haute couture twist, ties came in sheer organza) to gowns that flared below the waist using clever petal-inspired pleats. Look out for them on the Oscars red carpet this coming March – in their ethereal beauty, they have winner written all over them.
Valentino
Alessandro Michele prefaced his latest haute couture collection for Valentino with an ode to the house’s eponymous founder, Valentino Garavani, who passed away aged 91 last week. ‘What we do today takes place within a history not of our making, in a house long inhabited, rich with traces and gestures,’ he said in a letter distributed to guests. ‘To work within this space means accepting both its weight and its grace. It means recognising that every form exists only in relation to what made it possible, that every creative act is also an act of custody.’ (As well as Garavani, Michele also name-checked his forebears Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli.) Garavani’s legacy, Michele continued, was ‘an ethics of making… a practice grounded in the belief that to create is to care for, and that beauty consists in radical, patient attention to bodies and forms.’
The collection had been finalised before Garavani’s death, and was full of the gestures that made the Roman couturier’s work so enduring: a lust for the theatrical, a note of sensuality and romance, as well as more formal references, from ruffles and feathers to the bold red of the opening gown, Garavani’s favoured hue (such was its ubiquity in his work, it was deemed ‘Valentino Rosso’). The show set comprised a series of circular chambers through which models walked; guests watched through a series of peepholes opened by a butler at the start of the show (they were based on the 18th-century Kaiserpanorama, a subject of critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin’s work). It allowed pure focus on the looks themselves: an appreciation of that extraordinary act of making, undertaken by Michele in communion with the petites mains of the couture atelier. ‘Valentino’s legacy remains what it has always been,’ said Michele. ‘An idea of beauty conceived as a noble form of responsibility toward time, bodies and the world we are given to cross.’