Another through-line of the week was collections that sought to outfit the multiplicities of women’s lives. At Chanel, Matthieu Blazy’s wide-ranging collection was inspired by the changing personal style of Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel across her lifetime (‘[This collection is] about the women within a woman,’ he said), while Sarah Burton at Givenchy and Michael Rider at Celine presented collections that sought to provide an expansive wardrobe attuned to the demands of modern life. ‘I wanted a sense of balance and clarity,’ said Burton. ‘A wardrobe to bring precision and simplicity to dressing as we speed through the multiple perspectives and perpetual motion of all our lives.’

Here, we pick the standout collections of Paris Fashion Week as the S/S 2027 shows draw to a close – from Drew Henry’s confident first outing at Courrèges to a gilded collection from Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent, a show rumoured to be his last.

Dior

The invitation for Jonathan Anderson’s latest ready-to-wear collection for Dior was a pair of ‘wénwán’ walnuts, an ancient Chinese pursuit which involves rubbing together two walnuts in the hand until they get a glossy, ‘jade-like’ lustre (it can take over five years to achieve, hence their use for meditative purposes). They worked as a dual metaphor: one, that beauty can be derived even from nature’s simplest of bounties (‘wénwán’ walnuts in their final phase were highly coveted decorative objects), and second, that to create something precious takes time and patience. The latter feels particularly apt for Dior as a haute couture house – a couture gown can take over 100 hours of hand-stitching – but also for Anderson as he hones his vision for the Parisian house, one year after holding his first womenswear show.

Indeed, this was a collection that saw Anderson reiterate what are becoming his house codes: namely, a mood of contemporary femininity and romance conjured in intriguing fabrications (plissé jacquards, bouncing ruffles, fluttering organza petals) and whimsical accessories, from a swan-shaped metal evening bag to sandals adorned with glittering crystals and bows. His shrunken bar jacket, a signature since his debut, also featured, here with a contrasting collar evoking barn jackets, as did the metallic jeans which featured as part of his S/S 2027 menswear collection, shown in June. Like at that show, he also reimagined heavy tailoring wools in featherweight trompe l’oeil organza, nodding to a theme of lightness which ran throughout the collection. ‘Something that, as it walks, leaves a kind of residue behind,’ he said of the ethereal mood. Jack Moss

READ: Jonathan Anderson looks to the ‘preciousness’ of nature for a romantic Dior show

Maison Margiela

Despite being a Spring/Summer collection, there was something almost ‘back-to-school’ in the way the new offering from Maison Margiela was communicated. The notes, typed in Courier font, were written with an ‘in this essay I will…’ cadence, the contents part lesson in the traditional workings of an atelier, part rebellious upstart undermining, dismantling, and reframing those traditions.

The crux of the proposition was a rethinking of the interplay between hard and soft, which in a Parisian maison would be delineated according to the tailoring and flou departments, the former structuring garments according to classic menswear guidelines, the latter responsible for draping. Creative director Glenn Martens suggested an approach which blurred these lines: fortified folds so that what was hard read as soft; fabric stretched over rigid structures; a squishy briefcase.

Florals were a motif – sometimes in kitschy curtain fabric with bold outlines, elsewhere more diffused and painterly – and the show was staged amidst an abundance of flowers, a tribute, the brand said, to Raf Simons’ debut collection for Dior in 2012, but time-worn, drooping and faded. India Jarvis

Saint Laurent

Though it has not been officially announced by the Parisian house, Anthony Vaccarello’s latest collection for Saint Laurent is widely rumoured to be the Belgian creative director’s last (it was hearsay the designer indulged in at the show, handing a set of ‘house keys’ to his son Luca at the end of the show). If so, this was a fitting final act to a decade-long tenure, which saw him hone a vision of nocturnal glamour that often hinged on the power of repetition – his collections would mine a singular silhouette (usually power-shouldered and razor-sharp) ad infinitum, making for a definitive Saint Laurent ‘look’.

This season, taking place on a runway lined with enormous chandeliers under the glimmering shadow of the Eiffel Tower, silhouette gave way to colour. Here, Vaccarello – save for a few closing gowns in black – rendered the entire collection in gold, reimagining the hallmarks of Yves Saint Laurent (the trench; the safari jacket; brocade tailoring; ruffled blouses; opulent drapery and bows) in various golden-tinted hues. ‘I love gold,
 it’s a magical colour. When reflecting a woman, it’s the colour of the sun,’ Yves Saint Laurent was quoted as having said, on the collection notes, with Vaccarello concurring that it is perhaps fashion’s most transformative shade. ‘Gold, magical and mythical, can alchemically transform everything it touches,’ he said.

It made for a glittering finale to an equally transformative tenure. ‘A light shines all the more brightly because we know it cannot be held,’ he said, somewhat cryptically. ‘What passes sometimes leaves more light than what remains.’ Jack Moss

Courrèges

It’s an interesting assignment, taking on the reins of a brand so absolutely associated with 1960s Space Age optimism, when our contemporary space exploration is anything but. In August, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket crashed into the moon, which, when André Courrèges was in the atelier pioneering his signature futuristic silhouette, was still untouched by humanity. Now, space travel is being undertaken largely in order to find an alternative habitat to replace the planet we’re destroying, and it’s difficult to have a conversation about the universe without inevitably mentioning the name of one of our more problematic billionaires. Space isn’t quite as exciting or enigmatic as it was then – things are more confusing.

Drew Henry, who previously worked within the design teams of Phoebe Philo and Burberry, has taken on this mantle as the house’s new creative director. The show space set the stage for a dialogue between the retro and the modern – through an eclectic curation of unmatching chairs, sourced from different periods – that the ready-to-wear continued.

Henry, it seems, is an optimist. The collection captured the spirit of both past and present, the latter most especially through ideas of freedom and self-expression, which for many in 2026 may feel like dwindling commodities. His colour palette was vivacious: lime, vermillion, and of course that bright, bright white. But where he borrowed from archival gestures and shapes – the go-go boot, the Mod-ish A-line, the Peter Pan-collared pea coat, the chubby piping – he tempered the collection with a lack of uniformity that felt more recognisably contemporary. There was a kind of eclecticism and occasional incongruity to the collection which have become staples of much high fashion in the 2020s, a nod, perhaps, to the pace of the world and the speed and tenor of our image consumption, which have already come to define this era. India Jarvis

Dries Van Noten

Rugby shirts, austere knitted vests, and deck shoes may not read to most as the trappings of glamour, but for S/S 2027, Julian Klausner was preoccupied with the universal symbols of elegance a person might add to garments such as these, in order to capture something of the feeling. The idea of getting dressed up for no loftier reason than to admire yourself in the mirror – the application of a red lip, the addition of a sparkling trinket, or mixing in a flash of leopard print.

The base in question, at Dries Van Noten, read like the clothing of a particularly chic interwar-era aristocrat: boyish silhouettes with the occasional cinching at the waist, loose mid-length skirts and slouchy cardigans. The vintage-inspired cuts were offset with exquisite embellishment, and graphic prints made from movie posters imagined and designed in the atelier. If the modern woman doesn’t already define pussy-bows and drooping strings of beads as the height of glamour, this beautiful collection from Dries Van Noten may convince her to reconsider. India Jarvis

Acne Studios

The 30th anniversary of Acne Studios, the brand founded in Stockholm in 1996, has clearly got creative director (and co-founder) Jonny Johansson thinking about the idea of history. In spirited style, Johansson played a game of mash-up – nods to historical costuming, from billowing satin and brocade skirts to prints evoking Renaissance portraiture, were clashed with that most Acne Studios of staples, the denim jean (the brand began with 100 pairs of denim jeans; three decades later, it is a global fashion powerhouse showing twice-yearly at Paris Fashion Week). Elsewhere, frock-coats and shirts were reimagined in contemporary style (they came cropped to bare the stomach or were nipped dramatically at the waist), while references to historic maritime apparel came in slouchy lace-up T-shirts and sou'wester-style hats. Leather, another of Acne Studios’ foundational materials, added further juxtapositions in biker pants and patinated jackets.

‘Reflecting on the journey past and what’s to come, I wanted to keep exploring the energy released by bringing together two things that don’t belong,’ explained Johansson. ‘That tension has always inspired me. Here, denim becomes a canvas that moves through time. [This collection] affirms something I believe to my core: that Acne Studios always likes to play, but we never want to pretend. For me, it has to be real.’ Jack Moss

READ: Jonny Johansson on 30 years of Acne Studios: ‘I look forward much more than I look back’

Chloé

At the Chloé show’s midway point a parade of charming raincoats came out in quick succession: one white, draped across the shoulders like a poncho, followed by blush pink overlaid with transparent vinyl, another in beige, then black, then high-gloss firetruck red and sunshine yellow. ‘May the love that poured into this collection endure forever,’ the show notes read. May the rain pour forever too. Chemena Kamali described these pieces, inspired by fishermen’s coats and capes and paired with asymmetrical sou’wester hats, as one of her ‘obsessions’ of the season, alongside lingerie and floral embroidery, leading to a collection guided as much by her own instincts and passions as by the history of the brand itself. The signature Chloe flou, interpreted in crisp white broderie anglais and flounced organza, found its contrast in sharp-shouldered tailored pieces and skin-tight body suits in block colours, but it was the outerwear, in all its iterations, which stole the show. Spring showers can’t come soon enough. India Jarvis

Balenciaga

Corals provided the starting point for Pierpaolo Piccioli’s third ready-to-wear collection for Balenciaga, in part inspired by the textile works of artist Aude Franjou (one of her pieces, Les Coraux de la Liberté, ‘Corals of Freedom’, hung in the showspace). And, although a liberated use of colour and under-the-sea-inspired embellishment nodded visually to the marine creatures – anemone-style pom poms, seashell jewellery, and sponge-like neckpieces all featured – Piccioli said he was also drawn to the coral reef for the way it is an eco-system of ‘profound symbiosis’. ‘No one shines alone,’ he wrote in a letter to guests. ‘Joy and light are never solitary achievements.’

It is something that he likened to the haute couture atelier, which requires a collective spirit to create its extraordinary creations (Piccioli showed his first couture collection for the house in summer 2026). With this ready-to-wear collection, he sought to bring some of couture’s magic into these everyday garments – from a sewing technique used to give curving ‘basque’ shapes to T-shirts and jackets, to a more generous use of volume throughout, a nod to haute couture’s synonymy with abundance. ‘Through superlative cut and construction – human intervention – we can change the language of the known,’ he said. Jack Moss

Rick Owens

Rick Owens described couture-levels of labour intensive process in the press notes which accompanied his S/S 2027 collection: ‘millefoglie’ jackets (named for the dessert dish, which translates to ‘a thousand leaves’) were constructed from individually cut circles of recycled nylon tulle and then sewn onto a tulle base followed by a poplin base, sculpted to the body and taking around 45 hours per jacket to complete. Fabric was conceived from scratch, including a heavy double-duchesse inspired by industrial cargo straps, or a satin wave consisting of 100 double-twisted silk yarns per centimetre, a time-consuming process which produced just 30m of fabric a day.

These experimentations and innovations were subsumed into looks which followed the Rick Owens house codes to the letter: rigidity counterbalanced with draping; exaggerated verticality; pointed yokes; and an out-of-this-world quality, this season emphasised through pentagram designs, perforated and printed discreetly as, described Owens, ‘my little protest against judgemental condemnation and intolerance’. ‘We can see,’ he continued, ‘that it can be human nature to superstitiously demonise otherness.’ India Jarvis

Loewe

Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez’s latest collection took place in a Caper Mueller Kneer-conceived ‘arena’ in the grounds of Paris’ Château de Vincennes. Its in-the-round space – through which models criss-crossed – was designed to evoke a sense of immediacy, said the American designers, formerly of Proenza Schouler. They likened the set-up to the Anatomical Theatre in Padua, the Globe in London, and La Scala Opera House in Milan, though the space also evoked the bull ring – a traditional ritual of Spain, where Loewe was founded in 1846. Indeed, the pair said the collection was an ‘old-world – new-world conversation’, clashing ‘New England with Andalucia’, ‘the ease of American pragmatism, and nods to Spanish drama, ritual, history’.

Cue sporting blazers worn with flouncing mini skirts; summer dresses that twisted at the midriff to reveal the naval; or slouchy polo shirts worn with striped woven skirts (they were actually crafted from intricately woven glass beads, a collaboration with Loewe Foundation Craft Prize 2025 finalist Cécile Feilchenfeldt). Elsewhere, elements of play and experimentation continued from last season: moulded resin collars were set on top of knitwear and trench coats (they each were finished with over 20 layers of varnish), while ultra-short mini dresses, cut from leather and flared towards the hem, had a paper-doll quality (these graphic silhouettes have become something of a hallmark of McCollough and Hernandez’s tenure so far).

‘What we’re putting forward here is a proposition for dressing. How does this new Loewe language become a wardrobe?’ they said. ‘We’re taking the vision, the craft, and injecting a reality and character. There’s proximity to the clothes, proximity to living, and proximity to our own sensibility.’ Jack Moss

Issey Miyake

Taking the Japanese principle of ma as its starting point, Issey Miyake’s S/S 2027 was an ode to negative space. Ma refers to the perception of emptiness, an essential counterbalance to substance, as seen across design and artistic disciplines from gardening to musical composition to cinema.

Here, Satoshi Kondo utilised a number of techniques to emphasise the notion of ma: the show was staged in an almost vacuum of blackness at Dojo de Paris, a canopy of fabric held up by a troupe of dancers, aerating and collapsing with their movement like a parachute. After a period of silence, pianist Koki Nakano began a souring, multi-instrumental piece, engaging, as the brand explained, ‘in a dialogue between music composition and clothes-making, where auditory and visual senses inspire one another to give rise to a more intimate integration of music and clothing.’

As for the clothes themselves, they oscillated between close fitting – the return of the papier mâché second skin-like breast plate – and billowing, creating different configurations of ma according to how much negative space there was between fabric and skin. Among the typically deft and complex fabrication, a scrunched silk with bulbous pockets of air in places, artful creases in others, was a standout – used across dresses, skirts, trousers and tops. India Jarvis

Lanvin

There is something completely timeless about Peter Copping’s Lanvin – he seems to be a designer utterly resistant to gimmicks or trends which might immediately place a collection in the present day, although that’s not to say his clothes come across as nostalgic, more like classic. For S/S 2027, sensual fabrics in elongated proportions called to mind the New Woman, a continuation from the previous season and an homage to what is the centenary year of menswear for the brand – Copping has been weaving this anniversary into the shapes and attitude for womenswear with aplomb. For all its fluidity there were moments of graphicness too: sharp double-breasted suit jackets with contrasting buttons, the flare of a peplum, exaggerated deep V-necklines, a vivid red shoe breaking up a monochrome look (the latter a tribute to dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch, one of the influential women that were on the mood board for the season). India Jarvis

Givenchy

Sarah Burton’s collections at Givenchy thus far have been concerned with the multiplicities of women’s lives. Her latest outing, which took place amid a graphic show set by Hollywood production artist James Chinlund, continued this approach, which is defined less by strict thematics than an intuitive means of creating a contemporary woman’s wardrobe (as one of a rare number of women creative directors, it is a task she has taken on with zeal). Indeed, Burton offered little in a way of explanation for the collection: ‘I wanted a sense of balance and clarity,’ she said in a short note issued to guests. ‘A wardrobe to bring precision and simplicity to dressing as we speed through the multiple perspectives and perpetual motion of all our lives.’

There is something refreshing about this lack of soul-searching; instead, Burton delivered a direct and desirable collection, which spanned the alternating facets of a women’s life. There were well-cut denim jeans and vest tops edged with luminous piping (belt buckles which doubled as powder compacts added a sense of play); brightly coloured satin shirts and skirts, cut from leather; Burton’s signature razor-sharp tailoring, this season deconstructed or flaring into a peplum; and a vivid series of gowns, from the Grecian-style, installed with sculptural metal ‘wings‘, to a ruffled elongated dress adorned with intricate beading in Japanese-style motifs. Through it all, a clarity that she said was attuned to the overwhelm of contemporary life. ‘In a world that’s so off-kilter, how do you find balance?’ she said. ‘I wanted to take it back to this precise simplicity.’ Jack Moss

Victoria Beckham

There’s a bit of a separation of church and state, as far as Victoria Beckham is concerned; her work in the fashion world, at the helm of her eponymous label since 2008, is almost entirely detached from her past life as a pop mega-star, and for one so famous – for her personal style as much as for her musical career – she is seldom self-referential in her designs. S/S 2027, however, introduced a little nod to her own history, not through bandeau tops, or mini-dresses, or oversized sunglasses, but through illusions to dance.

In particular, Beckham was interested in the avant-garde movements of the 1920s, ‘when forward-thinking dancers rejected the restrictions of classical ballet in favour of a freer relationship with the body, developing styles that often connected movement with painting and other forms of art’. References to this period were most clearly communicated in the statuesque silhouette of some of the gowns, in a modernist bird print, and in the collection’s colour palette – taken apparently from the backdrops of contemporary portraiture.

But the dance of other eras was present too – fanning pleats brought the costume of Loie Fuller to mind, boxy tailoring, slightly oversized, might have been borrowed from Gene Kelly, and exaggerated funnel-necked blousons and balloon shorts matched the proportions of modern-day warm-up gear worn by ballerinas. India Jarvis

Junya Watanabe

For S/S 2027, Junya Watanabe continued his collaboration with movement director Pat Boguslawski, which lent a spectacular, dramatic quality to the much-lauded A/W 2026 collection, but this season in more classic fashion-show style: swaggering struts rather than the tango-inspired choreography seen in March. This matched the tone of the collection itself, which, whilst still fizzing with ideas and complex constructions, was more closely aligned to his blingified menswear outing this summer. Chaka Khan’s ‘Like Sugar’ and Michael Jackson’s ‘Just Can't Stop Loving You’ provided the soundtrack to the collection, which was titled ‘Funky’, and the American R&B star Ciara – pregnant with her fifth child – walked the runway, prompting whoops from the Palais de Tokyo crowd.

In the collection itself, athletic body stockings formed the basis for many looks, overlaid with cut-away trench coats and half-finished tailored jackets with the tacking still in situ, or cropped bouclé jackets strung with pearls. Laser-cut bodices in hard plastic came with ‘don’t come near me’ razor-sharp spikes, while a glittering, tiered contraption worn over the head called to mind a chandelier. Watanabe notoriously gives little away about his starting point for any given season, preferring to refer to collaborators over concepts (here: ‘The bodysuits were produced in the factory of CW-X, the high performance sportswear brand by the Japanese underwear company Wacoal’), so his work is necessarily open to interpretation. But here there felt no need for over-intellectualisation – all he willed you to do was sit back and enjoy. India Jarvis

Celine

Michael Rider is another designer working with intuition over big ideas, but this doesn’t make his clothes less intelligent – in fact, they were among the most desirable of fashion month so far. Continuing to hone his vision for a contemporary wardrobe, where a luxurious insouciance meets elements of sportswear and prep (Rider was born in Washington DC and attended Brown University; he also worked at Polo Ralph Lauren prior to Celine), there was a more sensual undercurrent to this latest collection, from the use of satin (it came in vivid tones of pink and green, and was gently pressed and creased across its surface), to references to underwear and slip dresses (the latter was sized-up in proportion and came in vampy black). He described the collection, which spanned mens- and womenswear as one of ‘positive obsession’. ‘[It’s about] being fabulous,’ he explained. ‘And letting clothes just do their job.’ As with past collections, there were also heaps of great accessories here: from sized-up belts and accordion handbags to colourful satin totes, two-tone pumps and leather diaries, carried in the hand. ‘[It’s about the] memories, moments that made us love fashion,’ he continued. ‘Moments where you get a glimpse of possibility.’ Jack Moss

Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood

‘It was a stifling summer,’ wrote Andreas Kronthaler. ‘I lived in a nightshirt with nothing underneath.’ The experience, shared by many, of unbearable temperatures prompted the Vivienne Westwood designer to question what clothes will become as these conditions worsen. The conundrum of heatwave style is on everyone’s lips these days, but the bigger, more pressing concern of climate change – and the role fashion and clothing production plays in that – has been part of the brand’s DNA for far longer than a few hot summers. The late Vivienne Westwood, to whom Kronthaler was married from 1992 until her death, was a highly influential campaigner for many causes, the fight against climate change among them, and her legacy of activism and mission-driven creativity remains a constant of her eponymous brand (this season’s collection also included a limited-edition T-shirt in honour of the suicide prevention charity Body & Soul, of which the couple were long-term supporters).

So what is the climate change wardrobe according to Andreas Kronthaler? Fabrics were billowy and often clashing – as if they’d been salvaged from multiple sources, and, as the show notes thriftily pointed out, ‘valuable fabric [was] used only at the front’. Shirts and jackets were left open, skin on show, and swimwear, kaftans, a yellow garland lei, and sandals brought a certain beachy chill to an otherwise typically punky and chaotic offering. India Jarvis

Hermès

This season at Hermès, Nadège Vanhée stripped things back – at least in terms of the mise-en-scène, which saw the Garde Républicaine showspace transformed into a gleaming white box (previous seasons have seen it filled with mounds of moss or sandy dunes). It lent the S/S 2027 collection a feeling of crispness and clarity, particularly the more vivid expressions of colour which the French designer evoked this season – yellows, oranges and reds had an almost electric quality in the otherwise sparse space (such was the brightness of the scene, some guests donned sunglasses to watch the spectacle unfold).

In what has becoming a thematic thread of the week, Vanhée was concerned here with the pursuit of lightness: the collection notes described garments ‘floating by, like feathers in the air’, with the idea of ventilation running throughout, whether through gauzy fabrics, netted construction, or perforated leather and suede (bucket bags even came with air holes of their own). Other pieces were cut into streamers at the hemline – a technique which added a sense of movement and ease to Hermès’ signature leather – while knitted bra tops, some wrapped with a plissé version of the carré, had a streamlined feel. Vanhée said the collection was one of pragmatism: recent travels to California and Asia, as well as across her native Europe, were defined by rising heat. Fittingly, Paris was in the midst of the last blush of late-summer warmth, with the sweltering showspace making her vision of lightness one of particular appeal. Jack Moss

Comme des Garçons

Denim is not a fabric typically associated with Rei Kawakubo’s runway shows for Comme des Garçons, though for S/S 2027 the designer put the humble workwear fabric – one synonymous with both the American West and her native Japan – front and centre.

Used here to construct Kawakubo’s typically imposing forms, from enormous spherical skirts that cracked like eggs to reveal ruffles of red fabric inside, to undulating panelled jackets which flared dramatically at the waist, it was part of a collection which she described as ‘when royal life and everyday life become one’ (she typically describes her collections in such cryptic one-liners, willing guests to draw their own conclusions).

Alongside denim, striped and polka dot fabrics captured a similarly ‘everyday’ mood, transformed here by the vastness of the silhouette – models had to shimmy past each other to traverse the zigzagging runway thanks to the size of the various garments – and teetering crowns by Nobuki Hizume, which together lent this arresting collection a regal, ceremonial air. Jack Moss

Miu Miu

‘To bring elegance to sports,’ was how the sage-like Miuccia Prada succinctly described her S/S 2027 collection for Miu Miu, which was an attempt, explained the Milanese designer, to capture the ‘here and now’. Bringing elegance to the everyday – or, indeed, to that which is typically deemed ugly or unappealing – has been a modus operandi of the designer since her early days at Prada (alongside Miu Miu, she is co-creative director of the house her grandfather founded in 1913, alongside Raf Simons).

For this latest collection, the effect was achieved through unexpected combinations: a bejewelled bra top over a Miu Miu-branded rash vest, for example, or a cross-laced houndstooth skirt which revealed Lycra swimwear underneath (cross-lacing ran throughout, including on a new collation with American denim brand Wrangler). It lent the collection an intuitive, eclectic feel: in Prada parlance, an ‘intentional, nonconformist dialogue’, one which felt an apt reflection of our mixed-up times.

Also in the Miu Miu melting pot were painted leather jackets, zip-up track tops and purposely crinkled cocktail dresses, while a line-up of famous faces, including Olivia Colman, Jamie Bell and Emma Corrin, added to the collection’s freewheeling appeal. Jack Moss

READ: Miu Miu drafts an all-star cast for a collection which marries sportswear and sophistication

Akris

Akris creative director Albert Kriemler borrowed his palette and his mark-making from the Viennese artist Martha Jungwirth, whose rhythmic, at times carnal abstractions were translated in a collection that graduated through a veritable rainbow of colours, precisely picked out from Jungwirth’s oil works: scarlet through puce, into the off-white of primed paper, then velvety black, sky blue, canary yellow. Jungwirth’s brush strokes were transformed into ribbons, appliquéd as details, or appear as laser-cut fringe, turned upside down and into dresses which become bouncy and feathery. Jacquard was reversed so the loose chaos of its underside became a print of its own, and elsewhere entire looks were kept confidently, boldly monochrome: ‘Seeing Martha’s colours for the first time, I was struck by their sheer audacity,’ Kriemler wrote. ‘Her paintings never give themselves away at once. You have to keep looking. Emotion and experience, recorded in paint. Reds, pinks, violets. “Gefühlsfarben”, as Martha calls them. Felt as much as seen.’ India Jarvis

Valentino

Troye Sivan’s Party provided the booming soundtrack for Alessandro Michele’s latest Valentino show, which saw the Italian designer take over the historic Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève close to the Pantheon (the venue has never been used before as a fashion show). The setting was purposeful: this collection was titled ‘Antilibrary’, a reference to Umberto Eco’s belief that the most valuable books are not the ones which you have read, but the ones you haven’t – to him, they represent the possibility of knowledge to be learnt (he practiced what he preached, owning a private library of over 30,000 books, the majority of which he had never read).

For this latest collection – which was preceded by a call for guests to bring a book to donate to local Parisian libraries – Michele applied the idea of ‘Antilibrary’ to the fashion show, seeing garments that you have not yet worn as receptacles of possibility. Nowhere is this more true than a fashion show, where viewers – whether those in the room, or watching at home through phones and screens – can project their own fantasies onto the clothing presented on the runway (there have been numerous times when a runway show has willed guests to rethink their entire wardrobe in their 15-minute-or-so run time). It lent the collection a bold, freewheeling approach, seeing Michele’s nostalgia-tinged designs reimagined in vivid combinations of colour and texture, from fluoro-coloured satin and lace to ruffles, feathers and bows. Topping off the youthful, spirited mood were caps which read ‘Villan Teen’.

‘I want to give back to fashion what fashion has always given me,’ he said. ‘I would love to push people to inject something more, because otherwise we risk falling asleep.’ Jack Moss

Jean Paul Gaultier

A full annual circuit of collections now under his belt – including his debut haute couture collection in June – Duran Lantink’s command to his atelier as they readied for year two was thus: ‘Always look for something that excites you. Don’t be afraid,’ continuing: ‘Things don’t have to make perfect sense. That’s also quite a Jean Paul Gaultier code.’ Evidently, it landed, as the brand summarised the ensuing S/S 2027 as having a ‘folky, witchy 1980s Ibiza vibe’, a wacky Venn diagram that came together into a surprisingly wearable collection.

The show’s first half was a focused experiment, as is Lantink’s want, on how garments can distort the body – so shoulders, clavicles, and breasts were subtly augmented through exaggerated cuts, but the fabrication and palette was kept low key: white cotton and sturdy brown leather. Colour and print was introduced later – plaid, ticking stripe and red needlepoint embroidery all lent a rustic, almost domestic quality to more outré shapes. Embellishment, of which there was little, took the form of bells, and accessories included matronly, veil-like headdresses and an expanded shoe offering (footwear is a new vertical for the brand, introduced under Lantink), including an inversion of the popular tabi style. India Jarvis

Zimmermann

Nicky Zimmermann’s Spring collection looked towards the figure of the butterfly, an insect chosen by the Australian designer ‘not because of its delicacy but because of its resilience’. The revelation had come when she and her team had a private tour of the butterfly collection in the Australian Museum, including the 19th-century illustrations of Harriet and Helena Scott, which she found particularly inspiring. ‘There’s a real strength in the way [the butterfly] moves and constantly transforms, and that became an important thread throughout the collection,’ she said. Cue Zimmermann’s signature vision of ethereal femininity – billowing shirts; flouncing ruffles; skirts cut with panels of lace – interrupted with elements of toughness, from denim jeans to stand-collar jackets and face-shielding visor sunglasses. Other pieces appeared as if Zimmermann’s protagonist for the season had stepped into the butterfly house: skirts, tops and dresses were adorned with three-dimensional organza butterflies, their wings fluttering to life as models walked the Carreau du Temple runway. Jack Moss

Chanel

Acts of transformation have defined Matthieu Blazy’s tenure at Chanel so far, which now spans a year since he showed his debut collection for the Parisian house last October (in the time since, the house has undergone a transformation as a whole, with rising sales reflecting the fervent response to designs). For S/S 2027, he looked once again to the idea of metamorphosis (last season, he evoked the metaphor of a caterpillar and a butterfly to denote the way the collection moved from the pragmatic to the spectacular), inspired by the personal style transformation of house founder Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel over her lifetime. ‘[It is] layered history of selves within a layered history of the clothing she wore,’ Blazy described of the collection, which was shown at the Grand Palais on a runway lined with a flock of giant birds in flight.

As such, the show began with Gabrielle Chanel’s own 2.55 quilted handbag, retrieved from the house’s Patrimoine archives and carried by Dyanira Hurbuscher, the model who opened and closed the show. In between, nods to the jersey underwear which began Gabrielle Chanel’s fashion career, peeking out from the opening looks; Edwardian corsets, deconstructed and paired with blooming tutu-like skirts, referencing the constricted silhouette she once wore and later rallied against; alongside the hallmarks of her style which would become house codes, from tweed tailoring (reimagined by Blazy in a stretch fabric for ease of movement) to floral corsages and strings of pearls (here, those pearls were reimagined in fabric).

Through this ode to Gabrielle Chanel, the show also had a more universal message: that the process of constructing our identity through clothing is rarely static. ‘Throughout their lives, women become multiple selves, different faces of the same coin. It’s like a game of exquisite corpse, where one identity leads to another,’ he said. ‘[This collection is] about the women within a woman.’ Jack Moss

READ: At Chanel, Matthieu Blazy’s latest collection takes flight

Louis Vuitton

This season, Louis Vuitton regained its position as fashion week’s closing act with a typically blockbuster runway show held in the Cour Carré du Louvre (to take over such a landmark is a show of the house’s might in itself). The show set, which was built in the historic courtyard of the former royal palace, evoked a motorway (complete with tarmac roads and concrete crash barriers) over which 34 futuristic Louis Vuitton-branded ‘cars’ hovered. Creative director Nicolas Ghesquière said he wanted this surreal urban scene to provide a juxtaposition to the collection itself, which was defined by a feeling of lightness and ease (silhouettes were scarf-like and caught the air; while tailoring was reimagined in ultralight fabrications that gently clung to the models’ bodies as they moved).

Indeed, he titled the collection ‘Ergonomie’, though he was quick to assert that this was not ergonomic in the sense of being moulded to the body; instead, ‘nothing is rigid, everything is fluid, like a second skin serving to define physicality in motion’. In this pursuit of lightness, it felt like something of a departure for Ghesquière, whose 13-year tenure at Louis Vuitton has largely been defined by the structured and the sculptural. ‘I wanted to express something that [gives an] impression of minimalism. But the work behind this construction, this simplification, to make things extremely light, is really complex,’ he elaborated backstage. ‘It looks simple, but that was the goal.’ Jack Moss

‘“Roc” is a piece about strength, structure and movement,’ says Messika, creative director of the modern jewellery maison she founded in 2005. Her inspiration for ‘Roc’ was far from Paris: the necklace’s dramatic shape nods to the Organ Pipes, a group of columnar vertical basalt pillars that formed 150 million years ago in Namibia. ‘I loved the idea of translating this raw geological power into a jewel,’ says Messika. ‘What fascinates me about “Roc” is the tension between its graphic rigour and its fluidity. At first glance, it feels bold and sculptural, almost like a piece of architecture. But once it is worn, it moves with the body and becomes incredibly alive.’

The necklace was unveiled earlier in October 2026 in a Messika show held at the Grand Palais in Paris. For this, Messika partnered with Carine Roitfeld. ‘I love this necklace because it sits like a choker, which immediately gives it a more modern, contemporary feel. I really like this way of reimagining diamonds and making them easier to wear every day,’ the seminal fashion editor enthuses.

If ‘Roc’ was hers, how would Roitfeld wear the statement piece? ‘I would keep it as simple as possible, with a black or white T-shirt and jeans,’ she says. ‘I think it’s much chicer not to wait for an evening out or a special occasion to wear diamonds. I love the idea of wearing them naturally, every day, with very simple pieces.’

At the centre of ‘Roc sits an emerald-cut diamond of 5.02 carats. There are roughly a further 20 carats of white diamonds set across the necklace. Are diamonds a Parisian gem? Roitfeld says yes, and states her case. ‘I think diamonds bring a special kind of light: they illuminate the face and instantly make us feel more beautiful. And I think there is something very Parisian about wearing diamonds during the day, effortlessly, without needing a special occasion. It’s precisely that contrast between something precious and a very simple look that I love.’

But Blazy is also concerned with the transformative power of clothing; how a woman might dress for the ‘multiple selves’ she might inhabit over a given day, or lifetime. Last season, he evoked the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly to describe a collection which was designed capture the innate contradictions of the house. ‘Chanel is function, Chanel is fiction. Chanel is sensible, Chanel is seductive. Chanel is day, Chanel is night,’ said Blazy at the time, ending the show with a rainbow-like parade of models emerging from the figurative chrysalis in glimmering tweed and chainmail tailoring, their hair pastel-coloured or coated with a metallic sheen.

‘It represents the freedom to choose between the caterpillar and the butterfly whenever you want,’ he said at the time. ‘I wish to create a canvas for women to be unapologetically who they are and who they want to be.’

This season, under an enormous flock of glowing birds which had been erected over the Grand Palais runway, Blazy looked towards the personal style transformation of house founder Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel over her lifetime – from her beginnings in pioneering jersey to create her liberated, un-corseted line to the richer expressions of glamour which would define her later life. ‘[A] layered history of selves within a layered history of the clothing she wore,’ described Blazy, who chose to begin and end the show with Gabrielle Chanel’s own 2.55 quilted handbag, retrieved from the house’s Patrimoine archives and carried by model Dyanira Hurbuscher, who opened and closed the show.

As such, the collection drew on facets of Gabrielle Chanel’s own life and style: ‘in the collection, the young Gabrielle becomes the various Chanel women she will be,’ read the collection notes. So there were nods to the jersey underwear which would begin her fashion journey, peeking out from the opening looks; deconstructed Edwardian corsets, referencing those which she once wore and abandoned; and the tweed tailoring for which she would become best-known. Through it all, a feeling of a life in construction: jackets appeared stripped of their outer layer to reveal ‘boning’ beneath, or were left raw along their edges. Blazy called them ‘the ghostly remnants of fashion lives past’.

But through evoking Gabrielle Chanel’s story, Blazy was seeking to capture more universal experience: that of constructing an identity through the clothes we wear, one which changes as we move through our lives, but often bears traces of our past selves. ‘Throughout their lives, women become multiple selves, different faces of the same coin. It’s like a game of exquisite corpse, where one identity leads to another,’ he said. ‘[This collection is] about the women within a woman.’

Of this collection of metaphors – continuing into the show’s soundtrack, which saw Nicole Kidman read passages from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a tale of personal metamorphosis across time and place – the one which Blazy settled on was the bird taking flight. ‘This is not a historical collection; it’s a collection about Gabrielle Chanel’s layered stories,’ he said. ‘Ultimately, Chanel took off, and each step she took led to her being free, like a bird.’

Stay tuned to wallpaper.com for more from Paris Fashion Week S/S 2027.

To create a complementary make-up look for these designs, Philips started, as always, by having a conversation with Anderson. ‘It is a kind of open [conversation],’ he says. ‘And then I work with the hairdresser, manicurist and me to propose some looks, show it on models and then decide.’

For this collection, ‘Jonathan wanted a natural look with a surprise element, something subtle,’ explains Philips. So, we went for two variations of eyeliner in silver. One look was a skinny silver metallic eyeliner and the other was a chunky silver glitter eyeliner wing.’

To create the look, Philips placed a premium on creating healthy-looking skin on each of the models, prepping them with the Dior Capture skincare routine and adding Dior Forever Skin Veil primer. For face, Philips used the Dior Forever Skin Glow Foundation, in which he blended a hint of blush using the Dior Backstage Rosy Glow stick in Rosewood, Toffee or Berry, depending on the skin tone.

He then gently powdered the T-zone with the new Dior Forever On Set Powder, and added a bit of Dior Backstage Glassy Glow Stick in Glossy Jelly on the high points of the face. Finally, eyebrows were naturally groomed and lips given a hydrated plumpness with the Dior Addict Lip Maximiser in 001 Pink. On top of this clean, healthy look, Philips added one of the two silver eye makeup styles.

As always with a runway show, the biggest challenge is time. ‘We have to come up with a look literally just before the actual show, so that’s always exciting. On the day of the show, the look is briefed to my team, so they can execute the look or looks and customise it according to the model’s face shape and skin tone,’ Philips says. ‘Making sure that the designer is happy is the goal, and when that’s the case, that’s where I get the most enjoyment from.’

For Philips, the runway is also a time for him to think differently than he does the rest of the year. ‘When we create a look for the show, it is to complete or complement the vision of the designer. In my role as creative and image director for Dior Makeup, I have to consider a broader approach too,’ he says.

‘I create products not only for women who are passionate about fashion. Not every woman wants to be in the latest fashion, but every woman wants to be beautiful. So, from that perspective I can say that the Dior woman is a multi-faceted one, she’s confident and knows that she’s worthy of the best. She can go for a simple, natural look or for a full game, she owns her beauty.’

Their debut, in October of last year, featured Ellsworth Kelly’s 1989 abstract masterpiece Yellow Panel with Red Curve in its entranceway (‘in [the painting] lies an optimism and spirit that we deeply identify with,’ the pair said at the time), while for their A/W 2026 show in January, a series of plushie animals sat around the yellow-floored showspace like impromptu guests. These included octopi, dogs and clams, each a work by German contemporary artist Cosima von Bonin.

This morning in Paris (2 October 2026), McCollough and Hernandez will show their latest collection within a showspace conceived by London- and Berlin-based architectural practice Casper Mueller Kneer. The runway set, which sits inside a specially constructed white box in the grounds of the medieval fortress and former royal palace Château de Vincennes, comprises a double-height circular ‘arena’ around which models will circulate and guests will sit.

The set marks the first major architectural project from the house under McCollough and Hernandez, who drafted Casper Mueller Kneer to create a ‘three-dimensional space’ somewhere between ‘an arena, a theatre and a gallery’. Entered on two levels, the minimal, all-white design features a circular outer wall, an upper gallery and a scaffold-like construction, as well as circles of cuboid seating on the central ‘stage’.

Inspirations include the Anatomical Theatre in Padua, the Globe in London, and La Scala Opera House in Milan, as well as Detroit’s gasometer. ‘It evokes spectator sports, ritual dramas, and performance, centring the unique energy of a shared, lived human experience,’ describes the house.

Central to the design was the idea of ‘intensity and proximity’, say the architects, who conceived the ‘arena’ in such a way that it could bring the most guests together in a ‘relatively contained’ space. Its design, with models circulating the arena’s two floors, also allows attendees to view McCollough and Hernandez’s collection up close.

‘We’re trying to create a space that has a definite three-dimensional quality. Both in terms of the design, but also in terms of the viewing experience,’ say the architects. ‘You’re very close to one another. You’re very close to the collection.’

‘We wanted to build a show space that explored the unique energy of a stadium, arena, or theatre,’ add McCollough and Hernandez. ‘The anticipation, the focus, the shared emotion – that electric charge in the air that everyone can feel. There’s something so real and immediate in those spaces, a sense of presence and proximity that felt very right for this collection.’

Stay tuned to wallpaper.com for more from Paris Fashion Week S/S 2027.

There is a clear metaphorical weight to Anderson’s choice of invitation – the idea that creating something beautiful takes time and patience. This not only applies to Dior as a house – after all, haute couture requires the ultimate acts of endurance, with gowns taking up to 100 hours to hand-stitch – but also perhaps to Anderson’s position as creative director. As tenures become increasingly short (look to Dario Vitale, who only lasted a single season at Versace, despite a critically lauded debut) and social media’s firestorm of opinion, that ‘some things take time’ felt like a necessary statement. ‘Coming across wénwán walnuts reminded me how we can find knowledge and preciousness in nature,’ he said.

Like last season, the show was staged in Paris’ historic Tuileries Gardens in a contemporary pagoda surrounding Le Bassin Octogonal, one of the park’s octagonal fountains. Last season, it was dotted with lily pads; this season, a more wistful mood was conjured with a cluster of camphor trees and dry ice, which gave the effect of fog hovering over a lake at dawn (the trees will be replanted in the gardens after the show). ‘Long before a tree spreads its branches to the sky, the nut holds the knowledge of its form,’ read the collection notes, a calligram of a walnut shell.

Indeed, this was a collection which saw Anderson finding the form of his Dior woman – a clear evolution of last season’s romantic silhouette (the millefeuilles of frills and ruffles returned here), and a counterpart to the Dior man he showed in June of this year (their shared wardrobe includes a metallic silver jean). Signatures are beginning to be forged, like his shrunken bar jacket (this time, it recalled a barn jacket with its contrasting collar); a use of plissé jacquard to create a more fluid tailoring line (plissé was used in his S/S 2026 couture collection, shown in June); alongside references to nature, whether in elongated petal-like earrings or painterly floral prints (nature was a perennial influence on house founder Christian Dior, who often returned to the flower in his collections).

Through it all, an eclectic, whimsical air that feels particularly Andersonian: a woven organza suit was left open to reveal a bra top beneath, and worn with asymmetric earrings and a silver handbag slung over the shoulder, while another look combined a pyjama shirt and delicate layered skirt, worn with Dior-chain branded heels – as if his protagonist for the season had dressed in haste. Elsewhere, there were floating organza bows; bouclé tweed left unfurling at its edges; metal evening bags shaped like swans; and shrunken cardigans in pastel-coloured cable knits, adorned with crystals.

Indeed, Anderson said that he wanted the collection to be one of ‘soft focus’, an apparition emerging from the fog. Part of this was down to the lightness of the garments: ‘What is tailoring is imagined as flou?’ was one question he asked himself, reimagining pinstripe and Prince of Wales check blazers in an organza-like fabric designed to appear as tailoring wool (flou is the term in haute couture to describe dresses made from fluid, lightweight fabrics, in opposition to the rigour and structure of tailoring). ‘Something that, as it walks, leaves a kind of residue behind,’ he described of the ethereal looks.

It is a vision of romantic femininity that is paying off for Anderson: the Christian Dior Group recorded revenue of €38.6 billion in the first half of 2026, with a growth of 3 per cent in the second quarter and the fashion and leather goods arm returning to revenue growth after a previous decline. On top of that, a starry collaboration with A24, launched during New York Fashion Week, is a reminder of Anderson’s unique knack for mining the cultural zeitgeist (he did so adeptly at Loewe, and looks to continue doing so at Dior).

But Anderson is not done experimenting yet: as he hones his vision for Dior, don’t expect him to settle into a groove (like the wénwán walnut, he is envisioning his transformation of the house in decades, not months). As he said after his first couture show in January, the role of a designer at a major house is to challenge expectation. ‘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].’ Today, he reiterated this: ‘If you’ve already arrived, there’s nowhere to go.’

Stay tuned to wallpaper.com for more from Paris Fashion Week S/S 2027.

And, while this season’s edition might lack the surge of newness which has defined recent seasons – one year ago, there were eight major creative debuts during the week, including Matthieu Blazy at Chanel and Jonathan Anderson at Dior – the week will, as ever, define the S/S 2027 season across its currently 68 shows and 33 presentations. That said, there will still be a handful of debuts, including former Burberry designer Drew Henry at Courrèges and Kai Nesselrath at Carven, who previously headed up womenswear at Saint Laurent.

Elsewhere, expect the reveal of John Galliano’s collaboration with Zara, the return of Maison Margiela and a celebration of 30 years of Acne Studios, alongside shows from emerging and established designers alike. All will make way for a no-doubt glittering finale from Nicolas Ghesquière at Louis Vuitton, who will provide this season’s final act on Tuesday evening.

Read below for all of Wallpaper’s moments to look out for at Milan Fashion Week S/S 2027.

Maison Margiela is back

Last season, Maison Margiela sat Paris Fashion Week out, choosing to show in Shanghai as part of a series of events which took place across China (these included exhibitions and immersive installations). For S/S 2027, it is back on the Paris schedule with a show late afternoon on Tuesday 9 September. It will also mark the first show from creative director Glenn Martens after the news that his S/S 2027 show for Diesel – held in Milan last week – will be his last as creative director (since his appointment at Maison Margiela, he has led both brands). This decision, he said, was to put his focus on Maison Margiela, which, alongside ready-to-wear, hosts annual ‘Artisanal’ shows – the house’s equivalent to haute couture.

Torishéju Dumi is our name to watch

Torishéju Dumi, who won the 2025 Savoir-Faire Award at the LVMH Prize, has been one of Wallpaper’s ones to watch for some time. Her expressive collections under her eponymous label Torishéju rework the contours of historical dress, influenced by her Brazilian-Nigerian upbringing and childhood spent within the Catholic church (she also draws parallels with the likes of Yohji Yamamoto, Hussein Chalayan and Rei Kawakubo in her intriguing approach to pattern cutting and form). ‘I have always been fascinated with the otherworldly. I’m always thinking: what else is out there?’ she told Wallpaper* when we profiled the London-based designer for our September Issue. This season, she will show off-schedule on Tuesday afternoon (29 September 2026) at Salle Wagram in Paris’ 17th arrondissement.

Paris’ landmark houses will all show on-schedule

No other city can rival the historic line-up of houses that populate the Paris Fashion Week schedule. This season is no exception, with Paris’ vaunted names – many of which are traditional haute couture houses – showing across the week. These include Chanel and Dior, arguably the city’s best-known houses, and both under relatively recent creative directors (both Matthieu Blazy and Jonathan Anderson, respectively, held their debut shows last September). As they enter their third ready-to-wear seasons, the focus will be on honing their vision for these two Parisian powerhouses (Dior will show 29 September; Chanel 5 October). The same applies to Givenchy and Celine (showing 3 October and 4 October), who are also under recently appointed creative directors Sarah Burton and Michael Rider. Elsewhere, expect shows from Louis Vuitton (6 October), Hermès (3 October) and Lanvin (2 October).

Zara will reveal its ‘creative partnership’ with John Galliano

Though his upcoming retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute may be cancelled, John Galliano will have his moment at Paris Fashion Week with the reveal of his collaboration with Zara on October 1 (the exact timing, 10am CET). Though there has been no word as yet whether there will be an official event – whether a show or party – it will mark the first in what is expected to be an ongoing collaboration between Zara and the designer, who was formerly at Maison Margiela. In fact, details remain largely under wraps across the board; when the partnership was announced this past March, all Zara confirmed was that this was a ‘creative collaboration’ which will see him rework the Zara’s archives, ‘deconstructing and reconfiguring them into new seasonal expressions and creations’. Watch this space.

Drew Henry will debut at Courrèges

Courrèges will mark its latest chapter on Wednesday morning (30 September) as new creative director Drew Henry begins his tenure at the house (he succeeds Nicolas Di Felice). His first creative director role, Henry comes to Courrèges from Burberry as senior design director under Daniel Lee, having begun his career at Phoebe Philo’s Celine (he later joined her at her eponymous label, and also worked as design director for ready-to-wear under Jonathan Anderson at JW Anderson). ‘André Courrèges believed in clothes that make sense for how people live. That matters to me. I have always been drawn to work that feels modern, useful and direct,’ he said in a statement when he was appointed earlier this year. ‘I am excited to shape a vision for the House that is optimistic, clear and grounded.’

Acne Studios will celebrate 30 years

In 1996, Acne Studios began with 100 pairs of jeans, recognisable for their red stitching, that creative director Jonny Johansson and his then-collaborators distributed to their friends and creative community in Stockholm, Sweden, where the brand continues to be based. Three decades on, Acne Studios – an evolution of its original name, Acne, which stood for Ambition to Create Novel Expressions – is now one of contemporary fashion’s best-known names, showing twice-yearly as part of Paris Fashion Week. And, while 30th celebrations have spanned the whole of 2026 – including a campaign celebrating its foundational denim collection, shot by Nan Goldin (above) – the brand’s S/S 2027 show will be followed by a dinner and afterparty marking the landmark year.

Louis Vuitton will provide the week’s finale

There are a few scheduling shifts this season, including Miu Miu moving from the final day of fashion week to Sunday afternoon (4 October). More notably, though, is Louis Vuitton’s return to being the final runway show of the season, with Nicolas Ghesquière presenting his latest womenswear collection for the house at 6.30pm on Tuesday 6 October. As yet, the show’s location is yet to be revealed, though with Tuesday lacking in other major-name brands (it will be joined on the schedule by the likes of Christopher Esber, Situationist and Litkovska), Louis Vuitton will no doubt command all of the day’s column inches.

This morning in Paris, Northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson recruited Fred Again to soundtrack his S/S 2027 menswear show for Dior, his third men’s outing for the house so far (Anderson became creative director in 2025). A custom mix for the show, it featured the songs of KTNA, Mabe Fratti and Jamie T, as well as original vocals from Christine and the Queens, pulsating from speakers surrounding the halls and gardens of Paris’ Musée Nissim de Camondo, where guests sat on traditional French chairs or on benches tiled to look like black disco balls (the show’s invite was also a Dior-branded disco ball in black).

Besides soundtracking the show, Anderson said that Fred Again’s musical process inspired the collection’s construction – one of ‘sampling and remixing to carve out new meaning for what’s known,’ as he described. In practice, this meant a shuffling of eras – 19th-century embroidery met distressed denim, for example – but also a shifting of a garment’s context. For this, the tuxedo was the protagonist: Anderson reimagined it in an organza-like fabric printed to appear like tailoring wool in the breezy opening looks, while other tailored jackets came in loosened proportions or were transformed into the silhouette of a blouson.

The choice of the historic venue, Anderson explains, also reflected this idea of the ‘remix’. ‘It’s about juxtaposing the historic and the contemporary and bringing Fred Again’s music into this typically quiet place,’ he says. ‘The opportunity to show here is special because the building is about to be restored, so it’s in this interesting in-between phase.’

The museum – which Anderson had first encountered during an exhibition of the work of British artist Edmund de Waal in 2021 – is the former home of former home of Moïse de Camondo, a French banker, who established a major collection of 18th-century decorative arts during his lifetime. ‘I became fascinated by its story, particularly in the context of Dior,’ he says. ‘I loved the idea of bringing the new into this historic space. And as we know, Monsieur Dior loved the 18th century.’

‘I think in some ways he was similar to Moïse de Camondo – they were both interested in reinvention as much as preservation,’ he continues. ‘The museum is currently in a phase of restoration. I like the slightly undone nature of it and how that connects to the collection – there’s this aspect of finding beauty in the imperfect.’

Follow our live coverage of Paris Fashion Week Men’s here.

Pharrell Williams continues his run of bold sets for Louis Vuitton, with a larger-than-life tidal wave

The set concept echoed a collection inspired by international surfing communities, and, fittingly, stood in the open air under blue skies. The ground at Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris had been covered with fine sand for the occasion, and will later be repurposed for ‘beach’ volleyball on the campus, and was bisected by a boardwalk-style runway.

Ideas of renewal and regeneration extend beyond the perimeters of the show and its materials, with Louis Vuitton pledging support to Coral Gardeners as part of its sustainability roadmap, to further reef restoration efforts in French Polynesia – not only an important environmental campaign but one which will directly benefit communities who live and work in the South Pacific. World Surf League athletes will take part in monitoring the restoration efforts during the Tahiti Pro competition this August, giving the brand a vital opportunity to hear direct feedback on the project from those the most emotionally connected to it.

The wooden seating was reused from last season’s show, which took place around an architectural ‘hotel’ designed in collaboration with Tokyo-based Not a Hotel, set within the parkland of the Bois de Boulogne and named ‘Drophaus’ for the structure’s affinity with a droplet of water. Audacious set design has become a Williams signature during his tenure at the house, with the S/S 2026 edition even becoming the subject of a documentary, which charted his process of research in India all the way to the execution of a supersized version of Snakes and Ladders co-created by Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai, at the Centre Pompidou.

louisvuitton.com

As the mercury rises this month, we’re expecting to see unprecedented temperatures at Paris Fashion Week Men’s, and, accordingly, brands including Dior and Rick Owens have moved their showtimes to earlier in the day for much needed respite from the afternoon heat. In addition to the prospect of early-morning outdoor events, or hopping from one air-conditioned show space to another, there are many fashion moments to look forward to: Saint Laurent will make its return to the the start of the schedule, showing on on day one, and there are menswear debuts to come from Meryll Rogge, Michael Rider at Celine, and Sarah Burton at Givenchy. In anticipation of Grace Wales Bonner’s Hermès debut next January, the brand has opted for a presentation this week, rather than the usual show, and Paris Fashion Week Men’s regulars from Lemaire to Comme des Garçons are also on the schedule.

Here, follow our real-time look at Paris Fashion Week Men’s S/S 2027 – from behind-the-scenes glimpses to access to the shows, presentations and parties, alongside runway reviews – as seen through the eyes (and iPhones) of the Wallpaper* editors. Stay tuned.

June 23, 2026 – 12:47 PM

Saint Laurent opens Paris Fashion Week Men's with effortless seduction

Opening Paris Fashion Week this evening, Saint Laurent’s S/S 2027 menswear show was staged amid Fujiko Nakaya’s Cloud #07156, currently on display in the Tadao Ando-designed rotunda of Bourse de Commerce – Pinault collection.

The collection itself had a mood of sensual ease: featherweight knits traced the line of the body, while arms were exposed in shrunken waistcoats and classic men’s underwear reimagined in leather. Typically broad shouldered tailoring – a signature of creative director Anthony Vaccarello – came with jewellery-like buttons, and the windbreaker returned, here in colourful technical taffeta. Closing the show was a series of looks in molten gold fabric.

Vaccarello said he was thinking about the idea of restraint as seduction, turning away from the constant need for drama and noise. ‘Nobody is trying to seduce you,’ he said via the collection notes. ‘What makes them seductive is that they do not need to. JM

June 24, 2026 – 9:19 AM

Acne Studios is here to dress the Personality Hire

Jonny Johansson was thinking about office hierarchies this season – not necessarily the explicitly understood pecking order, from C-Suite to intern, but the unspoken. ‘I have been studying people as far back as I can remember,’ the Acne Studios founder and creative director said, continuing: ‘Lately, I have been fascinated by individual expression at the office, which can function as a kind of everyday social experiment.’ Who commands the space versus who is in charge comes down to more than just title.

For today’s presentation, Acne Studios played upon the idea of disparate people with their own set of references and backgrounds coming together in one space, in ‘a scenario in which their personal uniforms coalesce like a master remix.’ At the more casual end there was denim (of course), paired with graphic T-shirts – some featuring trompe l’oeil ties – and sweaters which at first glance appear cable knit, but were actually ruched and crimped. There was a vintage-tinge in places, ice-cream shades, sporty blousons and Cuban heels. ‘The attire flourishes that would ordinarily denote age or status no longer apply in this office mash-up,’ the notes said. ‘From this constructed vision emerges a composite look in many forms – each one transcending the office walls and reclaimed as an attitude above all.’ IBJ

June 24, 2026 – 11:23 AM

Solid Homme explores ‘the tension between the natural and the artificial’

Solid Homme took guests to the lab for their S/S 2027 presentation, in which models walked through a space filled with hydroponic chambers – terrariums where plants are grown in mineral-rich solutions rather than soil – a comment on humanity’s ‘hubristic ambition not simply to understand nature, but to reconstruct it.’

The collection itself was outdoorsy, but without being bucolic. Technical fabrics in hues of violet and canary yellow, perforated surfaces, and shapes inspired by field equipment (note: windbreakers and boonie hats). IBJ

June 25, 2026 – 7:02 AM

Sarah Burton’s debut menswear presentation for Givenchy

At home in Givenchy’s Paris headquarters on Avenue George V, Sarah Burton held her first menswear presentation as creative director of the house, which she joined in September 2024. The presentation comes off the back of a surprise campaign for the collection, which was photographed by Juergen Teller and released this week – starring talent including Don McCullin, Don Letts, and Danny Fox.

The collection was presented in dialogue with a triptych of works of British artist Rachel Whiteread, and elements of her treatment of surface and colour were interpreted through the garments, particularly in the butter-soft leather pieces, rugby shirts and wide-leg trousers, in solid blocks of pink or forest green with the gentlest of folds. Classic Burton-isms could be read through precisely tailored jackets with slightly nipped-waists and sharp shoulders, as well as in the painterly florals which appeared as both print and embroidered elements. ‘I wanted this to feel very personal and intimate, and to reflect the conversations that I have with the friends of the house,’ Burton said. IBJ

June 25, 2026 – 7:50 AM

A closer look at Dior’s latest menswear collection

Details from Dior’s proposition for going out out dressing at the Musée Nissim de Camondo, show venue turned showroom: satin bow-ties, multi-colour zig-zags and oversize knits shot through with sparkles. IBJ

June 25, 2026 – 10:09 AM

IM Men looks to bamboo for inspiration

Earlier this morning, IM Men – part of the Issey Miyake umbrella of brands – presented a S/S 2027 collection which looked to bamboo for inspiration. The initial inspiration came from a visit to Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs which drew them towards the institution’s collection of East Asian art – ‘misty bamboo forest landscapes in ink wash paintings and the intricate layering of branches and leaves created by the paper stencils used in katazome kimono dyeing,’ as the notes described. In the collection, this led to criss-crossing bamboo-style hats and chest pieces, while other pieces took the reference more lightly: like a series of dyed wash denim, designed to evoke the the traditional ink wash paintings, or a series of motifs by designer Rikako Nagashima, derived from images of the shadows cast by bamboo. JM

June 26, 2026 – 8:06 AM

Junya Watanabe puts his riff on streetwear

This morning at Le Trianon in Montmartre, Junya Watanabe opened proceedings with a collection which put his distinctive riff on streetwear, collaborating with a slew of other brands – among them Kappa, Needles and New Balance. The sweatsuit was a recurring motif, with versions spanning classic Watanabe black and more vivid hues of yellow, green and burgundy, while signature elements of deconstruction – from shredded tweed jackets to back-front-jeans – were layered throughout. Bold, jewellery-like embellishment completed the look, from a multitude of chains to crystal brooches studding American sporting caps. JM

June 26, 2026 – 8:18 AM

Studio Nicholson hosts its first-ever runway show

This afternoon, in the historic Hôtel d'Évreux on Paris’ Place Vendôme, Studio Nicholson founder Nick Wakeman hosted the first-ever runway show for her London-based label in its 16-year history. ‘I want the crowd to appreciate our journey and the brand’s provenance,’ Wakeman said of the choice. ‘I want people to see the clothes move; I like the idea that it’s live and not just another static image.’ Choosing an intimate, salon-style presentation, the collection was an evolution of the look Nicholson has honed since the brand’s founding: a minimalist, ‘no tricks’ approach where fabric quality is foremost and ‘clothes are believable and fit for purpose, but not boring,’ as she described. Comprising both men’s and womenswear, the result was a comprehensive wardrobe of Studio Nicholson classics – including the Sorte trouser, which has been in production for the last 16 years – alongside some new additions, like a fisherman’s-style jacket and boxy, safari shirt. JM

June 26, 2026 – 9:50 AM

Hermès evokes the spirit of the Gaucho

Hermès’ design team looked to the folk figure of the Gaucho – the itinerant, wild horseman of the South American frontier – for today’s presentation (not the usual runway show, while the brand is between creative directors, with Grace Wales Bonner making her debut at the helm in January 2027). Gently tapering slacks were worn slightly high-waisted, bombacha style, and the classic Hermès silk scarf was styled with a nod to a rustic neckerchief. The palette was redolent of sedate, dusty plains – earthy browns and muted teal, with an occasional flash of lavender – but tempered with more playful prints of cacti and jumping fences. IBJ

June 27, 2026 – 7:10 AM

One hundred years of Lanvin menswear

It’s the centennial year of Lanvin’s menswear line, and the surrealist milieu of Lanvin’s eponymous founder was on creative director Peter Copping’s mind this season. The couturier's relationship to the artistic movement – which celebrated its own centennial in 2024 – was more subtle than her contemporary Elsa Schiparelli, but, according to the show notes for S/S 2027, she dressed members of the loose group of artists and poets including Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau. This connection was communicated through discreet subversions of menswear classics: tailored trousers which pool around the ankle, a silk pyjama set modified for daytime, tasseled dress scarves styled with safari jackets. IBJ

June 28, 2026 – 5:45 AM

Soshiotsuki debuts at Paris Fashion Week Men’s

‘A usually strict father allowing himself to loosen up, just slightly, while on holiday,’ was the central image of 2025 LVMH Prize winner Soshiotsuki’s debut Paris Fashion Week show – the atmosphere of a fantasy resort encouraging the patriarch to let go a little, to resist the impulse for perfection. This was told through a collection made from mostly original fabrics, manufactured in Japan, and constructed to give ‘the impression that gravity has naturally caused the garments to collapse’. IBJ

June 28, 2026 – 8:43 AM

At Celine, Michael Rider is creating the clothes he loves

Taking place at the Tennis Club de Paris this afternoon, Michael Rider hosted his first dedicated menswear show for Celine – a continuation of the American designer’s distinctive aesthetic at the house so far, one which melds Ivy League prep (Rider was at Polo Ralph Lauren before Celine; he is also an alumnus of Brown University) with a Parisian insouciance rooted in the house’s codes. Rather than a specific theme, Rider instead said he was simply developing the Celine man’s wardrobe: ‘[It’s about] enjoying what we do in the studio, and desiring it ourselves, all of it, the clothes and the characters.’ Cue a collection of eclecticism and ease: ballooning trousers, metallic leather jeans, colourful cummerbunds, and a multitude of low-pro shoes, sandals and sneakers featured as part of the highly desirable line-up. ‘[It’s about] building toward something bigger,’ he said. ‘Something with legs, and roots.’ JM

June 28, 2026 – 10:02 AM

Sacai closes out the week

And with Sacai, Paris Fashion Week Men’s comes to a close. ‘The new classics’ offered just what it promised, colliding ‘the rigid, historically conservative codes of traditional tailoring with the vibrant, non-conservative energies of contemporary culture’. Voluminous panel pocketed suit trousers were juxtaposed with tie-dye rugby shirts, and a roomy tailored jacket was hybridised into a duffel with the addition of toggle-and-rope fastenings. Shown concurrently with womenswear, the collection also debuted the brand’s first collaboration with Birkenstock, new footwear which comes from ‘layering and exchanging elements across archival styles.’ IBJ

Though there remains a hopeful outlook, with plenty of intriguing moments taking place across the month. These include Simone Rocha’s headline act as guest designer at Pitti Uomo, marking her first-ever menswear show, while American designer Thom Browne will make a surprise appearance at Milan Fashion Week this season (previously, he has shown as part of the menswear calendar in Paris), alongside Ralph Lauren and Paul Smith, who both return to show in the Italian city. Further afield, and off-schedule, Zegna will show in Los Angeles, following last summer’s runway show in Dubai – a sign of the Italian house’s ambition for international expansion (the Zegna group reported a rise in net profit of 20 per cent in 2025, bucking market trends).

Here, everything that Wallpaper* knows about Men’s Fashion Month so far.

Pitti Uomo (16-19 June 2026)

Pitti Uomo, which takes place each season in Florence’s Fortezza da Basso and locations across the city, has invited acclaimed Irish designer Simone Rocha to be this summer’s guest designer (she follows in the footsteps of Raf Simons, Grace Wales Bonner and Martine Rose, as well as brands like Givenchy, Jil Sander and Off-White). For the occasion, Rocha will hold her first-ever dedicated menswear show – previously, it has appeared as part of her womenswear collections – in an as-yet-unannounced location in the city. ‘I would like to thank Pitti Uomo for their generous invitation to present my first independent menswear show on the men's calendar,’ she said in a statement, elucidating that she will use the opportunity to show ‘the length and breadth of [her] menswear proposition... [and] a new chapter in my work and world.’

Elsewhere, there will be shows from DSM Kei Ninomiya – the everyday line from Rei Kawakubo and Adrian Joffe-led concept store Dover Street Market – and Copenhagen-based label Sunflower. At the main fair, which takes place at the Fortezza da Basso, there will be the usual line-up of brands showing their latest menswear collections – among them Herno, Caruso, Guess and Brunello Cucinelli, the latter which will also host its twice-yearly opening dinner on the evening of 16 May at the cloisters of the Santa Maria Novella church, a World Heritage Site.

Milan Fashion Week Men’s (19-23 June 2026)

In Milan, a somewhat quiet schedule – partly down to Zegna decamping to LA, and other brands, like Gucci, going co-ed during womenswear – nonetheless features a handful of impactful moments. These include Prada (co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons have long had a knack of defining an entire season with their runway shows), Dolce & Gabbana (fresh off an appearance in Devil Wears Prada 2), Paul Smith (the British designer has made Milan home of his runway shows for a number of seasons) and Ralph Lauren, which will also return after showing in the city earlier this year.

Elsewhere, Thom Browne will host a special runway show on the afternoon of Monday 22 June, shifting from his usual spot on the Paris Fashion Week schedule (the American brand has a strong red-carpet presence, so expect a typically starry front row). Showing that same day is Giorgio Armani, who will move from early afternoon to evening, closing out the week’s proceedings at 6pm on Monday night.

Paris Fashion Week Men’s (23-28 June 2026)

The release of the Paris Fashion Week menswear calendar comes with a handful of surprises: notably, a Saint Laurent show on the opening Tuesday afternoon (23 June), a Celine show on the final Sunday (28 June), and presentations from Givenchy and Meryll Rogge (it will mark the first menswear presentation under Sarah Burton at Givenchy; meanwhile Rogge is making her debut on the men’s schedule).

Elsewhere at Paris Fashion Week Men’s – the final and longest leg of the month – there will be the latest show from Pharrell Williams at Louis Vuitton (expect a blockbuster happening on the opening night at 9pm) and Jonathan Anderson’s third menswear outing at Dior, following a high-profile debut Cruise show earlier this month in Los Angeles.

Hermès, meanwhile, will replace its usual show with a presentation as the house transitions to its new menswear creative director, Grace Wales Bonner (she replaces Véronique Nichanian, who held her final show last season). Rick Owens, Lemaire, Dries Van Noten and Willy Chavarria are all slated to show as usual, while the usual roster of Japanese designers who choose Paris to show each season – including Comme des Garçons, Junya Watanabe and Issey Miyake – will present their latest collections throughout the week.

Take, for example, this A/W 2026 season, which culminated this past week in Paris after stops in Milan, London and New York. On the one hand, there was a prevalence of black – a colour that suggests a certain seriousness, or sobriety – on the other, Muppets-bright faux fur and shearling dominated the runway, suggesting an altogether more liberated mood. The same could be said for what seemed to be the season’s defining garments, the slip dress and the tailored suit – both loaded with connotations – or the lived-in layers of Prada’s A/W 2026 collection versus the levity and romance of Jonathan Anderson’s sophomore ready-to-wear collection for Dior.

Here, Wallpaper* unpacks six of A/W 2026’s defining trends and takeaways – ones that begin to set a blueprint of how we might dress for the season ahead.

Layering ultra

Prada’s A/W 2026 show had a novel conceit: instead of the usual 40-or-so models, there were just 15, each wearing four looks in an impressive act of quick changing (such was the power of the illusion, when Bella Hadid appeared just a minute or so after she'd left the runway, I wondered if perhaps she had a secret twin). Largely, this was achieved by clever layering, with models stripping away garments to reveal what lay beneath – a metaphor, said co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, for the changing demands of a woman’s life. ‘As a woman, your life is layered – each day demands not only a shifting of clothes, but a richness of identities within yourself,’ said Mrs Prada of the collection, where an anorak might have been layered over a cocktail dress; an organza skirt removed to expose a pair of bloomers. ‘You make choices, you decide who you want to be.’

Indeed, it is a way of dressing that feels particularly attuned to the demands of contemporary life – not least the changing weather, which was in full display over fashion month (the early days of Paris Fashion Week were so warm for early March that the discarding of items of clothing was necessary). Aside from Prada, collections this season felt particularly richly layered: at Celine, polo-neck sweaters were worn beneath a silk shirt, which was in turn worn beneath an overcoat (Michael Rider added plenty of accessories to the collage, too, from belts and enormous scarves to blankets grasped in the hand) while at Acne Studios, blazers were insouciantly hung over the shoulder via the use of clever in-built straps (the idea of layering was enhanced by a pile-up of clashing checks). At Loewe, parkas were constructed with extra collars, hoods and shaggy shearling trims (some layers could even be inflated like beach lilos), while Rabanne, Chanel and Valentino favoured vivid amalgams of colour, embellishment and texture, often achieved through placing one garment over another. In the respective shows, it made for some bold looks, but one could imagine teasing these pieces apart and wearing them – or indeed layering them – with your own wardrobe.

Black out

It might seem trite to call black a trend: after all, this is a colour that never goes out of style (so much so, it is the colour all others are compared to – such and such is the new black). However, the prevalence of the hue on this season’s runway was noticeable – not least at Fendi, where Maria Grazia Chiuri embraced the colour for her first Fendi collection, presented in Milan. By our count, around three-quarters of the 81 looks were majority black, a stark departure from Silvia Venturini Fendi’s primary-hued S/S 2026 collection last season. Though it didn’t feel dour: instead, it allowed the collection to straddle both a uniform sleekness – lean tailoring, flight jackets, and the like – and something more sensual in textures of lace, silk and crepe. Part of the choice, she said, was a riposte to the kind of attention-grabbing collections she sees as becoming the norm. ‘I think we must be pragmatic,’ she said. ‘Fashion is not entertainment. Fashion is a job. I am that kind of designer.’

A similar mood was struck by Peter Copping at Lanvin, where the languid glamour of the 1920s and 1930s inspired sculpted tailoring and sinuous gowns, many in textures of black, from lustrous vinyl and silk to dramatic faux fur, while at Saint Laurent, a stream of black Le Smoking-inspired tailoring introduced Anthony Vaccarello’s femme fatale for the season. Balenciaga, Issey Miyake and Gucci also had large sections of black in their respective collections, though it was Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Garçons who was most adamant about the colour’s creative – and indeed revolutionary – potential. This season, save for a short interlude in saccharine pink, the rest of the Japanese brand’s A/W 2026 collection was all-black. ‘I have come to realise that, after all, black is the colour for me,’ said the Japanese designer. ‘It’s just the strongest, the best for creation, and the colour that embodies the rebellious spirit. And has the biggest meaning: the universe and the black hole.’

Fun ‘fur’

Fashion has long revelled in its contradictions and, if black dominated several of the runways, a more colourful countercurrent ran alongside. There was the bold yellow floor at Loewe (and equally pop-hued collection); Matthieu Blazy’s lustrous metallic palette at a triumphant Chanel; or the bold flashes of electric blue hosiery at Jil Sander, where Simone Bellotti, in his sophomore collection, sought creative liberation and ‘abandon’. Bolder still, though, were the flashes of brightly hued faux fur and shearling – or indeed fabrics which mimicked their shaggy textures – which appeared throughout the season, lending a sense of play that my colleague Jason Hughes, Wallpaper* fashion & creative director, affectionately described as a ‘Muppets mood’.

So there were Louise Trotter’s bold, shaggy silhouettes at Bottega Veneta, constructed from various fabric innovations from pulled threads of silk (they evoked fur, or shearling), or high-pile velvet manipulated to look like astrakhan; Junya Watanabe’s collaged silhouettes, where alongside crunched-up Mylar blankets, curtains and licence plates were bold panels of soft toy-like faux fur; or Loewe, where degradé shearling was trimmed ‘in the same manner as poodle grooming’. These ‘fun furs’ made a case for dressing outside of your comfort zone, or simply giving your outfit – even if it is all-black – a single colourful (and fluffy) flourish.

Slip on

In our March 2026 Style Issue, we identified the slip dress as one of the S/S 2026 season’s defining garments, particularly those that recall 1990s minimalism. For A/W 2026, the garment returned to the fore, albeit reimagined in an unconventional manner. Take Loewe, for example, where nighties – like those you might find in a Marks & Spencer four-pack, complete with the tiny bow on the chest – were recreated in rubber, cleverly 3D-printed in various primary hues (for men, a version came as a top with long sleeves). The result was something playful and a little surreal – a reflection of the collection itself, which was defined by a feeling of experimentation. ‘For us, the act of making is, at its core, an expression of joy – an intellectual, process-driven pursuit charged with playfulness,’ said Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, the American designers behind the collection.

A similar, if more overtly sensual, approach came at Saint Laurent, where Anthony Vaccarello constructed a series of garments from sheer lace coated in silicone (he talked about the technique giving ‘structure’ to the traditionally delicate material, with ‘fragility becoming force’). Meanwhile, at Miu Miu, Miuccia Prada also explored the juxtaposition of delicacy and toughness, something the deep-thinking designer said was inspired by the contrast between the ‘smallness of the body... and the vastness of the [world] which surrounds us’. The latter came in trapper hats, shearling-lined parkas and hefty, bubble-soled shoes; the former in a series of sheer organza slip dresses adorned with sequins, crystal embroidery and scalloped trimmings.

New romantic

Jonathan Anderson’s sophomore ready-to-wear collection took place in Paris’ Jardin des Tuileries, where a runway had been constructed around one of the circular fountains, its surface dotted with Monet-esque water lilies (or, at least, very real-looking reproductions). In the bright spring sunshine, it made for an idyllic scene, one backdropping a collection of romance and lightness, from Belle Époque ruffles and feather-trimmed outerwear to floral appliqué and bow adornment (completing the look were polka-dot pumps or shoes decorated with lily pads). ‘Dior has this giant past, and I had to start there,’ he said of the free-spirited mood. ’Now I feel free to release it from that.’

Throughout the season, designers mined this feeling of contemporary romance, defined by levity and play. At Matthieu Blazy’s own sophomore ready-to-wear collection for Chanel, looks were richly textured and adorned – from crystal flowers to golden butterflies, or the multitude of illusory tweeds and trompe l’oeil fabrics – though never felt heavy. Meanwhile, ruffles and lace became defining motifs, appearing everywhere from Alaïa (dropped-waist peplum dresses with layers of raw-edge ruffles) and Bottega Veneta (fronds of ruched fabric reminiscent of shearling that emerged from beneath tailored fabrics) to Simone Rocha, where sheer lace and organza were delicately embellished with crystals. One inspiration for her A/W 2026 collection was a fairytale from her native Ireland – Oisín and Niamh's journey to Tír na nÓg, the Celtic land of eternal youth and beauty.

Power move

The Saint Laurent show began with eight dark-coloured suits in a row: some double-breasted, others single, each with a sloped shoulder and narrowed – though not constricted – waistline. Anthony Vaccarello said it was about proposing a new power suit, one influenced by ‘severity of the 1970s and 1980s’ but with new fluidity and ease. ‘[They are not about] a clichéd projection of power,’ he said via the collection notes. ‘[But] a quiet and fluid conversation between the parameters of femininity and masculinity.’ Indeed, the show ended with his riff on Le Smoking, Yves Saint Laurent’s tuxedo cut for a woman’s body and one of his defining creations (it celebrates its 60th anniversary this year). Worn by model Loli Bahia, it was cut with the same fluid line as the opening looks – ‘the attitude more insouciant shrug than swagger’.

It was a season of great tailoring across the board, particularly in Paris. At Givenchy, Sarah Burton said reuniting with her tailoring team from Alexander McQueen had brought new sharpness to her suiting this season – there were some great blazers with cut-in lapels and gently sculpted waistlines – while the highlights of Copping’s Lanvin came in jackets with plisséd panels on the back, which gave a dramatic (though not restrictive) hourglass silhouette. If largely tailoring this season followed these contours (wide-shouldered; narrow-waist; fluid in construction), an opposition came in a more streamlined proposition from the likes of Fendi, where narrow suiting had a uniform feel, or Hermès, where contouring equstrian-inspired blazers recalled those worn for dressage competitions.

A similar look was seen on the Prada runway, with models in smudged raccoon-eye make-up and hair in half-done ponytails that had strands haphazardly escaping. The show had a novel concept: 15 models, wearing 15 looks, with each model changing four times throughout the show to create a new composition of the previous look. The beauty complemented the idea by suggesting a woman always in motion, always in a rush, too busy to refresh her make-up or even redo her ponytail over the course of the day.

The best beauty looks of A/W 2026

In New York, Collina Strada took messy hair to the next level with hairstylist Mustafa Yanaz giving models bed-heads that looked like they took many sleepless nights to achieve. While in London, the teased, matted hair at Simone Rocha was paired with punk details in, of all places, the eyebrows, such as multiple eyebrow rings and a black-pencilled eyebrow that curved dramatically at the edges. The result was an unkempt, delinquent appearance that complemented the bow, taffeta and glitter-heavy femininity of the clothes.

Yet, when it comes to this season’s messy beauty, no one did it better than the contingent of Japanese designers who show at Paris Fashion Week each season. At Comme des Garçons, hair by Takeo Arai and headpieces designed by HIZUME, combined to create a fascinating, strange beauty, with matted worms of hair – for lack of a better term – emerging from what looked like ripped sheer tights or oily bird’s nests.

At Yohji Yamamoto, black lips were paired with excessively gelled, Siouxsie Sioux-style hair. While at Junya Watanabe, hair stylist Eugene Souleiman and make-up artist Isamaya Ffrench created plastered-down, finger-wave wigs and streaming black eye makeup for a memorable 1920s-flapper-after-a-really-terrible-night look.

A similar look was also seen on the Saint Laurent runway, although more sleekly done, with hair gelled to helmet-like perfection and a flawlessly executed smoky eye and dark red lip (here, though, the inspiration seemed to be the severe beauty of Helmut Newton’s photographs of Saint Laurent in the 1970s). Demna’s first Gucci show also featured contoured cheeks, saturated red lips, and fanned-out smoky eyes. The most noteworthy saturated lips and smoky eye combination, however, was perhaps those at Tom Ford, where the velvet lips engineered by Lucy Bridge were so richly pigmented they looked almost fake.

Speaking of fake, there were those like Matières Fécales and Rick Owens who ostentatiously subverted beauty conventions with the use of prosthetics. The Matières Fécales collection, which satirised the style of the one per cent, translated the ideas behind its clothing into fake black eyes and faces practically deformed by plastic surgery.

While Owens, always one for bold beauty, built on the codes he’s been developing for years with make-up artist Daniel Sällström, to create eyes obscured by colour contacts and extra-long fake lashes that were emphasised by painterly strokes of neon eyeshadow. Sällström was also the make-up artist behind Vaquera’s white painted faces and multi-winged cat eyes, which combined to create a kind of modernised 18th-century aristocrat. The show also featured one model with lime-green pubic hair, which was, if nothing else, memorable.

But when it comes to the most memorable beauty look of the A/W 2026 runways, the winner might be a brand that was more playful than provocative. We are, of course, speaking about one of the most lauded shows of the season: Matthieu Blazy’s sophomore ready-to-wear outing at Chanel.

As the show progressed and the clothes transitioned into more iridescent evening wear, the subtle beauty of the runway looks began to take an iridescent sheen as well. Models’ slicked-back hair appeared covered in a glittery, chromatic coating with matching metallic eye make-up, while one particularly noteworthy look featured long, mermaid-style pastel locks with matching pastel eyeshadow. All in all, a shining end to the season.

With a nine-day schedule standing at nearly double the length of its counterparts, Paris remains the defining city of fashion month – not least because it comprises shows from fashion’s heavyweight houses, among them Chanel, Dior, Louis Vuitton and Saint Laurent (to name just a handful).

After last season’s debuts dominated the S/S headlines, A/W 2026 was about the sophomore show, as designers settled into their positions as creative directors. Without the weight of expectation, we saw some brilliant shows – notably Jonathan Anderson at Dior, Michael Rider at Celine, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez at Loewe, and Matthieu Blazy at Chanel (all were showing their second ready-to-wear collections).

Here, reported by Wallpaper* fashion & beauty features director Jack Moss and contributing writer India Jarvis, we pick the standout shows that defined the week.

The best of Paris Fashion Week A/W 2026

Dior

Jonathan Anderson staged his A/W 2026 runway show for Dior in Paris’ Jardin des Tuileries, constructing a circular show set around one of the park’s ponds (for the occasion, it had been populated with Monet-esque lily pads, meticulously constructed to look like the real thing), while the invitation comprised miniature versions of the park’s signature green metal chairs. Across the pond’s centre ran an elevated runway, echoing the line of the Tuileries’ Grand Allée, a historic promenade since the park opened to the public in 1667 after a renovation by Louis XIV. It led to a collection about ‘seeing and being seen’, a contemporary imagining of the promenade, ‘[where] a walk in the park becomes a performance’. Cue a ‘panoply of Parisians’ in eclectic, time-hopping attire, from the woozy ruffles of the Belle Époque (here transformed into mini dresses with bouncing trains) to plays on bourgeois tropes, such as fabrics that recalled heritage tweeds, blazers with golden buttons, and shearling jackets reimagined with wave-like hems. What was most striking, though, was a feeling of levity: lily-pad-adorned footwear, polka-dot motifs and crystallised denim were both playful and pretty. ‘Dior has this giant past, and I had to start there,’ Anderson said. ‘Now I feel free to release it from that.’ Jack Moss

READ: Jonathan Anderson’s latest Dior show was a walk in the park

Saint Laurent

A cinematic offering from Anthony Vaccarello unfolded in a simulacrum of a sleek, modernist home; at its centre, a sized-up recreation of a bust that lived in Yves Saint Laurent’s own apartment. Through it strode this season’s Saint Laurent heroine, her heavy-smoked eye and slick, side-parted hair a nod towards Helmut Newton’s Paris Vogue photograph of a model in Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘Le Smoking’ tuxedo on Rue Aubriot in 1975. Indeed, tailoring was central to the A/W 2026 collection: eight trouser suits opened the show, while various other iterations appeared throughout (including Vaccarello’s own riff on the tuxedo, worn by model Loli Bahia, who walked exclusively for Saint Laurent this season and closed the show). Here, the silhouette was sloped across the shoulder and narrowed at the waist – though not constricted – for a riff on the power suit that was more ‘insouciant shrug than swagger’. As a counterpoint, Vaccarello looked towards the ‘troubled heroines’ of Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams, as well as Romy Schneider in the 1971 film Max et les Ferrailleurs (she was this season’s protagonist, he said), to capture an ‘elegance tinged with ennui… the beauty of intimacy and vulnerability’. To capture this mood, a series of slips and dresses came in lace coated in silicone, while enormous fur coats had a vivacious confidence. Jack Moss

Dries Van Noten

For many of us, the stylings of awkward adolescence are best not dwelt upon – after all, who looked or felt their best as a teenager? Evidently, Julian Klausner takes a more romantic view of this impressionable time, but, then again, Klausner was likely a more sophisticated brand of teenager than most. In any case, this was the impression given by his A/W 2026 collection for Dries Van Noten, which was inspired in part by a visit to Lycée Carnot, and the memories of being an adolescent ‘work-in-progress’. The Lycée is a Rive Droite public school with alumni including Gilles Deleuze, Guy Debord, and Daft Punk, and its Gustave Eiffel-designed great hall has been the backdrop for numerous Paris fashion shows over the years – in other words, a suitably rarefied and creatively rich starting point.

The 61 looks at Dries Van Noten asked that most teenage question: who am I going to be today? For the confident moment, a navel-bearing button-up knit with a vibrant silk skirt. When a suit of armour is required, a protective duffel coat that does the talking for you. Or maybe one day the mood might be scholastic – collegiate blazer and pleated skirt, but always, always customised, an embellishment here, a contrasting trim there. ‘Just like a pixelated picture, the more one gets far from that time of endless questioning, the clearer it becomes,’ Klausner said, a metaphor he extended through prints with digitally warped 17th-century Flemish still life paintings. Opulent, mature fabrics and finishings were styled with a youthful irreverence best summarised by the final lines from Gala Dragot’s vocal performance, which soundtracked the show: ‘Don’t be too serious... Wear a collar... Keep it blurry though.’ India Jarvis

Acne Studios

If Dries Van Noten was an homage to the experimental attitude of youth, then Acne Studios marked its 30th birthday year with a collection that declared (as one does at 30): I know exactly who I am. A/W 2026 was an affirmation of the house’s irreverent signatures, such as a revival of the particular 1996 cut of jean that made their name, and photographic elements that nod to the brand’s unconventional marketing style, including the bi-annual Acne Paper.

The setting for this season was a succession of intersecting cuboid rooms that, viewed simultaneously from the end of the runway, appeared like a Josef Albers work made three-dimensional. According to Jonny Johansson’s show notes, this was conceived ‘like an enfilade of salons … the portals marking what has come before, and what might follow’. Where a salon in the Parisian tradition might mean a bringing together of clashing or complementary ideas, at Acne Studios, the determination is to blur those boundaries as much as possible. Standout looks saw cropped aviator jackets worn with skin-tight jodhpurs and desirable point-toe pumps, Prince of Wales check jackets worn over one shoulder, and larger-than-life portraits of art school students, taken by Paul Kooiker, printed onto stiff pencil skirts and draped dresses.

Alaïa

Late last year, just after the completion of the Italian house’s sale to Prada, it was announced that Dario Vitale would be leaving his position as creative director of Versace (he lasted a single, but impactful season), to be replaced by Belgian designer Pieter Mulier. It meant that this season’s Alaïa show, watched by designers Matthieu Blazy and Raf Simons, was to be his last: the swansong of a five-year tenure defined by commercial expansion and critical success (he has also established a coterie of model muses, many of whom walked this final show, and will likely follow him to Versace). Held in an intimate showspace in the former Fondation Cartier – Mulier said he wanted it to recall a 1990s pre-iPhone runway show – the collection itself eschewed his more recent experimental silhouettes in favour of stripping things back to the essence of the house, from simple body-contouring tank dresses to lean tailored overcoats, stretch knits, and peplums and ruffles (the last flourishes rendered in Mulier’s contemporary, streamlined style).

‘This collection is about clothes to wear. What is a jacket? What is a dress?’ he said backstage after the show. ‘It’s basically a vocabulary of the last five years. It’s what I learned at Alaïa, that I’m giving to the next designer. It’s like leaving the keys on the table. At Alaïa, I learned precision, editing and [that] real luxury is not what we all think. It is a perfectly cut jacket.’ Jack Moss

READ: Pieter Mulier delivers a swansong collection at Alaïa: ‘It is a vocabulary of the last five years’

Rabanne

Of all the distinct fashions of the long 20th century, it could be argued that 1940s style is the hardest to reference without veering into the territory of costume. Perhaps it’s because boxy tailored silhouettes and victory rolls are so much associated with the vast canon of British war movies, or perhaps because austerity-driven ‘make do’ dressing is antithetical to contemporary fashion at either end of the high-low scale. It’s a testament to Julien Dossena’s eye, then, that for Rabanne A/W 2026 he incorporated patently 1940s-inspired styles – T-bar heels, tea-dress florals, and clashing knitwear – without evoking even a hint of reenactment.

After all, Rabanne has always been a house noted for its futuristic bent. Unconventional, industrial materials, like metal and plastic, are at its very heart, and remained so this season alongside those more vintage ideas – coming together in a collection that the brand called ‘a little louche’. This take on modernist femininity was told through blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpses of a slip through an unbuttoned blouse, a hint of lace underneath a more conservative skirt, and pussybows left suggestively undone. Dossena told Wallpaper* post-show that the character he wanted to build with these contrasts was that of ‘a resistant woman’, and that for him, there was a suggestion of retro-futurism with the 1940s-derived shapes (for example, hair pulled into sculptural pompadour styles was less Vera Lynn and more replicants in Blade Runner). India Jarvis

Rick Owens

What might the cyberpunk cousin of Marlene Dietrich wear for a night on the town? It’s a question that could only be answered by Rick Owens – whose A/W 2026 collection was an homage to the ‘dignified sequence of her life stages’, all shot through with classics from his own particular design language. Think body parts augmented through prosthetics and sci-fi silhouettes in a post-apocalyptic landscape heavy with dry ice and punctuated by magnesium-bright beams of light. Presenting the collection as the second part of ‘Tower’, which premiered during the men's collections, Owens drew from Dietrich’s qualities of ‘steeliness’ and ‘grit’, and interpreted them as sheath-like dresses, abundant piles of faux fur, and flight jackets.

Just as the German star’s enduring legacy was in part a product of her striking collaborations with Josef von Sternberg, Owens is an artist quick to credit the rich input his work receives from his creative partners. This season, much attention has been lovingly devoted to name-checking the hands through which his raw materials pass – from the third-generation, family-run mill in Como, Italy, which weaves a high-performance fibre called Kevlar (purportedly five-times stronger than steel), to the Veneto-region wash house committed to reducing water waste, which treats industrial indigo canvas. India Jarvis

Loewe

Presented on a bright-yellow runway populated by German artist Cosima Von Bonin’s plush figures of clams, octopi and dogs, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez’s sophomore Loewe collection was a welcome jolt of energy on the Friday morning of Paris Fashion Week. ‘What is fashion but an open field for endless creative play?’ said the American designers, whose poppy A/W 2026 collection translated their colourful beach-ready debut for the winter months, resulting in a riot of curvy dégradé shearling parkas, 3D-printed slips and shaggy-hemmed dresses with trailing trains. Other elements had a sporting feel – like face-shielding sunglasses, boldly coloured anoraks and chunky riffs on half-zip ski sweaters – while inflatable elements meant garments could be transformed in size and proportion (a lobster-claw-shaped pump, shown at the re-see the following day, will be sold separately).

Such experiments were made possible by the abilities of the Loewe atelier, particularly when it came to leather: bouclé overcoats were made from intricate loops of leather yarn, while the gradient shearlings were treated ‘in the same manner as poodle grooming’. ‘As we began [creating] our second collection, we were struck by a simple truth: for us, the act of making is, at its core, an expression of joy – an intellectual, process-driven pursuit charged with playfulness,’ said the designers. ‘The path taken matters as much as the end result. It is the idea of play as rigorous experimentation and problem-solving, moving between instinct and experience, between a devotion to craft and its endless opportunities for innovation.’ Jack Moss

Issey Miyake

For Satoshi Kondo, the role of designer is as much about relinquishing control as it is wielding it. Knowing when to hold back, not to overstep the mark, to let the materials speak for themselves. This was the credo he brought to the fore for Issey Miyake’s A/W 2026 offering – a characteristically Japanese recognition of innate, simple beauty.

Titled ‘Creating, Allowing’, the collection navigated this specific tension understood by designers through pieces where the artist’s hand was inserted sparingly, never tampering with the true essence of the fabrication, only enhancing. At its best, this looked like expanses of cloth cut with technical lines that left their impression on the negative space, like the wine-coloured single-breasted coat with inbuilt cape that the model held up over her shoulders to exaggerate its rectangular construction. The innate movement of the house-signature pleats was used only intermittently and, instead, dramatically inflexible lacquered washi paper was introduced through breast plates, bodices and belts – creating a contrast between motion and restriction. Kondo’s intention with this was that the most important impact was made through the human frame, by ‘minimising design intervention and leaving the form-making to the wearer's own body’.

As for the space itself, the Carrousel du Louvre was transformed with a layer of silvery sand and ‘finely shredded aluminum foil, [serving] as a device for the interaction between "material", "people", and "clothing"’. This surface became marked and patterned as the models moved across it, another allusion to Kondo’s metaphor of ‘considered disruption’. India Jarvis

Lanvin

This year marks the centenary of menswear at the house of Lanvin – a celebration that filtered into the season’s womenswear outing through nods to the boyish silhouettes that characterised interwar ladies’ fashion. It was a time when overtly feminine curves were flattened into straight lines from bust to waist, creating an elongated, athletic outline that came to epitomise the emancipated New Woman.

Peter Copping, who took the reins at Lanvin in late 2024, imagined ‘a dialogue between generations’, which came together beautifully to meld the concerns of Jeanne Lanvin’s customers in the 1920s with those who shop the brand in the present. What do they have in common? Evidently, a love of opera – gloves were cuffed and elbow-length, and belted opera coats were voluminous enough to be worn over an evening gown, and trimmed with faux fur. They wear hats (Jeanne Lanvin’s first foray into fashion was as an apprentice milliner), with A/W 2026’s borrowing from cloche shapes but with exaggerated sou’wester-style brims. They favour a dash of restrained glamour. If some of the cuts leaned slightly austere, they were countered with an opulence of fabric and finish: hand-embroidered bead droplets, inky velvets, laser-cut fringes.

Lanvin is the oldest French maison still in operation, its HQ still in its original site – therefore, the weight of its legacy must hang heavily over every designer who takes its helm. Its founder insisted on le chic ultime, a phrase that surely needs no translation, and which is no small order. It is a comfort that, for every moment of reinvention it undergoes, Lanvin is still a place that women can go to for guaranteed elegance. India Jarvis

Givenchy

The idea of individual style was a throughline of Paris Fashion Week, one expressed by Sarah Burton with her third collection for Givenchy – the former Alexander McQueen designer’s most liberated outing yet (and, as a result, her best). ‘How can we put ourselves back together in the world we’re living in?’ was the question Burton asked this season, elucidating after the show that she was thinking about the multiplicities of a contemporary woman’s life (as such, it found a companion with the Prada show in Milan, where Miuccia Prada asserted that ‘as a woman, your life is layered – each day demands not only a shifting of clothes, but a richness of identities within yourself’). So there was some typically brilliant tailoring (Burton is known for her prowess in the medium, and has recently brought over her tailoring team from Alexander McQueen), though also more vivid expressions of style – a dress, hanging from razor-thin straps, in bright yellow leather; shimmering leopard spots that burst into tassels; silk T-shirts that had been refashioned by Stephen Jones into headpieces – as well as oversized riffs on carpenter jeans, off-the-shoulder bombers, and high-collared white shirts. ‘I wanted to make it feel very personal,’ said Burton. ‘Each woman is her own person, each silhouette is her own character.’ Jack Moss

Junya Watanabe

Junya Watanabe lets the clothes do the talking. The A/W 2026 collection was accompanied by show notes that came to two single sentences: ‘The Art of Assemblage Couture explores form born from pure creative instinct, free from conventional notions of dressmaking. Through the direct presentation of raw materials, this approach expresses the surrounding social environment.’ This succinct summary belied a frenzy of ideas, which played out over one of the most entertaining shows of the week.

Classic couture silhouettes were fashioned from a mish-mash of consumer goods and mass-produced garments. The opening look, worn by Irina Shayk, comprised a gown in a 1950s prom style, constructed from gloves, with a mesh flounce. A puff-sleeved dress, with a squared neckline and a central slit that showed a silver interior, appeared to be made from a gold Mylar blanket – its creased folds still visible, like it had just been ripped from its packet. Another dress used kitschily patterned curtains, pinch pleats and all, for its full, trained skirt, while its bodice was made from – what else? – scrap number plates.

So far, so Watanabe, but this season offered more in the way of spectacle than just unconventional materials. In a more choreographed display than usual, Watanabe called in the services of Poland-born movement director Pat Boguslawski. He directed a languid yet melodramatic routine for Watanabe’s models, who threw garments onto chairs with tango-inspired passion, and turned their heads with the kind of simpering doe-eyed expressiveness of silent movie starlets. This reference was reinforced through Eugene Souleiman’s hair design, sculpted curls slicked to the foreheads and cheeks in the manner of Josephine Baker, and glam make-up by Isamaya Ffrench – winged, heavy-lashed and sometimes tear-streaked eyes. India Jarvis

Celine

It hasn’t taken long for Michael Rider to define a signature look at Celine: a preppy, uptown-inflected uniform that feels like a vision of Parisian style through American eyes (Rider had worked at Celine previously, under Phoebe Philo, though more recently headed up US label Polo Ralph Lauren). And it has worked: his collections thus far have felt like you could wear them off the runway and straight onto the street, full of clever riffs on quotidian pieces that will no doubt be much copied by lesser brands (they have also been full of great accessories, from abundant charm bracelets to colourful handbags and slipper-like loafers). For A/W 2026, Rider continued his upward trajectory with a show held at the Institut de France amid a series of beautiful modernist speakers in wood and metal, presenting a collection that favoured perennial style over ephemeral trends. ‘Celine is a style: a mix of old and new that feels urgent and dreamy,’ said Rider. ‘Making the things we all dream of finding and wearing.’ And in among this ready-to-wear wardrobe (in the truest sense), flourishes of the playful and the romantic emerged, from enormous sequins and flashes of animal print to feathered headpieces and bold punctuations of colour. ‘Putting on clothes, a look, can change the day – [it can] change how we walk and feel,’ said Rider. ‘I love that.’ Jack Moss

Hermès

Staged on a runway of moss and soil (strangely, a trend of the week, later seen at Miu Miu and Louis Vuitton), Nadège Vanhée’s latest outing for Hermès saw her conjure what she called a ‘liminal realm’ between dawn and dusk, earth and space. It lent the collection an alien, otherworldly feel: models emerged from glowing orbs and looped around the Garde Républicaine show space on an inky runway, which also inspired the clothing’s palette of deep blues, greys and black. Mashing up the equestrian codes that remain at the heart of Hermès – here, sliced-away jodhpurs-cum-cycling shorts, dressage blazers and knee-high leather boots – with lean, futuristic silhouettes, it was a clever hybrid of the past, present and future, a liminal realm of Vanhée’s own. Ostrich and leather jump suits, with contrasting knit sleeves, were the season’s show pieces – the result of the house’s superlative leather atelier, they straddled sex appeal and function – while visible zips added an almost sci-fi feel, running down the front of dresses or slicing across the chest of a jacket. Prints came via AM Cassandre, an art deco artist, and saw clouds intersected by a geometric structure – a reflection of Vanhée’s own juxtapositions between the graphic and the elemental. Jack Moss

Comme des Garçons

A strong Comme des Garçons collection saw Rei Kawakubo find solace in her favoured colour, black, which – save for a brief interlude in bright, candy pink – made up the majority of the A/W 2026 collection. And, while recent collections have seen Kawakubo grapple with tumultuous world affairs, the choice of the colour was not necessarily to represent grief or mourning – instead, the Japanese designer said it captured the expansiveness of the creative process. ‘I have come to realise that, after all, black is the colour for me,’ she said in a typically brief statement issued to the press. ‘It’s just the strongest, the best for creation, and the colour that embodies the rebellious spirit. And has the biggest meaning: the universe and the black hole.’ Indeed, the use of a single colour allowed Kawakubo’s typically provocative forms to come to the fore: this season, pillow-like constructions draped in semi-sheer black tulle, undulating pile-ups of shirred ruffles and tassels, or saucer-shaped protusions that looped around the upper body. Like any Comme collection, it was a Rorschach test – revelling in the unfamiliar, Kawakubo always challenges you to draw your own conclusions. Jack Moss

Balenciaga

Of all the creative directors at the nascent stages of new tenures, Pierpaolo Piccioli might have one of the steepest mountains to climb at Balenciaga. In the 16 years he spent at Valentino, prior to taking this new position in the spring of 2025, he demonstrated a Cristóbal Balenciaga-worthy approach to dressmaking that prioritised proportion and colour. But while Piccioli was sending out breathtaking confections of ballooning silk taffeta at Valentino, Balenciaga the brand was being injected with a new edge, at the hand of Vetements-founder Demna, whose zeitgeist-defining designs were laced with subversion and irony. How to bring the grandeur and romance that are Piccioli’s calling cards, without alienating the new demographic of customers who flocked to the brand under Demna?

For this season, his second collection, Piccioli pinned his hopes on a collaboration with Sam Levinson – the creator of Euphoria, the teen drama responsible for making internationally recognised stars out of its cast, which includes Jacob Elordi, Sydney Sweeney, and Hunter Schafer. Audiences at the Balenciaga A/W 2026 show were treated to a preview of clips from the HBO show’s third series (airing publicly in April), which played on screens across the venue; its interplay of light and dark was found running through the collection, which Piccioli had titled ‘ClairObscur’. The collection itself was a largely black affair, in light-catching high-gloss fabrics, punctuated by the occasional neon-toned print that harkened to Euphoria's colour-saturated visual style. If Euphoria – boundary-pushing, youth-orientated, and ever so slightly contentious – feels more spiritually within Demna’s wheelhouse than Piccioli’s, the High Renaissance references (‘ClairObscur’ is a play on clair-obscur or chiaroscuro, the artistic style beloved by Mannerist painters, which manifests as dramatically contrasting tones to create intense depth) brought proceedings firmly back into Piccioli’s world. India Jarvis

READ: Balenciaga taps Euphoria’s Sam Levinson for A/W 2026

Jean Paul Gaultier

After the shock factor of his debut last season – one which divided both critics and online commentators with its barely-there silhouettes and trompe l’oeil prints of nude bodies – Dutch designer Duran Lantink seemed to hit his stride this season, using his eye for the surreal and the sculptural to create a disruptive cast of archetypes, from the raver to the cowboy. Marlene Dietrich (or, more specifically, a treasured mesh T-shirt printed with the filmstar that Lantink had found in a vintage shop) was one figure on the moodboard, inspiring the clever opening tailoring, which came with jutting folds and sculpted lapels, while also being printed on a dress installed with dry ice (a nod to her favoured vice – cigarettes). The designer said she was a master in subverting tropes: ‘dominant, sexy and graceful, the ultimate hybrid’ – a mood that informed the shape-shifting collection. Tailoring metamorphosed into tech-y sportswear, trompe-l’oeil bodysuits of artist’s dummies were overlaid with lingerie, and puffer jackets became bodysuits. ‘It’s a spirit that suits the house of Gaultier, a place where the world is perpetually turned upside down,’ said Lantink via press notes. ‘Feminine and masculine, inside out, vintage and new, underwear as outerwear, technical and tailored all at once.’ Jack Moss

Chanel

Matthieu Blazy said that his sophomore ready-to-wear collection began with a quote from house founder Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel. ‘Fashion is both caterpillar and butterfly. Be a caterpillar by day and a butterfly by night,’ she said. ‘There is nothing more comfortable than a caterpillar and nothing more made for love than a butterfly. We need dresses that crawl and dresses that fly.’ It seemed an apt description for Blazy’s own vision for Chanel thus far, one which elevates the quotidien through expressive acts of craft, and finds joy in both the functional and the glamorous. These are special clothes, no doubt (as anyone who has had the chance to see them up close can attest), though they are designed to be worn, not simply exalted. As such, he will no doubt be satisfied by the busy shop floors earlier this week as his debut collection landed (it was an ongoing fashion-week talking point), and more so to see those purchases worn by attendees to the show on Monday evening (and not just by the usual high-spending customers, but editors and stylists alike).

Staged amid a series of vast primary-coloured cranes – Blazy is, after all, still in the process of constructing his Chanel – the designer’s A/W 2026 collection was a brilliant and comprehensive exercise in wardrobing, which, to borrow Coco Chanel’s categorisation spanned the ‘caterpillar’ (roomy blazers, tweeds reformulated into lumberjack-style overshirts, simple jersey dresses), but also the ‘butterfly’. The latter came in an extraordinary stream of lustrous, colour-sturated looks at the end of the show, loaded with embellishment – appliqué flowers, lace and beads – and matched with models’ pastel-coloured or metallic hair. Over the 78 looks, there was a multitude of iterations of the Chanel woman, and the accessories to match (from gleaming metallic court shorts, to squashy crescent-shaped bags that recalled croissants). ‘Chanel is day, Chanel is night. It represents the freedom to choose between the caterpillar and the butterfly whenever you want,’ said Blazy. ‘I wish to create a canvas for women to be unapologetically who they are and who they want to be.’ Jack Moss

READ: Matthieu Blazy’s sophomore Chanel collection is made for ‘women to be unapologetically who they are’

Louis Vuitton

Nicolas Ghesquière staged his A/W 2026 collection for Louis Vuitton amid a show set by Severance production designer Jeremy Hindle, seeing rolling green hills – like those found in pastoral landscapes – abstracted into a series of sharp, futuristic peaks. The collection itself had a similar rationale, drawing inspiration from nature – ‘mountains, forests, plains’, and the clothing traditionally used to live among such elemental landscapes – and reimagining them through a series of Ghesquière’s typically idiosyncratic, time-travelling silhouettes. The idea of expedition seemed a throughline – supersized-wide-shouldered jackets, shearling hats and furry-hooded duffel coats seemed primed for protection, while bags hung on leather staffs like bindles – though there was a ceremonial feel to garments, which recalled traditional rural dress (though, in Ghesquière style, they were mashed up in such a way that the references were hard to place). ‘It is not an escape from our realities, but an echo of them,’ said Ghesquière of the vivid collection, which also featured the ‘urban pastoral’ works of Ukrainian artist Nazar Strelyaev-Nazarko. ‘[It is] a new folklore, for the future.’ Jack Moss

Miu Miu

Miuccia Prada has long interrogated a woman’s place in the world: how they move through it, and a wardrobe that feels reflective of their needs. For A/W 2026, she was thinking about the ‘smallness of the body’ – not in its physical proportions, but in opposition with the vastness of the world around us. It feels like a response to our current era of overload: the runway at Palais d’Iéna was covered in a layer of soil and moss, a reminder that beyond the pomp and ceremony of luxury fashion, we are simply humans living in communion with the earth (as a seatmate commented, perhaps this was her instruction to ‘touch grass’). ‘I am obsessed with the smallness of the body – in a human sense, the contrast between ourselves, our bodies and the vastness of that which surrounds us,’ she said. ‘Who we are, and the scale and magnitude of what we have to face. This collection is not about fragility – there is a confidence, and a strength. But always about a confrontation between a human and the expansiveness of the world.’

As such, the collection segued between moments of strength and intimacy: for the former, enveloping trapper hats, hiking shoes and sporty shearling-lined parkas, for the latter, slip dresses, satin shoes and bejewelled embellishment. There felt something of the 1990s to it: not only in the more minimal looks, which intersected the middle of the show, but in that contrast between glamour and utility (a parka over a mini dress; a studded handbag; a block heel), and also the appearance of Chloë Sevigny, a longtime house muse who first walked for Miu Miu in 1996. She was joined by a coterie of ‘individuals’ on the runway, from models Gemma Ward and Kristen McMenamy to the actress Gillian Anderson, who closed the show. Jack Moss

READ: Miu Miu’s all-star cast for A/W 2026 featured Gillian Anderson and Chloë Sevigny

The collection, titled ‘Mindful Intimacy’, evoked the 1990s in minimal tailoring and close-fitting bootcut pants, worn with zig-zag headbands and block heels – so it was no wonder Miu Miu tapped two icons of 90s style for the show.

Meet Miu Miu’s all-star cast for A/W 2026

Sevigny has been an official US brand ambassador for Miu Miu’s beauty line since 2025, and an unofficial muse for its ready-to-wear division for much longer. She opened the S/S 1996 show in a dusty blue pant-and-shirt set, hair closely cropped and jawline already the envy of the world. For its Resort 2019 collection – which riffed on the idea of ‘spontaneous’ dressing – Sevigny stepped out in another two piece, this time a leather peplum top and microshorts, styled insouciantly with a granny-ish floral blouse layered over her shoulders. Today, she was dressed in a three-button blazer over a mini-dress, both in fabric that graduated from black leather to brown shearling.

Sevigny’s past runway appearances include walking for Proenza Schouler and Mugler, and she has starred in numerous campaigns, from Saint Laurent to Ecco. However it is her eclectic personal style which has solidified her status as one of the world’s most enduring cool-girls, with its effortless mix of casual grunge and precisely chosen luxury.

Nor is Gillian Anderson a stranger to great style – known equally for daring red-carpet looks (such as the low-cut dress by Eduardo Lucero with thong exposed, for the 2001 Academy Awards), and her off-duty Y2K sunglasses and boyish baseball caps, she made her runway debut just last year, for Le Défilé L’Oréal Paris.

The casting of Anderson, 57, who closed the show in cream, appliqued shift dress, is part of a growing trend for luxury houses showing clothes on a more mature generation of stars. Miu Miu itself has featured the likes of Willem Dafoe, 70, and Richard E Grant, 68, in recent collections, and Burberry, SS Daley, Prada and Simone Rocha have found virality by sending out respected film and TV talent including Lesley Manville, 69, Jeff Goldblum, 73, Kyle MacLachlan, 67, Ian McKellen, 86, and Fiona Shaw, 67.

Other famous faces who walked the show were singer-songwriter Lauren Auder, multi-media artist Charlie Osborne, Anderson’s Sex Education co-star Lily Newmark, and models Kristen McMenamy and Gemma Ward.

Catch up on our live Paris Fashion Week coverage here

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There have been some exceptions in recent times. At Hermès, menswear artistic director Veronique Nichanian rounded off a 38-year-long tenure with a celebratory runway show this January; in July 2025, Demna held a final haute couture collection at Balenciaga before heading to Gucci; and, in June 2024, Dries Van Noten said goodbye to his eponymous label with a finale collection shown on a glimmering silver catwalk (before an enormous disco ball was lowered for the after-party).

Pieter Mulier’s swansong at Alaïa

And, despite fashion’s short attention span – and voracious desire for the new and the next – it still feels a more satisfying ending for both designer and viewer. It is a chance for the former to revel in what they have created, and for the latter to express their appreciation.

As was evidenced yesterday evening at the former Fondation Cartier in Paris, where Belgian designer Pieter Mulier held his swansong runway show for Alaïa after a five-year tenure. Hired in 2021, four years after the death of the house’s namesake designer Azzedine Alaïa in November 2017, he would be the couturier’s successor (the time between was overseen by an anonymous in-house team). His time at the house has been defined by commercial expansion and critical acclaim, a veneration of house codes – architectural construction; body contouring silhouettes; superlative craft – with a resolutely modern eye.

Speaking to Wallpaper* in 2022, he would call it a search for ‘modern beauty’. ‘I like the idea of working with a small but devoted team of highly skilled technicians and dressmakers – it’s a reminder of the purest form of fashion,’ he said. ‘It’s a big problem if you make clothes without knowing the people who will help you to build them. And also without knowing who is wearing them. The women who wear Alaïa are not static works of art, but are active in society, working, running, busy with children. I want to create clothes that carry this idea of a modern beauty, always in movement.’

It was an idea he echoed in a letter distributed to attendees before last night’s show. ‘This collection is not about me,’ he wrote. ‘It is about the Alaïa team – our family – and an expression of all we have learned, and felt, and loved across the past five years.’ An exhibition of portraits by Japanese photographer Keizo Kitajima of the Alaïa atelier and staff served as the show’s prelude. ‘His photography, like the work of Alaïa, affects and shapes those who see it,’ Mulier continued. ‘[Keizo] has created a series of portraits of the people who have created this collection. In turn, this collection is itself a portrait of Alaïa.’

Watched on by designers Raf Simons and Matthieu Blazy, the A/W 2026 collection was one of intimacy (guests were within touching distance of garments) and reduction, an expression of simplicity that Mulier, despite some of his more experimental recent collections, said was at the heart of Alaïa. ‘This collection is about clothes to wear. What is a jacket? What is a dress?’ he elucidated backstage after the show. ‘It’s basically a vocabulary of the last five years. It’s what I learned at Alaïa, that I’m giving to the next designer. It’s like leaving the keys on the table. At Alaïa, I learned precision, editing and [that] real luxury is not what we all think. It is a perfectly cut jacket.’

This search for perfection infused the collection, which began with a series of tank dresses, 1990s in flavour and engineered to cling to the body, while equally meticulous suiting and lean double-breasted overcoats demonstrated tailoring prowess. Contouring knit sweaters were worn with elongated jersey skirts, while more dramatic silhouettes came in trapeze-style overcoats and flared peplums and ruffles, which appeared on jackets and gowns (albeit in Mulier’s graphic, contemporary style). The Alaïa hood – a house signature – emerged in scarves which looped over the head and across cocooning overcoats.

Such was the clarity of his vision, looks were often repeated, appearing in new colours, fabrications or lengths. Mulier said that repetition was ‘very Alaïa’. ‘He would do one skirt fifty times, and the last one was the best one – the same, same, the same. This collection is a bit like that, trying to be perfect, even though perfection doesn’t exist.’

The show culminated with a rousing standing ovation from the packed room – for Mulier himself, but also for the atelier, who joined him for an emotional finale bow. ‘I feel quite empty and happy at the same time,’ he admitted as journalists crowded around him for the post-show scrum.

Mulier will likely take some time off before he begins his next role as creative director of Italian powerhouse Versace on July 1. There, he will take over from former Miu Miu design head Dario Vitale, who succeeded Donatella Versace in 2025, but only lasted a single season. The appointment came after Versace was purchased by the Prada Group for €1.25 billion in a landmark deal, which was completed in December 2025.

‘When we considered the Versace acquisition, we identified Pieter Mulier as the right person for the brand,’ said Lorenzo Bertelli, Versace’s executive chairman, at the time (Bertelli is the son of Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli and has held various roles within the Prada Group). ‘We believe that he can truly unlock Versace’s full potential and that he will be able to engage in a fruitful dialogue with the brand’s strong legacy. We are excited to begin this journey together.’

Stay tuned to our live coverage from Paris Fashion Week A/W 2026 here.

And this afternoon, Jonathan Anderson – the Northern Irish designer and creative director of Dior – was the latest creative mind to be seduced by the gardens’ charms, using the Tuileries to stage his A/W 2026 womenswear collection for the Parisian powerhouse. In bright spring sunshine, the show set had been erected around one of the park’s lily-pad strewn ponds (here, those water-lilies were clever imitations); across its centre ran a contemporary imagining of the Tuileries’ tree-lined Grand Allée, a site of promenade since the gardens opened to the public in 1667.

A walk in the park: Dior A/W 2026 by Jonathan Anderson

Indeed, Anderson said this was a collection about ‘seeing and being seen’ in such public settings, a preoccupation of Louis XIV and the aristocracy of his reign. He also invoked the poet Charles Baudelaire, and his 1857 poem À une passante (To a Passer By), in which the narrator observes a mourning woman in a Paris flea market. Struck by what he sees as her innate nobility and ‘majestic’ grief in a ‘lightning flash’ of a moment before she disappears into the crowd, it would immortalise the figure of the flâneur – a detached but voracious observer of the changing city that critic Walter Benjamin said epitomised the modern 19th-century experience.

Anderson, who began the role as sole creative director of the house in June of last year, could also be deemed something of a flâneur: in one viral video posted to social media, he is captured by an anonymous observer wandering the banks of the Seine alone, smoking a cigarette, while recent Instagram posts have seen him capture quotidian moments observed while traversing his adopted city, like the stacks of love-heart padlocks attached onto the poles of a bridge, or the ducks which wander the Tuileries gardens. Though if a flâneur is someone who knows the city intimately (as Benjamin argued in The Arcades Project), Anderson was keen to assert that he retains an outsider’s eye.

‘I will always feel like a tourist in Paris,’ he told designer and podcaster Bella Freud in a conversation which aired before the show’s start. ‘But sometimes being a tourist is quite good, because you see the thing, you kind of edit.’ ‘I suppose it’s a way of finding the things that attach you to a city,’ she added, to his agreement. ‘Especially Paris, it's so grand, it's so composed.’

The idea of the pleasure garden – one which Anderson said also had very British connotations, too – lay at the root of the collection, the idea of dressing up to enter the thrum of city life (indeed, as he noted, in 1667, when the Tuileries opened, there were strict dress codes as to what you could wear inside). ‘A walk through the park becomes a performance,’ was the tagline to the A/W 2026 collection, conjuring a ‘panoply of Parisians... each dressed to play a part, whether mundane or spectacular.’

It made for a collection of eclectic elements; a modern riff on the 19th-century promenade. Several pieces found their roots in historical dress: ruffled Belle Époque gowns were abbreviated into mini skirts replete with bouncing trains (these millefeuilles of frills and ruffles returned throughout, including beneath a flared riff on the house’s Bar Jacket); regal brocade jackets came with peplum hems and rows of fabric-covered buttons; while a pair of dramatic lace gowns had a feeling of deconstruction, as if torn and destroyed by time (indeed, their edges were left frayed).

Others were a play on Parisian bourgeois tropes: scarves were slung across fabrics which mimicked heritage tweed, blazers were adorned with big gold buttons, and shearling jackets were reimagined with wiggly, wave-like hems. But there was a satisfying levity, too, even prettiness – flowers bloomed from dresses, jeans were adorned with crystals, and the polka dot became a defining motif. Even last season’s shrunken Bar Jacket was loosened up: here, an iteration of the Dior classic came in oversized proportions, and was worn with voluminous matching pants.

It felt like a designer gaining confidence in his position, one no doubt bolstered by the overwhelmingly positive critical reception to his first couture show in January. There, he favoured a similarly freewheeling approach: ‘I think the idea of designing things is to make people want something they didn’t want,’ he said at the time. ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learnt at Dior, it’s just about putting ideas out [there].’

Anderson is a designer who has always excelled best when working intuitively and without restriction; here, the collection was created, from start to finish, in under a month. ‘Dior has this giant past, and I had to start there,’ he said. ’Now I feel free to release it from that.’

Stay tuned to our live coverage from Paris Fashion Week A/W 2026 here.

Paris might mark the final stop of fashion month, but such is the weighting of the season that several of its biggest shows are yet to come (Paris Fashion Week has a crammed nine-day-long schedule, nearly double the length of its counterparts in New York, London and Milan). Among them: Dior, which will begin proceedings on Tuesday afternoon (3 March 2026) with Jonathan Anderson’s sophomore womenswear show for the house, and Chanel, where Matthieu Blazy will present his own second act (both showed acclaimed collections during haute couture week in January). Others who are relatively new in their tenures include Michael Rider at Celine (the American designer will show on March 7), Duran Lantink at Jean Paul Gaultier (March 8), and Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez at Loewe (March 6).

There will also be a swansong: Belgian designer Pieter Mulier will present his final collection at Alaïa, the culmination of a five-year tenure defined by commercial expansion and critical success, honing a vision of what he calls ‘modern beauty’. Having taken over from Azzedine Alaïa after the couturier’s death, his next move is the Italian fashion house Versace, where he succeeds Dario Vitale, who only lasted a single season.

There is, of course, plenty to look out for besides. Saint Laurent will hold its usual Tuesday evening show (3 March 2026) in what is sure to continue Anthony Vaccarello’s veneration of silhouette and form; Issey Miyake will look to continue its brilliant run of shows under design lead Satoshi Kondo (March 6); and shows from Miu Miu and Louis Vuitton will close out fashion month on Tuesday (March 10). There will also be the usual slew of avant-garde labels, from Paris and beyond: Rick Owens, Comme des Garçons, Junya Watanabe and Matières Fécales (among others), will all show collections filled with ideas across the course of the week.

Here, the Wallpaper* editors on the ground will be offering a real-time look at standout moments of Paris Fashion Week A/W 2026 – from behind-the-scenes glimpses to access to the shows, presentations and parties. Stay tuned.

March 5, 2026 – 5:15 AM

Pieter Mulier holds his swansong show at Alaïa

Watched on by fellow designers Raf Simons and Matthieu Blazy, last night in Paris, Pieter Mulier presented his final collection for Alaïa at the former Fondation Cartier (it was preceded by an exhibition of works by Japanese photographer Keizo Kitajima, capturing the entire Alaïa atelier and team). It would mark the culmination of a critically acclaimed five-year tenure, which saw him succeed house founder Azzedine Alaïa, following the couturier’s death in 2017 (Mulier started four years later, in 2021, after a stewardship by an in-house team).

Encapsulating the idea of ‘modern beauty’ which has characterised his time at the house, the A/W 2026 collection was defined by a feeling of reduction: simple, body-contouring dresses met trapeze-shaped outerwear, while peplums, ruffles and hoods – albeit in Mulier’s graphic, contemporary style – evoked house codes. The intimate show featured a line-up of house muses, from Mona Tougaard to Alex Consani, and was rounded out by a rousing standing ovation. Mulier’s next move? Creative director of Italian powerhouse Versace, where he takes over from Dario Vitale.

‘[It is] not my Alaïa, [but] our Alaïa,’ said Mulier. ‘I am proud that I am a part of the history of this house – and this house will be a part of me, forever.’ Jack Moss

March 5, 2026 – 10:55 AM

A closer look at Jonathan Anderson’s latest Dior collection

Earlier this week, Jonathan Anderson showed his sophomore womenswear ready-to-wear collection for Dior in Paris’ Tuileries Garden. The gardens – constructed by Catherine de’ Medici in 1564 and later renovated in 1664 by Louis XIV before becoming a public park – also inspired a collection which was about ‘seeing and being seen... [where] a walk in the park becomes a performance’. Cue riffs on Belle Époque silhouettes, alongside a rich amalgam of fresh, nature-inspired flourishes – from lily-pad footwear and fronds of feathers to floral jacquard and appliqué. Wallpaper* returned to the water-lily strewn showspace today for a closer look at the collection – swipe through above to see what we found. Jack Moss

READ: Jonathan Anderson’s latest Dior show was a walk in the park

March 7, 2026 – 2:36 PM

Victoria Beckham’s muse was Tamara de Lempicka

Last night, Victoria Beckham took us to the southernmost of Paris’s arrondissements, to present her A/W 2026 collection at Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, a residential complex which hosts around 6,000 of the French capital’s student population. The foundation was conceived in the 1920s – the same period in which Beckham’s seasonal muse, the painter Tamara de Lempicka was reaching her creative heights.

De Lempicka’s portraits of modern women through the Machine Age offer much in the way of inspiration, sartorially speaking. Her statuesque subjects wear marvellous folds of fabric, rendered through bold, geometric planes of colour, close to the face. Beckham played upon this geometry with a collection which focused heavily on tailoring, or ‘anatomy-enhancing suiting,’ with playful constructive details: extended pockets on tightly fitting trousers, or blazers with intriguingly wonky necklines.

Her palette was largely neutral, but with the occasional uniform-colour, khaki and Air Force blue, or turquoises and oranges taken straight from The Girl, and Portrait of Ira P (both 1930), respectively. The ‘sense of dimension’ and ‘optical depth’ integral to clothes which borrow from Art Deco was achieved through sheer crystal organza and ‘crinoline shell garments’, and that unmistakably Art Deco line was suggested through pattern cutting – a bomber-shaped jumper in leather with a thick wool turtle-neck, met the upper torso in a deep-V, and a one-shoulder velvet dress connected to its bubble skirt via a sloping, ovoid drop waist.

Beckham also introduced the Sloan bag, a top-handle design ‘crafted in aged leather and croc-embossed leather in rich heritage jewel tones, the bag is constructed with folded side gussets that reflect the light and create shadows in motion.’ India Jarvis

In 2026, another Paris-Blackpool connection has materialised for Hoyle, who now stars in a series of short videos for Mugler. The French haute couture and ready-to-wear label was founded by late iconoclast Manfred Thierry Mugler in 1974, with a debut collection titled ‘Café de Paris’. The avant-garde fashion house, which the designer and artist built to escape a reality in which he never felt he belonged, similarly became an escapist beacon for those pushing against the status quo. Among them was Hoyle, whose queer adolescence collided with the rise of Thatcherism. ‘Thierry Mugler made a big impression on me,’ he says. ‘The theatricality of the garments… You learn what a costume can do; it can change you. I mean, in your private life, you know, you might be on your knees. But put a costume on, and you’re liberated.’

Hoyle developed his signature form of satirical cabaret in the gay clubs of Manchester and London through ‘anti-drag’ character The Divine David. ‘I suppose I called myself that because I do have a belief that all of us contain some form of divinity,’ says Hoyle, also noting the influence of Bette Midler’s stage persona The Divine Miss M. ‘But it was tongue-in-cheek, really.’ Gaining a cult following, Hoyle was tapped by Channel 4 to host his own shows, The Divine David Presents (1998) and The Divine David Heals (2000), which saw him sport signature Divine David garb – appearing as though Elsie Tanner from Coronation Street had a nasty in run in with a Blackpool circus clown – and deliver surrealist social commentary against the backdrop of a psychedelic greenscreen. (Hoyle would later ‘kill off’ The Divine David at Streatham Ice Rink, in a funerary spectacle called ‘The Divine David on Ice’).

Miguel Castro Freitas, appointed Mugler’s creative director in 2025, after the departure of Casey Cadwaller, is a huge admirer of Hoyle, for ‘his wit, disruptive spirit, and glamour’. ‘[They are] aspects that are all essential to Mugler, as well,’ the Portuguese designer says in a press release for the new video series, which brings The Divine David back to life on film. ‘It was such a lovely surprise hearing from Miguel,’ Hoyle says. ‘We connected via my manager, Tim, over a Zoom call. He explained how he’d followed my work for years and vowed to collaborate with me one day, and his new role at Mugler was the perfect opportunity to make it happen.’ Hoyle was ‘given free creative rein’ over the direction of the videos, which were shot by his long-time creative partner Lee Baxter, with Manchester-based drag artist Liquorice Black responsible for ‘styling and coiffure’. ‘We were a really great local creative team,’ adds Hoyle, explaining that everything was shot in the UK’s North West. ‘I was very grateful to Mugler for allowing me to make the films there; there’s no reason why high-quality work can’t be produced outside of London,’ says Hoyle.

The final three films of the nine-part digital series drop in increments this week (23-28 February 2026). In each one, The Divine David explains ‘how to’ wear Mugler’s ‘The Wardrobe of Identities’, the brand’s pre-S/S 2026 collection, for a variety of scenarios, ranging from the commonplace to the absurd. For example, embarking on a cruise or travelling to Pluto. ‘Getting to wear those clothes… I have to say, it was incredible,’ says Hoyle, calling out the ‘butter satin’ gown featured in ‘Episode VI’ as a standout piece. ‘The script was written around the pieces in the collection, and the idea of wearing something so beautiful and exquisite to go foraging for mushrooms or to take a bus.

‘The times that we’re living in, you couldn’t make them up,’ says Hoyle. ‘I’m old enough to remember going on marches in the 1980s. And entering the 1990s, you really felt that you were going towards a more progressive future. But at the moment, we seem to have hit some sort of brick wall.’ Hoyle’s perspective on the role fashion plays during times of sociopolitical unrest is largely optimistic, however. ‘To me, fashion is a sort of antidote to evil,’ he muses. ‘I think it’s always served that purpose. It has its problems, as everything does. But I think that the fantasy of it, the escapism, the ability to play around and have a laugh, is so important. And, as with the series we’ve made with Mugler and Miguel, I find the fashion world very encouraging of creativity, allowing space to be idiosyncratic and a bit off the wall.’

Mugler A/W 2026, Freitas’ second runway collection for the house, will take place on 6 March during Paris Fashion Week. Will Hoyle be making an appearance on the FROW? ‘Oh, we need to discuss that, Nicky, but we’ll see!’ he says to Mugler’s global comms director, also on the call. ‘But it would be nice if possible, as I love Paris. There’s nothing better than sitting at a café on a boulevard somewhere, or in Montmartre. I’ve been a few times with Lee [Baxter]. We just sit together in silence and just watch all the beautiful, eccentric people go by.’

mugler.com

That said, the debuts continue, most notably in Milan, where Gucci will hold its first runway show under new creative director Demna (last season, as an introduction, he presented a short film starring Demi Moore and Edward Norton), Maria Grazia Chiuri will show her first collection for Fendi, and Meryll Rogge will debut at Marni. And those shows aside, the schedule across the month remains busy – not least in Paris, where an eight-day schedule cements the city’s status as the world’s style capital.

Here, on the eve of a new season in style, everything you need to know about Women’s Fashion Week A/W 2026.

New York Fashion Week (11–16 February)

A slight reshuffle of the New York Fashion Week schedule means that this season is front-loaded: on the opening day, three of the city’s biggest names – Proenza Schouler, Coach and Tory Burch – will all present their A/W 2026 collections, moving forward from their usual slots later in the week. Proenza Schouler will likely command the most attention: this season marks the runway debut of Jamaica-born, New York-based designer Rachel Scott as creative director, following a soft-launch presentation last season. She comes with plenty of experience: after roles at Costume National, Elizabeth and James and Rachel Comey, she founded her own label, Diotima, in 2020. She has since won the CFDA American Womenswear Designer of the Year in 2024 for her work at the brand, which held its first runway show last season to wide acclaim (it was one of Wallpaper’s highlights of the season). Alongside her new role at Proenza Schouler – where she takes over from founders Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez – she will continue to work on Diotima, showing her latest collection on Sunday.

Elsewhere, New York’s usual banner names return: Michael Kors will show on February 12, Calvin Klein on February 13, and Eckhaus Latta on February 14. Surrounding them are some brilliant rising names: we are big fans Zane Li’s fledgling label LII, which marries 1990s minimalism with architectural construction and a bold colour palette, while Ashlyn, led by Yohji Yamamoto alumnus Ashlynn Park, is evolving into one of New York’s most intriguing young labels with its reimagining of historical silhouettes and straddling of Japanese and Parisian codes (she recently won the 2025 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund). Other moments to watch out for are Nicholas Aburn’s sophomore show as creative director of Area, and the latest runway show from Khaite, which – if previous runway shows are anything to go by – will come with cinematic scenography conceived by founder Catherine Holstein and her architect husband Griffin Frazen.

London Fashion Week (19–23 February)

London Fashion Week seeks to continue the momentum built last season under new British Fashion Council CEO Laura Weir. Proceedings begin on Thursday evening with the graduating class of Central Saint Martin MA program – long an incubator for fashion’s rising stars – while on a similar track, Fashion East will continue a two-decade-long tradition of showcasing a trio of on-the-rise designers (this season, Jacek Gleba and Louis Mayhew will return after their debuts for S/S 2026, joined by Traiceline Pratt’s GOYAGOMA). Other rising names on the schedule to look out for include Lucila Safdie, Selasi (the Ronan McKenzie-run label will hold its first on-schedule runway show) and Oscar Ouyang, while the more established Chopova Lowena and Talia Byre will both show their latest collection in a presentation format. Conner Ives, whose ode to the women of pop was one of last season’s highlights, will also show on the closing on Monday.

Elsewhere, expect shows from longtime London Fashion Week stalwarts: these include Simone Rocha and Erdem, while Roksanda is taking the season off to instead hold an intimate dinner with the BFC. There are some returning names, too: Julien Macdonald will bring his brand of typically outré glamour with a runway show on Saturday afternoon, while Joseph will host its first runway show under Mario Arena, who came to the British label in 2024 after stints at Nanushka and JW Anderson. Last but not least, Burberry will close out the week on Monday evening – expect the usual high-wattage happening with an eclectic star-packed front row.

Milan Fashion Week (24 February–1 March)

A new energy permeates Milan Fashion Week as Gucci makes a welcome return to the runway in its first show under new creative director Demna (if his Balenciaga shows were anything to go by, expect spectacle), while Fendi shakes off a period of flux as Maria Grazia Chiuri takes the helm of the Roman powerhouse (they will show on Friday and Wednesday respectively). Meanwhile, Belgian designer Meryll Rogge – who worked at Marc Jacobs and Dries Van Noten before starting her own eponymous label – will also make her debut as creative director of Marni, showing on Thursday evening.

Elsewhere, Milan continues to be dominated by its legacy names (the schedule is light on rising talent), which will host their usual blockbuster runway shows across the week. These include Giorgio Armani and Emporio Armani (the latter will be co-ed, having skipped Men’s Fashion Week), Max Mara, Tod’s, Ferragamo, Dolce & Gabbana and Prada – the latter long a barometer for the season’s trends – while at Jil Sander and Bottega Veneta, Simone Bellotti and Louise Trotter will show their sophomore collections after acclaimed debuts last season. We look forward to seeing their visions evolve.

Paris Fashion Week (2–10 March 2026)

As ever, Paris Fashion Week continues to dominate: a packed eight-day schedule cements its status as the world’s style capital. Though perhaps this season can be seen as one of relative calm – after the frenzy of big-name debuts last season, including Matthieu Blazy at Chanel and Jonathan Anderson at Dior, A/W 2026 will see this new class of designers settle into their roles and hone their visions. Other designers hosting their sophomore ready-to-wear shows this season include Duran Lantink at Jean Paul Gaultier, Miguel Castro at Mugler, and Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez at Loewe.

Elsewhere, expect the usual line-up of the Paris’ storied houses – among them Louis Vuitton, Givenchy and Celine – alongside those who travel to the city each season, including the Japanese avant-garde (among them Comme des Garçons, Junya Watanabe, Issey Miyake and Noir Kei Ninomiya) and a slew of international labels, from Miu Miu and Stella McCartney to McQueen. Meanwhile, an energetic and eclectic line-up of younger designers completes the schedule, including Julie Kegels, Hodakova, Vaquera, Matières Fécale and Niccolò Pasqualetti.

Bill Prince, editor-in-chief

A rare standing ovation greeted the conclusion of Véronique Nichanian’s autumn-winter 2026/27 menswear show at Hermès last weekend – a fitting tribute to her 38 years leading the house’s men’s offer. The moment was capped by a showreel of her work over the years and a performance by one of her favourite artists, Paul Weller. It was a privilege to be present and witness the passing of the baton to Grace Wales Bonner, who shows next year. In the meantime, we bathed in a final walk defined, as ever, by the designer’s precision and elegance – a tutorial in contemporary tailoring that came with more than a flash of Véronique’s rock ’n’ roll spirit, with its inclusion of blush shearlings and high-shine crocodile suiting.

Modernism on the move

Ellie Stathaki, architecture & environment director

This week involved a bit of travel at the architecture desk. First, I visited Villa Beer, the newly reopened Viennese modernist classic by Joseph Frank and Oskar Wlach. What a treat it was to explore this rare 20th-century gem (as well as pay a visit to Hermann Czech’s beautiful miniature icon, the Kleines Café in central Vienna, where I bumped into none other than Mr Czech himself).

On Wednesday, meanwhile, I hopped on a preview tour of the upcoming Kanal-Centre Pompidou in Brussels. The Belgian capital has seen nothing like it – until November 2026, that is – when this significant (40,000 sq m) cultural destination will open, complete with an architecture centre, art galleries, public plazas, hospitality offerings and a playground by Assemble. Set in a former Citroën factory and showroom from the early 20th century, the building has been reimagined by a trio of collaborators: EM2N, noAarchitecten and Sergison Bates architects.

The project is nothing if not ambitious, and its authors are passionate about becoming an active and inclusive presence in the city’s urban realm. 'We are creating a museum where the centre of gravity won’t be the exhibitions,' said its managing director, Yves Goldstein, at a press conference held within the structure’s advanced building site. 'It will be the public space. We want to create a public space.'

A blues-beating ritual

Tianna Williams, staff writer

After what seems to be the longest January in history, I am grateful that we are inching closer to spring. Though the cold, wet months are not for the faint of heart, I have recently been trying to shift my perspective and embrace 'the cosy'. This includes journaling, sipping warm drinks and eating pastries in weather that can only be described as grim.

Central to this is a good candle (I have been thoroughly enjoying Ashley & Co’s Tui & Kahili scented candle, as well as their Coffee Date lip balm), your favourite mug (I love Nkuku), and blank pages on which to jot down your thoughts.

A world of craft

Anna Solomon, digital staff writer

A trip to Paris Design Week a couple of weeks ago yielded many beautiful destinations, but one stop has lingered: Astier de Villatte. Located on the Rue Saint-Honoré, just behind the Jardin des Tuileries, the boutique is an enchanting space devoted to ceramics, perfume and books. Astier de Villatte feels suspended in time, its old-world interior a higgledy-piggledy assemblage of objects that wouldn’t feel out of place on Diagon Alley.

The brand’s world also encompasses a letterpress printing atelier in l’Haÿ-les-Roses – one of the last in the world still printing books using lead – a publishing house and a perfume workshop. Founders Benoît Astier de Villatte and Ivan Pericoli have built its reputation almost entirely through word of mouth – relying on people who, like me, are so charmed by this shrine to craft and tradition that they can’t help but pass the story on.

A Portobello pit stop

Jamilah Rose-Roberts, social media editor

Last week, while wandering through Portobello in search of secondhand books and old cameras, the need to eat crept in slowly. Portobello has a way of doing that through all the walking and browsing. What I was craving was breakfast that felt solid and well made – somewhere I could sit, eat properly and carry on with the day.

Almost by accident, I stumbled upon Cleanse Juice Bar and Kitchen, a health café tucked neatly on the vibrant street, offering everything I was craving. The space is light-filled and unfussy, and the food leans into organic, fresh, carefully prepared ingredients.

Breakfast here feels super restorative. Vibrant bowls layered with seasonal fruit, grains and seeds arrive looking alive, with flavours that are clean and well balanced. The juices taste purposeful rather than sweetened – each one clearly built with care for the body. There is a sense that ingredients matter, that provenance is part of the pleasure. I recommend their Moroccan tea, which is delicious.

In a neighbourhood overflowing with choice, Cleanse Juice Bar and Kitchen feels dependable and consistent. If you are nearby and want a good breakfast, coffee, or buildable bowl, stop in – it is well worth it.

Still, a number of collections may have slipped under the radar – particularly from brands that chose to unveil their new collections off the official calendar, or via lookbook rather than a show. Here, we highlight the best collections you might have missed from the A/W 2026 menswear season.

JW Anderson

What links pop queen Kylie Minogue, fashion editor Tim Blanks, screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes (Challengers, Queer) and creative director Mark Kalman? They are all, apparently, friends of Jonathan Anderson. It's no secret that the Irish designer has been incredibly busy over the past year with his landmark appointment as Dior’s new creative director – he is the first to oversee menswear, womenswear and haute couture – so runways at his eponymous brand have paused for now. Instead, Anderson has cleverly leaned into his rich visual world through imagery, tapping up a ‘close-knit circle of friends, long-time collaborators, and acquaintances‘ to star in playful lookbooks.

The latest of these was released last week, its series of impulsive portraits by Heikki Kaski comprising perfect internet fodder, seeing the unlikely crew of creatives pose in Anderson’s A/W 2026 designs, laughing and climbing out of baskets. The collection itself is typically witty and idiosyncratic – from a tote bag reading ‘Porn’ to motifs of cars and botanics – with several pieces riffing on previous greatest hits. Or, in the brand’s words, ‘the deranged, twisted classics JW Anderson stands for’.

Wales Bonner

Grace Wales Bonner has long favoured a beautiful shoot over a runway, though she did make an exception last season, staging a special Paris presentation to mark ten years of her brand. Titled ‘Jewel’, it explored the figure of the Black dandy through an eclectic, emotionally charged wardrobe rooted in British sartorial traditions – essentially, the language that has defined a decade of her celebrated work.

Released this week, a new series of serene visuals shot by Malick Bodian sees her return to an image-first format. Set within sun-strewn modernist buildings, the collection takes cues from the ‘elemental simplicity’ of modernist architect Balkrishna Doshi. Always balancing the ‘practical and the sensual’, the collection also channels the meditative rhythms of ragas (spiritually charged Indian compositions designed to evoke particular moods and moments of day), specifically those written for the morning. Alongside fresh iterations of her ongoing Adidas collaboration, the clothes this season move fluidly between cultural touchpoints – Bengal-stripe shirting and fine merino knits made with John Smedley, brooches of panga panga wood crafted in Botswana by Beullah Serema and Peter Mabeo, and indigo linen tuxedos from Savile Row.

Using modernist design as a framework to share ‘optimism across cultures’, the collection is ultimately one of ease – something Wales Bonner may very well be seeking in the lead-up to her anticipated debut as Hermès’ new men’s creative director, which the designer has over a year to prepare for (indeed, as the morning raga reminds its listener, there’s no need to rush).

Our Legacy

Leaning into the brand’s less-is-more Scandinavian genre of cool, Our Legacy’s latest collection is dryly titled ‘Just Clothes’. The brand has long avoided the circus of fashion week and, as it does every season, has elected to unveil the new offering through a series of sharp, studio-shot images. Subtly reworking the staples that have made Our Legacy a global cult, the design team started by asking themselves, ‘What makes a pure garment?’ Removing the fizz of trends, their answer is meticulously refined uniform that can be layered and reconfigured in manifold ways: clean-cut outerwear, insulating bomber jackets, elevated denim, workwear-inflected shirting, timeless knits and leather goods embellished with the brand’s ubiquitous silver hardware. In a statement released alongside the visuals, Our Legacy describes it as ‘a necessary retreat from fashion’s ever-amplifying noise’.

Av Vattev

The fluid dress codes of British rock stars – from Mick Jagger’s romantic pirate shirts to Roxy Music’s eclectic tailoring – have fed the moodboards of Italian-born designer Antonio Vattev since he founded his namesake brand in 2018. Since then, he has not only built a cult following but dressed a new generation of pop icons, including creating tour looks for Charli XCX and Troye Sivan in 2024. This season, though, he looked from music to dance, and the figure of Soviet-born ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, who defected to the West in 1961. Vattev drew on the dancer’s ‘liberation, sensuality, and understated chic’ both on and off the stage (his rehearsal wear inspired wrapped polos and beanie hats with the lace-up closure inspired by his viral ‘Viper’ cardigan). New for this season was a greater focus on craft: a newly developed ‘python’ textile was crafted from leather petals, each one hand-applied in a process taking hours of work. The starting point for the unique textile was an appearance by Nureyev on The Dick Cavett Show, wearing a python-pattened outfit.

Kartik Research

Marking his sophomore show on the Paris Fashion Week calendar, New York–based designer Kartik Kumra presented his latest collection for Kartik Research in a stately Paris hôtel particulier. Twisting a couturier’s salon-style display through a South Asian lens, seats were wrapped in Kantha fabric and rooms lined with handmade Jaipur rugs, while Kartik’s signature neroli scent filled the space. The collection looked to the refined dress codes of Ahmedabad in the 1970s, a city known as a site of artistic gathering in India. Handwoven textiles – some ornately embroidered, others expressively patchworked – formed silhouettes that merged traditional dress with Western tailoring. Rather than elaborate on the dreamlike narratives of the clothes themselves, the designer used the show notes to address the realities of trade in India at the present moment.

‘The US administration’s decision to impose a 50 per cent tariff on India a few months ago has rippled through the ecosystem in ways that are both abstract and brutally specific,’ he said. ‘We have the relative privilege of being a brand. We can follow the money, shift focus, and try to sell more in Asia to cushion a slowdown in the US. But these are fabric vendors, embroiderers, loom artists, dyers. Their access is narrow, their margins thinner […] Sitting with this reality has crystallised something for me. We need to build something back home with its own gravity. Something not permanently tethered to Western demand cycles, policy swings, or distant administrations. Something that pulls people in rather than constantly reaching out.’

For the runway highlights of men's fashion month A/W 2026, see our reports from Paris, Milan and Pitti Uomo.

As for the rest of the week, there was a mixture of new beginnings and momentous goodbyes. Joining the calendar for the first time was Bologna-based Magliano, who presented his Paris debut among mainstays Rick Owens, Comme des Garçons, Dries Van Noten, Issey Miyake and Sacai. Closing out the week was a swan song collection from Véronique Nichanian on Saturday evening (24 January), rounding out a 38-year tenure at the helm of Hermès’ men’s universe. She will be succeeded by British designer Grace Wales Bonner, who will present her debut for the heritage Parisian house in January next year.

Wooyoungmi

The Wooyoungmi showspace was covered in a fine layer of faux fur, giving the illusion that you were stepping onto freshly powdered snow. This season, Madame Woo began by thinking about dressing for the icy depths of winter (‘South Korean winters are cold,’ she prefaced) in a time-travelling collection which saw Edwardian double-breasted tailcoats and waistcoats edged with faux astrakhan meet more contemporary cold-weather attire, from puffer jackets lined in faux fur to elongated windbreakers. In part, Madame Woo drew inspiration from the opening of the Gyeongin railway in her native Korea, seeking to capture the magic of turn-of-the-century travel, ‘when [it] was something you dressed for, even in the freezing cold’. Here, dressing up had a playful bent: enormous beanie hats in chunky knits or faux fur teetered on models’ heads, while flashes of bold colour ran throughout. It made for a collection of satisfying juxtapositions, between modernity and tradition, function and play. JM

Hermès

Though Paris Fashion Week Men’s officially concludes this afternoon, yesterday evening’s Hermès show felt like the season’s final act. Indeed, for Véronique Nichanian, artistic director of Hermès’ men’s universe, it was to be her swan song: the concluding collection of an extraordinary 38-year-tenure at the Parisian house, one which allowed her to claim the title of the longest-working creative director of a major fashion house.

Not that Nichanian is one to dwell too long on the past. Staged at Palais Brongniart, which Napoleon I commissioned to house the Paris Stock Exchange, the designer took one last chance to hone her vision for the Parisian house’s menswear – one of timelessness and ease, whereby making a garment a pleasure to wear was paramount (silhouettes would evolve through the movement of a centimetre of fabric, while the materials which made up her collections were the result of endless experimentation and play).

Here, she once again looked towards menswear archetypes – the blouson, the parka, the peacoat and the double-breasted suit all featured in the collection – drawing on past collections to instil them with her signature ease. Fabrics, were, as ever, superlative: fluffy shearling and calf skin ran throughout, while high-shine crocodile, technical satin and a featherweight wool and silk faille added flair. ‘Everything fits together, but everything is mobile, alive, enduring, seamlessly, continuously, through a season made for a lifetime,’ she said via the collection notes.

The show closed with Nichanian taking a final lap of the runway, as the assembled guests rose to their feet for a minutes-long ovation. It was well-deserved: she is a testament that success can be achieved by pursuing pleasure and perfection over ephemeral trends. Backstage, she was asked for what advice she would give to her fellow designers. She smiled and said, ‘to slow down’. JM

READ: Inside Véronique Nichanian’s swan song runway show for Hermès

Kiko Kostadinov

There was a feeling of clarity to Kiko Kostadinov’s latest runway show, staged on the sunlit upper floor of the Grand Plateau – a former university in Paris’ 5th arrondissement – on Saturday morning. Scattered around the space were a series of Oscar Tuazon’s white-box sculptures, which Kostadinov described as ‘minimal, architectural forms’, though they also had an intriguing strangeness. What are they? What are they for? And what’s inside?

The same could be said of Kostadinov’s A/W 2026 outing: on their surface, these were clothes with a sense of uniform and simplicity (a feeling compounded in the largely monochrome looks), though – as with much of the Bulgaria-born, London-based designer’s oeuvre – beneath their surface was an intriguing use of pattern cutting to distort familiar menswear forms. ‘It is a return to the primary language of construction and material,’ he said. ‘The collection builds through sequential variation, developing fundamental cuts and silhouettes that are gradually adapted and evolved.’

This was largely achieved through a tension in the garments between a feeling of precision – sliced necklines, clean, uniform-inspired jackets, neat toggles and fastenings – and an impulse towards drapery and volume. The latter was explored in the collection’s brilliant closing looks: a series of tabard-style sweaters in vivid coloured stripes, whereby the hemline was pulled by the model all the way up and over the shoulder. With garments like these, Kostadinov said he designed them to be worn in a multitude of ways. ‘This is a collection that is happy being challenging, with an emphasis on producing clothes that actually bring something new to a wardrobe,’ he said. Jack Moss

Comme des Garçons Homme Plus

Rei Kawakubo titled her latest Comme des Garçons Homme Plus collection ‘Black Hole’, one of the small bits of information that the designer offers each season about her arcane thinking process (she instead challenges those who attend her shows to draw their own conclusions). ‘Let’s get out of the black hole,’ she elaborated, suggesting that this was her attempt to pull us out of the darkness and into the light (the finale saw models assemble on the runway en masse in all-white clothing, bolstering this tentatively hopeful mood). The visual leitmotif of this collection was a series of masks by Shin Murayama, recalling Jason Voorhees’ hockey mask from Friday the 13th (others saw Hannibal Lecter), which appeared to have been busted open to reveal models’ faces, while typically subversive tailoring had Kawakubo’s distinctive energy (silhouettes were sliced away to reveal the midriff or flared just above the waistline; others bloomed with ruffles, or patchworked with panels of black sequins). As ever, this was a pitch from Kawakubo for liberation through clothing – indeed, as one motif scrawled on the collection read, ‘my energy comes from freedom’. Long may that last. Jack Moss

Willy Chavarria

Part of the reason that American designer Willy Chavarria shifted his seasonal runway show from New York to Paris was to ‘reach more people’, he told Wallpaper* last year. ‘Moving the show to Paris as such an American brand was about having a global message – a message of humanity that’s about people in all countries,’ he said at the time. Yesterday afternoon at a vast judo dojo on the edge of Paris – marking his third runway show in the city – he made his loudest statement yet, staging an all-singing, all-dancing musical spectacular in front of 2000 guests (a large number had been invited from influencer Lyas’ ‘La Watch Party’, an initiative which invites the public to watch live-streamed runway shows in a series of community screenings; here, in a suprise gesture, they got to attend the real event).

Unfolding under a vast screen reminiscent of those at a rock concert – the designer’s name scrolled across at the show’s start – the floor had been transformed into a reimagining of a New York City intersection, complete with a gleaming Cadillac, phone boxes and bus stops, on which a cast of characters enacted a tale of love, loss and high drama. They included the Chilean-Mexican singer Mon Laferte and Puerto Rican performer Lunay as a pair of star-crossed lovers; boy band Santos Bravos, who bounded around the stage in unison, and the Italian singer-songwriter Mahmood. On the runway, a cast of over 100 models – including Julia Fox, Romeo Beckham and Goldie – walked alongside.

While the clothes occasionally came second to the spectacle, Chavarria’s design vernacular remains distinct: namely, riffs on working uniforms and sportswear, inspired by his adopted home city of New York (Chavarria was born to an Irish-American mother and Mexican-American father in Fresno, California; his collections also draw on his heritage and upbringing). The show was presented in three sections – Big Willy, a see-now-buy-now line with a streetwear focus; an Adidas collab (this season, football was an inspiration); and his eponymous Willy Chavarria – with the latter capturing a nostalgic elegance in 1950s-inflected tailoring and ladylike gowns, calling on the silhouettes of mid-century haute couture.

At the end of the show, the entire cast returned to the stage – including Chavarria himself, who wore a T-shirt that read ‘Protection is Love’. The applause was, unsurprisingly, rapturous. ‘The connection between us is powerful. We are in this together,’ he said. ‘All of us.’ Jack Moss

Junya Watanabe MAN

Presented yesterday morning in a shadowy set space lined with cafe tables, Junya Watanabe’s latest collection for his namesake label continued the legendary designer’s fascination with crafting clothes that expand the imagination. In recent seasons, this has taken the form of extrapolating garments from their original purpose to create something entirely new, often with fantastical effect. Last September, he went so far as to pile red high heels onto models’ shoulders.

Yesterday morning, however, Watanabe’s deconstructive motifs took on subtler cues. A series of impeccably dressed men, some wearing top hats, emerged from the darkness in tailored looks crafted from a mishmash of lustrous and everyday materials. The effect was a surreal Magritte-meets-Dickens elegance, with tuxedo jackets assembled from latticed leather and classic wool coats patchworked with plaid shirting. Formality was offset by a collaboration with Stüssy, which saw the skate brand’s insignia sprayed across the backs of suits and puffer jacket hoods spliced onto pinstriped tailoring. Transportive and original, he titled it ‘The Best, Dressed’. Orla Brennan

IM Men

The vaulted nave of Collège des Bernardins, a 13th-century Cistercian school, provided an atmospheric backdrop for IM Men’s third show in Paris, which was titled ‘Formless Forms’ (the Issey Miyake brand replaced Issey Miyake Homme Plissé on the schedule). Designers Sen Kawahara, Yuki Itakura and Nobutaka Kobayashi said that this season they were imagining those moments at the ‘seam of a day’, dawn and dusk, moving from the opening looks in black and white towards a kaleidoscopic finale (a section in optic white was interspersed between). ‘Moments when something begins, and when something ends,’ they elaborated.

But, as the collection’s title suggested, this was at heart a show about form: the endless possibilities of a singular piece of cloth has long been at the heart of the Issey Miyake project. The collection’s expressive silhouettes – largely cut generously, and wrapping around the body, like the scarf-inspired looks towards the end of the show – were developed through endless fabric experimentation. Like the pieces they called ‘Clay’ (presumably for the material’s malleable quality), a heat-treated ribbed knit, which allowed the team to create sculptural silhouettes around the body that would not have been able to be achieved in flat pattern-making.

Other pieces were cleverly padded – life-raft-style or crafted from Kasuri-woven fabric, where yarns are pre-dyed to make intriguing patterns once on the loom. If the processes behind each garment were complicated, the result was anything but: these were clothes which appeared to have been made with the simplest of gestures – ‘formless forms’, appearing like magic from the darkness. Jack Moss

Rick Owens

Rick Owens has never shied away from a little controversy, but this season he initially felt some hesitation around the dominant theme of his new collection – military uniforms – given the state of global current affairs. Carrying on nevertheless, the designer chose to travel down a road of ‘parody’. In a steam-filled room within the Palais de Tokyo, where the American designer has shown for over ten years, Owens’ army of goth warriors emerged through the smoke in a series of looks that twisted combat uniforms through his unmistakable codes. Silhouettes were armour-like and structured or sinuously body-hugging, crafted from protective glossy black bull leather and kevlar – a fibre used in modern combat wear that is stronger than steel – and worn with ‘grotesquely’ bloated police boots. Designed to be protective and adjustable, such as leather vests worn under detachable sleeves, these were clothes fit for battle.

Beneath the intimidating allure of Owens’ glam rock gods was the work of a global community of craftspeople. Transformable outerwear was cut from waxy cowhides tanned in Japan and made in a specialist atelier in Atsugi, performance fabrics were sourced from a third-generation Italian mill, tough insulating cabas were felted in a small workshop in Rajasthan, while shaggy shearlings and goat hides were crafted in collaboration with London designer Straytukay. And, if the gothic storylines of Owens’ world have earned him the moniker of fashion’s Prince of Darkness, his genius has always been in his balance of sentiments, always offsetting intellectual depth and beauty with humour and a touch of sleaze. Choosing to title the collection Tower – a continuation of sorts of his ‘Temple of Love’ display in Paris last season – yesterday’s display was a particularly sharp example of exactly that. It was, he said, ultimately ‘a prayer for love and hope.’ Orla Brennan

Amiri

Los Angeles native Mike Amiri has shown his collections in Paris since 2018, but this season he decided to bring a bit of the Californian hospitality he grew up with to the French capital. He invited guests to the covered market Carreau du Temple in the 3rd, where the designer had recreated a Laurel Canyon home he described as ‘a luxurious den’ complete with a careworn curation of furniture and objects. The clothes this season were also close to home, drawing upon a lexicon of West Coast influences that are close to the brand – shifting eras of music culture, the Golden Age of cinema, and the louche glamour of the art scene that settled in the city during the 1970s. Expressed in an earthy palette of burgundies, brown and teals, the overall mood was one of superstar sensuality – sinuous sheer gowns followed by nostalgic tailoring worn over barely buttoned up shirts, biker-inflected second skin leather and all-American denim worn with Western accessories and embellished knits. These were, said the designer, ‘clothes that feel like an extension of who you are,’ adding that this collection was a particularly special one, straight from ‘our reality, our heart, our home.’ Orla Brennan

Dior

Jonathan Anderson’s second menswear show for Dior began with the British designer noticing a blue plaque for the French couturier Paul Poiret on Avenue Montaigne, just outside of Dior’s spiritual home at number 30 (in 1946, Christian Dior founded the house in a four-storey hotel hôtel particulier on the street; it remains the home of the house’s haute couture atelier today). Poiret, who began his career in 1898 but would rise to prominence in the 1910s, was known for a fluid, uncorseted line, vivid fabrications and theatrical flourishes, often borrowing from world culture (such was his influence on Belle Époque fashion, he went by the nickname ‘Le Magnifique’). Having acquired a Poiret gown, Anderson fantasised about how this would look clashed with the codes of Dior: in the opening looks, Anderson presented a series of vest tops in sequinned silk, as if that gown had been sliced away at the waist, with skinny jeans (thanks to Hedi Slimane’s Dior Homme, these are part of the house’s menswear lexicon).

What followed was a collection of vivid experimentation, a continuation of his exploration of codes of ‘history and affluence’ that began in his debut, imagining a gang of ‘aristo-youths’ dashing down a Parisian street (a short film released before the show by Jessica Madavo showed just this). So there were ultra-shrunken riffs on the Bar jacket in tweed and denim; cotton polo shirts adorned with crystal epaulettes; while jackets with enormous ‘fur’ cuffs, shimmering sweaters and undone dinner suits suggested a mood of dressing up (Poiret was well-known for his fancy dress parties; bright yellow wigs added to the liberated mood). ‘For me, fashion shows are about showing ideas,’ Anderson said of the collection, which was happily without inhibitions. ‘I don’t want normality.’ Jack Moss

Lemaire

It's true that runway shows have lost much of the exuberance of decades past, which makes it all the more refreshing when a brand brings a bit of theatre back to fashion week. Inviting guests to the imposing modern opera house Opéra Bastille in Paris’s 12th arrondissement, yesterday afternoon Christophe Lemaire and his co-artistic director Sarah-Linh Tran did exactly that. The pair enlisted choreographer Nathalie Béasse to stage a piece titled ‘mine eyes’, which imagined a Fantasia-esque world where domestic objects have ‘souls’ and fabrics and colours are able to ‘speak’.

Moving through the space, some holding chairs, models brought this tableau to life dressed in looks that pushed Lemaire’s sharp codes – artful pleats, asymmetrical draping and billowing tailoring – to expressive new realms. An attention to fabrication was particularly strong this season, with ideas of illusion explored through materials that played tricks on the eye; crushed velvet that looked metallic, lacquered denim with a leather-like sheen, and coated cotton resembling dry silk. Shapeshifting took on a more literal meaning in hybrid pieces, such as quilted silk skirts that double up as capes or blankets, and the brand’s ubiquitous asymmetrical draped dresses cut in colour block dual tones. Men, meanwhile, were dressed in a wardrobe of a largely Western mood, where bootcut tailoring was layered with deerskin-style outerwear and leather boots (although a few pieces seemed to look to the east, such as mandarin jackets in supple calfskin leather.)

Continuing a surreal theme, French illustrator Roland Topor’s dark dream worlds inspired accessories, with leather bags that loosely took on the shape of buttocks and seashells. Layering so many ideas in a single collection is a gamble, but with Lemaire and Tran’s discerning execution it worked, making for one of the most memorable displays the pair have produced in some seasons. Orla Brennan

Louis Vuitton

Pharrell Williams’ latest menswear collection for Louis Vuitton was one of sartorial trickery. He called it ‘timeless’, and it was certainly rooted in the canon of menswear classics – double-breasted tailoring, gentlemanly overcoats, Harrington jackets, cableknit sweaters all featured. But, thanks to the Wonka-lik wizadry of the house of Vuitton, these were transformed through futuristic fabrications developed by the house’s atelier (in Williams’ words: ‘a wardrobe structured from lasting forms elevated through the artisanal and scientific ingenuity of Louis Vuitton’). So there were jackets that appeared to be constructed from houndstooth or herringbone tweeds, but were actually a light-reflecting technical yarn (a use of trompe l’oeil ran throughout); silk and chambray jackets with in-built thermoregulatory technology; jackets applied with crystals to appear as if the wearer had been caught in a rain shower; or simply a T-shirt crafted not from simple cotton but ultra-soft vicuña.

Williams also used the occasion to reveal Drophaus, a prefabricated home in wood and glass that sat in the centre of the showspace. Described as a ‘future living concept’, it was made in collaboration with Shinji Hamauzu’s Tokyo-based company Not a Hotel, which has created a series of architect-led vacation homes across Japan. It was another attempt to create something timeless: ‘Drophaus is my vision of the future – something that makes sense today or 20 years from now because it’s built on function, savoir-faire and real human need,’ Williams told Wallpaper*. ‘I’m not an architect. I’m a solution builder.’ Jack Moss

READ: At Louis Vuitton, Pharrell Williams reveals ‘future living concept’ designed in collaboration with Not a Hotel

Auralee

With the festivities of December a distant memory and days as short as they are bracingly cold, January can feel like a spiritual affront. Last night in Paris (20 January), a day after ‘Blue Monday’ – the most depressing day of the year – one of the menswear calendar’s most sensitive designers, Ryota Iwai of Auralee, presented an affirming shot of life amid the gloom. Asking simply ‘What makes winter joyful?’, the collection found its starting point in moments of luminosity and seasonal calm, such as the feeling of crisp morning air on the skin or the delicate way that winter sun filters through cloud lines.

In practice, this resulted in a resolutely wearable co-ed collection, crafted with a deft elegance that has long been Auralee’s DNA (last year the brand celebrated a decade of business). Seeking ease in roomy shapes, the show opened with a series of looks that played with contrasting textures of comfort – reassuring deep piles of shearling hidden inside outerwear and warming textiles of nep yarn, tweed, and cashmere, which became wrap skirts edged with fringe that resembled classic scarves. Several looks harnessed the ease of throwing on a perfect pair of jeans on a winter Sunday, while lightness came in graceful silk georgette dresses and barely-there technical layers that mixed neutral tones with shocks of primary blue, yellow, and red. Ending with a series of sturdy, dark looks of timeless chic – an enveloping midnight-black duffle coat, a simple grey merino wool set – it was, as intended, a bid for joy in deepest, darkest winter. Orla Brennan

For more updates, read our live blog from Paris Fashion Week A/W Men’s 2026, where we’re covering everything from presentations to parties.

The building is a collaboration with Shinji Hamauzu’s Tokyo-based Not a Hotel, a company that has created a series of vacation homes across Japan, which are architect-designed and sold by fractional ownership, rather than the typical renting of rooms (‘it was important to signify that we were completely different from your regular hotel,’ Hamauzu told Wallpaper* when he was awarded a 2023 Design Award for the project). In February 2025, Williams and his close collaborator Nigo were announced as ‘investors and creative advisors’ for the company, with several projects in the works.

The building itself is titled ‘Drophaus’, named for the way it finds inspiration in a droplet of water. Compressed glass walls mimic a water drop; the effect, says Williams, is that the lines between the home and the garden are blurred (in the show set, it was surrounded by Japanese-style terraces and long grasses). He says that the living space is one of an ‘outsider’s design mindset’, which is about ‘reimagining disciplines around feeling, function and cultural relevance’.

‘I grew up around water, I’m drawn to it, I build and create my best work close to it. Drophaus is based on a water drop, so if you stand back and take the roof and the ceiling off, it’s just a drop,’ Williams tells Wallpaper*. ‘If I can’t live in water, this is the closest thing. Drophaus is my vision of the future – something that makes sense today or 20 years from now because it’s built on function, savoir-faire and real human need. I’m not an architect. I’m a solution builder.’

True to this multidisciplinary approach, Drophaus also features ‘Homework’, a new furniture series whereby each object has ‘ten per cent imperfection’ – whether in their irregular forms or undulating textured surfaces. Williams says he designed them to emphasise this as a place for living: reflecting this, the invite for the show was a pair of leather slippers imprinted with the show’s date. And, at the start of the show, a trio of models explored the home, before walking the grass-covered runway.

Scored by a live choir, the collection explored themes of timelessness: Williams said that these were pieces designed to ‘endure rather than expire’. This was largely done through fabrication: menswear archetypes – from the trench coat and the double-breasted suit to classic workwear – were reimagined through experiments in material, from ‘houndstooth’ and ‘herringbone’ that were actually reflective technical yarns to crystal embroidery designed to evoke droplets of water.

louisvuitton.com

Follow along with our Paris Fashion Week live blog for more updates.

Welcome to Paris Fashion Week Men’s A/W 2026

Paris marks the closing leg of menswear month, though we are far from its conclusion: over six busy days, it will provide perhaps our most definitive view of the A/W 2026 season ahead. Shows from the likes of Dior (where Jonathan Anderson will reveal his sophomore menswear collection for the house), Louis Vuitton (expect the spectacular from Pharrell Williams) and Hermès (where Véronique Nichanian will hold her swansong after 37 years), will set the tone for what’s next in menswear.

Elsewhere, expect a roster of thought-provoking – and likely experimental – collections from Comme des Garçons, Rick Owens, Junya Watanabe and Yohji Yamamoto, who represent the week’s avant-garde. We are also excited to see the return of New York-based designer Willy Chavarria – part of the Wallpaper* USA 400 in 2025 – and the arrival of Magliano, the eponymous label of Luca Magliano, who draws on his native Bologna’s history of protest and subculture in his provocative collections (he has shifted from Milan this season).

Add to that a line-up of presentations, parties and openings, and we look set for a busy six days ahead. As ever, the Wallpaper* editors will be on the ground – stay tuned here for a first look at the standout moments of Paris Fashion Week Men’s.

January 21, 2026 – 8:03 AM

Acne Studios celebrates 30 years with a love letter to denim

Launched in Stockholm in 1996 with 100 pairs of raw denim jeans, Acne Studios has managed to maintain a youthful heart through three decades of business. At the turn of such a milestone, its core identity has been on the mind of founder Jonny Johansson, though the designer has cleverly resisted getting too nostalgic. Instead, his A/W 2026 collection – presented with an intimate display at the brand’s Paris headquarters this morning – asked how young men today want to dress and move through the world.

The collection revisited the straight-legged denim staples that made Acne Studios a global force, reimagining them through the lens of a younger generation through ripping and taping motifs that symbolise a subversion of the past. Mixed in with these denim pieces, vintage-inspired tailoring celebrated the ageless ceremony of dressing up, seen through double-breasted blazers and slender and precise wool outerwear – shapes that never go out of style. ‘Heading into 2026, I began thinking about these last 30 years,’ Johansson said in a statement released with the collection. ‘You start off as the young brand; then suddenly, you have a legacy. Ours has formed from exploring the soul of denim and what this means to us. Denim has an eternally youthful identity, while being worn in such a way that its surface speaks to lived experience.’ OB

January 22, 2026 – 6:42 AM

At Solid Homme, a study of the modern man’s alter egos

Like many of Paris’ historic buildings, the Maison des Métallos has gone through several identity changes through the eras – it was once a musical instrument factory, then a metalworkers union, and now stands as a performing arts centre. The building’s layered past made it the perfect stage for Korean designer Madame Woo’s latest Solid Homme collection, which explored the multiple identities worn by the modern man. Presenting a study of several complex characters, the collection included a barista who codes through the night, an accountant who builds furniture after hours, and a creative director who returns home to be a dad. Looks themselves were vibrantly hued – bright primary shades, colour block pastels and deep neutrals – while styling shuffled up smart and casual garments to create a series of impulsively arranged looks. It was, said the brand, ‘one wardrobe’ made for ‘many lives’. OB

January 23, 2026 – 8:38 AM

A closer look at Jonathan Anderson’s latest Dior collection

Today in Paris, a re-see at Dior’s HQ allowed editors to look at Jonathan Anderson’s latest men’s collection up close. Using tales of couturier Paul Poiret’s infamous dinner parties as a starting point – where Paris’ young artists would play dress up during La Belle Époque – the Irish designer crafted yet another deeply referenced and texturally eclectic collection for the French maison, which was revealed on Wednesday. As always with Anderson, details were where the magic lied – neatly pleated stiff white collars, brass belts in the shapes of antique mirror frames, shearling cuffs exploding from formal tailored coats, and prince-like bejewelled epaulettes on the shoulders of casual plaid shirts. OB

January 24, 2026 – 11:16 AM

A close look at Celine’s latest menswear collection

In place of a runway show this season, American designer Michael Rider presented his latest collection for Celine in the house’s headquarters on Rue Vivienne (from the windows of the presentation space you could see the atelier below; the idea was to feel like you were walking into an impromptu fitting above). Buoyed by Celine-branded sandwiches and popcorn, guests explored the collection via a series of playful milieus, from enormous stacks of jeans and sweaters to a snake-like swirl of shoes (arranged, satisfyingly, in colour order), while looks from the collection hung on walls. Like his previous outings for the house (he debuted earlier this year, in June), it is a vision of Parisian style through an American’s eyes, mixing insouciant French glamour with moments of preppiness (for the latter, cue college sweaters, colourful silk ties and shirts, slippers and loafers). The result was something totally fresh and desirable – we wanted every piece. JM

‘I have read some really heinous comments about the work of many designers in these last few days,’ said Edward Buchanan, former design director of Bottega Veneta and the Milan Fashion Director for Perfect magazine, in a much-reshared Instagram post. ‘I am a designer and I know that these creatives work hard to get these collections out. It is not always perfect, and it is not always what you personally imagined it to be. You don’t have to like everything... Why not celebrate and talk about what you love?’

Fashion week S/S 2026: the key takeaways

It was why the finale of Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel debut on Monday evening felt joyful not only for the model Awar Odhiang twirling across the runway to the sounds of ‘Rhythm is a Dancer’ in a gown that descended into thousands of colourful chiffon feathers, but the fact that a weight felt like it had been lifted. Save for a handful of exceptions (Fendi is yet to announce its new creative leadership), that final debut meant that the line-up of designers at fashion’s major houses is set, and likely for some time – no more speculation or gossip, hearsay or rumour. Now, after their opening gambits, these designers must be left to hone their vision – after all, a debut is only the beginning.

Despite this, it has been a strong season of shows, with plenty of big, bold ideas sitting alongside propositions for a real-world wardrobe. There is no doubt that this new class of designers have brought with them a fresh energy: thematically, the idea of freedom emerged again and again, of dressing on your own terms. It's why this season’s trends feel equally liberated – designers gave into romance (albeit rewritten in distinctly modern terms), were unrestrained in their use of colour, and created distinctive silhouettes to match (from the ultra-streamlined to the panniered).

Here, we break down the trends and takeaways from the S/S 2026 shows, which concluded earlier this week in Paris.

The idea of freedom was on designer’s minds

A feeling of eclecticism has run through recent Prada collections, seeing co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons favour the bold and intuitive over strict thematics – a response, they say, to the uncertain, algorithmic times in which we live. This season, they talked about wanting to liberate clothing from ‘hierarchies’, shuffling simple workwear uniforms – a longtime Prada inspiration point – with colourful flourishes of eveningwear, from ballooning taffeta skirts to opera gloves. The result, said the pair, was a ‘new elegance’ – unconventional, instinctual, free. ‘In the combination of the different elements, in this idea of composition, there is a choice and freedom, authority and agency for the woman wearing them,’ said Mrs Prada. ‘It is fashion that is connected inherently to the world, with a meaning and usefulness. How to face the world, and how to survive.’

Again and again, the idea of sartorial freedom appeared in this season’s collections: at Ferragamo, Maximilian Davis channelled the liberatory dress codes of the 1920s (‘this was a moment where women were creating a new femininity... it was a celebration of freedom, a reclaiming of self’) while at Bottega Veneta, Louise Trotter’s debut collection looked towards Laura Braggion, Bottega Veneta’s first female creative lead, in its expressive use of colour and texture (as young woman, she was a part of Andy Warhol’s Factory). ‘I was imagining her journey – her freedom of being an Italian woman, an archetypal Italian woman, moving to New York,’ she said post-show. ‘It was a liberation for her. And that's really what I wanted to capture – a feeling of liberation.’

A similar mood was struck at Chanel (Matthieu Blazy was inspired by the ‘modernity and freedom’ of Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel’s designs), Loewe (the collection’s bold, graphic line drew on the work of artist Ellsworth Kelly) and Hermès (titled ’Free Rein’, Nadège Vanhée referenced the untethered wild horses of Carmague). Through it all, there was an invitation to dress on your own terms, and without restraint.

Kaleidoscopic colour ran throughout

With this exploration of freedom came an equally liberated use of colour, as designers embraced bold, unapologetic hues in what was the most colourful fashion season in some time – a response, perhaps, to the feeling of bleakness elsewhere. This was a trend not restrained to a single city: in New York, Rachel Scott made a powerful impression with a debut runway show for her label Diotima which drew on the energetic spirit of carnival – a vivid, painterly palette spanned bright red, sky blue and cerise across anemone-like ruffles and tassel flourishes – while London saw colour-saturated outings from Erdem, Talia Byre and Burberry (a hot pink whipstitched leather jacket provided the latter’s closing look, with creative director Daniel Lee looking towards the dress codes of 1960s and 70s musicians).

As the season continued, a more graphic use of colour emerged: Simone Bellotti’s debut collection for Jil Sander featured bold primary hues of red and blue throughout; when viewed against the crisp white walls of Jil Sander’s Milanese HQ, they took on the feel of contemporary artworks. At Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez’s debut for Loewe, a work by Ellsworth Kelly set the tone: hanging in the entranceway of the showspace, Yellow Panel with Red Curve (1989) inspired the ‘chromatic intensity’ of the collection (zingy hues of yellow, electric blue and orange featured throughout). Stripes also appeared in the former Proenza Schouler designers’ collection, another recurring motif through the season, like at Dries Van Noten, where Julian Klausner – already proving himself as much of a master colourist as the label’s eponymous founder – presented a vivid collage of print and colour, from bold yellow stripes to abstracted polka dots, spirals and harlequin diamonds, blown up is size.

Designers evoked the time-worn and well-loved

The idea of inheritance was unsurprisingly on the mind of Matthieu Blazy at Chanel – after all, his debut for the house sees him take on the legacy of not one but two fashion greats: Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld. Originally inspired by the love affair between Gabrielle Chanel and British polo player Boy Capel, and the way she would borrow his jackets and shirts, the idea of passing garments between people – or indeed through generations – was one of the throughlines of the collection. That, he said, is the luxury of a house like Chanel, ‘the worn familiarity of the truly chic, items feel passed down and utilised,’ as he described. In the collection, this was figured in garments which appeared to be unravelling at their edges (the hanging ‘threads’ were actually minuscule strings of beads), while the 2.55 quilted handbag had been cleverly manipulated to appear battered and worn.

Indeed, the idea of the time-worn and well-loved run through the season: at Tory Burch in New York, cardigans seemed to be disintegrating at the sleeves, while other garments were purposely crumpled and creased. ‘I wanted something familiar and worn, but uber-chic and elevated,‘ she said after the show, noting that such fabric manipulation took months of experimentation despite their illusion of ease. At Coach, garments were weathered and worn – creative director Stuart Vevers said he was inspired by seeing vintage, decades-old Coach bags carried by young people on New York’s streets – while at Loewe, some of the more washed-out hues looked to reference fabric left out too long in the sun.

There was a mood of modern romance

Taking place at the Louvre Palace, the opulent summer apartments of Anne of Austria, Queen of France provided the backdrop for Nicolas Ghesquière’s latest collection for Louis Vuitton, an attempt to capture ‘the boundless freedom of the private sphere’. In its evocation of nightwear and lingerie – as well as flourishes of beaded floral embroidery, satin ruffles and enormous bows – the era-traversing collection captured a mood of romance that ran through the season, one which was influenced by history but distinctly modern in construction and anything but saccharine.

At his debut womenswear show for Dior, Jonathan Anderson evoked the pannier waistline – another surprising trend of the season, particularly as it coincided with the opening of ‘Marie Antoinette Style’ at the V&A – as well as bows, lace necklines and shoes adorned with twisting satin roses. The Irish designer said he was interested in the ‘tension’ between fantasy and reality: ‘past converses with the present, the bold with the calm, the grand with the commonplace,’ he said. Similar juxtapositions ran through Simone Rocha’s S/S 2026 collection in London, a designer who has long contrasted sweetness and subversion. Her crinoline skirts were purposely skewiff; ruffled-edge bags were shaped like pillows, while panels of clear vinyl sat atop delicate silk gowns.

Meanwhile, at Givenchy, Sarah Burton rallied against the idea that power dressing for women means simply donning a man’s suit. Instead, she sought to find authority in the feminine, from pearl-adorned bra tops to frilled mini dresses which flared like tutus. ‘I was looking at female power,’ she said. ’And how to empower women through archetypes of the feminine, an iconography of the female.’

Bold silhouettes signalled new chapters

Like this season’s prismatic palette, designers were equally expressive when it came to shape and form: spanning the playful, the sculptural and the streamlined, silhouettes echoed the month’s liberated spirit. There were Nicholas Aburn’s bold party dresses at Area, constructed from blown-up streamers, enormous pailettes or a shaggy mass of glimmering tinsel (such was their size, they transformed the proportions of the body); Louise Trotter’s undulating fibreglass tops and dresses at Bottega Veneta; or the hiked up shoulder line of Satoshi Kondo’s latest collection for Issey Miyake (the Japanese designer said he imagined the garments having a conscious of their own).

Contemporary riffs on pannier waistlines and crinoles ran through the season, including at Alaïa, where Pieter Mulier continues to define a powerful vision of womanhood with an eye to the contours of the body. ‘This collection is reduced, sculptural. Precise. Yet there is also an extremity to it, in heightened colours, bold shapes. Uncompromising,’ he said. Perhaps most extreme, though, were the bold forms of Duran Lantink’s Jean Paul Gaultier debut – like in his collections for his (currently paused) eponymous label, garments were exaggerated into almost cartoon-like proportions, riffing on the house’s signatures, from the sailor hat to trompe l’oeil prints. They may not have been for everyone, but in their audaciousness, they captured S/S 2026’s mood of abandon.

Here, we select the best collections you might have missed from the S/S 2026 season.

Stefan Cooke

Stefan Cooke and Jake Burt have taken pleasure in doing things their own way over the past few seasons, opting to host relaxed gatherings rather than get caught up in the stress of producing runway shows. Last season, they invited friends, editors (and pets) to Burt’s east London shop, Jake’s, to try on pieces from their A/W 2025 collection. Amid jumper-swapping and chatter, an enormous cake by baker Louis Thompson provided a convivial centrepiece. This season, the pair took over Tenderbooks on Cecil Court, presenting their S/S 2026 collection with a newspaper-style lookbook and window display shot by Angus Williams. There was no cake this time, but generously filled ice buckets of beer (Thompson, however, did make an appearance as a model in the lookbook). The collection itself saw the pair’s unmistakable wardrobe take on skin-baring, thrown-together configurations – men in ecru trenches paired with tracksuit bottoms and ballet flats; women in chainmail mini-dresses and glam-rock boots, drop-waist pleats and chevron-detailed cinched jerseys. It made for an off-kilter but easy offering from two designers who somehow just get better season after season.

Lucila Safdie

Since graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2021, Argentina-born Lucila Safdie has used her brand to explore various ideas of girlhood, drawing upon the worlds of cinema, literature and Tumblr to craft clothes that skew saccharine fantasies with the wearable edge of the real women in her life. While most young designers are caught up in personal fantasies, already Safdie has grounded herself in a community – outside of the studio, she hosts a well-attended monthly film club, screening features that have inspired her world.

This season marked Safdie’s first appearance on the London Fashion Week calendar, and she used the opportunity to do something quite unusual. Inviting editors to the Soho Review gallery, the designer staged a teen bedroom scene where her models – impervious to their visitors, as teenagers so often are – lounged on beds and tried on her S/S 2026 designs in mirrors. The collection used Helen Rappaport’s book The Romanov Sisters as a starting point, translating its tragic tale into a 2010-coded wardrobe that brought together Peter Pan-collared jersey polos, frill-edged shorts and cut-out cotton dresses in girly hues of pink, white and grey. It was a clever and distinctive introduction to the designer’s world, marking the arrival of an intriguing new storyteller in the city. We’re looking forward to seeing what she does next.

16Arlington

Marco Capaldo enjoyed a season off the schedule, turning up to cheer on friends at their displays instead (the designer attended Chopova Lowena and Conner Ives in support). Presenting his S/S 2026 collection with a sleek, pared-back lookbook circulated online, this season Capaldo was thinking about an ineffable quality of glamour that stretches through decades. 1920s lingerie, 1940s sleepwear, 1970s shirting and 1990s pencil skirts formed the framework of his collection, creating points of intrigue through an assemblage of tactile textures and embellishments – from a delicate brown feather trim floating from oversized trench coats to a dress formed of glimmering strands of sequins. These were clothes, said the brand, ‘made to be worn; to be seen in movement; to be enjoyed’.

Federico Cina

Italian designer Federico Cina named his S/S 2026 collection ‘Sottovoce’ – meaning to speak in a low or hushed tone. In keeping with the word’s dulcet spirit, he chose to forgo the circus of a runway show for something quieter during Milan Fashion Week. Inviting guests to Fondazione Sozzani, the designer created a ‘silent landscape’ where models gently embraced before paper backdrops, while others interacted with the cool blue set, slipping their arms into paper jackets affixed to the walls. The clothes themselves explored ideas of fragility and structure through workwear silhouettes and crisp tailoring in a palette of blue, white and grey, inspired by the muted paintings of Bologna-born artist Giorgio Morandi. The soothing presentation, said Cina, was about pausing to contemplate what it means to ‘inhabit a place, a body, a garment, the world’.

Vaquera

Over the past decade, Patric DiCaprio and Bryn Taubensee have established Vaquera as one of the most original forces in New York’s fashion scene. As the brand turned ten, they promptly upped sticks to Paris – keen, it would seem, on retaining their underdog status. This season, they were thinking about ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste, presenting a cast of unruly, expressively dressed characters in an intimate showspace covered in draped curtains.

Proposing the idea that there’s a right place and time to wear anything, this season their typically berserk wardrobe mixed up romantic 18th century dress, square-shouldered two-piece sets of an 1980s bent, and surreal patchworked lingerie, worn with sneakers that were the product of a new collaboration with Nike – a sign of the ever-rising popularity of their witty, anti-glam aesthetic.

‘We moved to Paris this summer – iconically the centre of “good taste”,’ said the pair. ‘But what does that mean? When you start to see the world through our lens, you realise that these categories don’t exist… We are always examining why we are still doing this brand after so many years. The answer we always come back to is joy.’

Hodakova

Ellen Hodakova Larsson has hit her stride. ​​Marking her second Paris display since winning the LVMH Prize last year, the Swedish designer showed her S/S 2026 collection in the stony 1992 extension wing of the Musée Bourdelle. This season, as ever, saw a merging of stories from the designer's rural upbringing with scattered references of personal artistic intrigue. Using an array of salvaged materials from Swedish small towns (vintage bed linens, leather furniture covers, and umbrella boning), the collection looked to three different makers for inspiration – Donatello’s 1440 woodwork of Mary Magdalene, the architectural metalwork of sculptor Claes Oldenburg, and the heritage thatch work of Joar Nilsson, who helped her make several of the collection’s straw-woven pieces. From this melting pot, a highly original wardrobe emerged, spanning bulbous outerwear in heavy leather, furry shapes that recalled mittens, and her first experiments with shoes, which arrived in rounded, toe-capped shapes with sturdy wooden heels. It made for a rich, textural study in form and material – and yet another glimpse into Larsson’s endlessly interesting world.

August Barron

Shown at Gare des Mines in Paris, August Barron’s S/S 2026 collection marked a new era for Bror August Vestbø and Benjamin Barron – their first since rebranding from All-In to a portmanteau of their names, and a new chapter across the pond in Paris (where they’ve been based for less than a year).

The collection continued the duo’s signature approach to character dressing, this time channelling the suburban housewife of 1950s America through a lens of ‘subversion and desire’. Inspired by Japanese bondage magazines in which women’s clothing appears caught mid-undress, garments were suspended in moments of ‘tension and release’ – shirts and cardigans lifted and frozen above the chest, double-layered hoodies revealing lace bras beneath, and dresses twisting across the body as zippers sliced through midriffs.

Styled by longtime collaborator Lotta Volkova, the show saw models – including photographer Petra Collins – bounce animatedly through the space, ruffling the heads of onlookers on the front row. August Barron might have moved on from All-In, but their irreverent spirit, evidently, remains intact.

Notably, this season pointed to shifts that are happening in beauty and fashion more generally, as the line between the two industries continues to blur and many fashion brands are branching beyond the traditional categories of make-up and hair to explore how fragrance, skincare and wellness can create novel new experiences of their clothes, both on the runways and off.

The best unconventional beauty moments of S/S 2026

For the most part, the beauty looks this season were kept relatively simple, with minimally made-up faces and slicked-back or classically blown-out tresses dominating the runways. There were a few notable exceptions: Rick Owens complemented his operatically gothic designs with eerie black contact lenses, while Glenn Martens at Maison Margiela outfitted models in logo mouthpieces that gave them a root-canal-ready appearance.

At Alaïa, Pieter Mulier combined his fluid designs with cascading, knotted hair extensions, while The Row featured sinuous up-dos held together with various combs. Meanwhile the unabashed sensuality of Haider Ackermann’s S/S 2026 collection for Tom Ford featured lacquered lips in different colours, designed by make-up artist Lucy Bridgeto match the runway floor. Not long after the show, Bridge was announced as the brand's first-ever global make-up artist, a fitting move for both Bridge and the brand, who share a penchant for opulent, cinematic glamour.

One wonders whether the appointment marks a new era for Tom Ford Beauty, which set a new standard for luxury in the industry when it launched in the early 2000s with lipsticks that cost a then unheard of $50 and the launch ‘Black Orchid’, a now-iconic fragrance made from one of the darkest, most elusive flowers on earth (and which was recently the subject of a new campaign starring Tilda Swinton). The brand’s shock factor when it comes to beauty has since mellowed, but with Bridge and Ackermann at its helm, could this now change? It will need to, if Tom Ford Beauty wants to stand out in a market that in the past five years alone has become saturated with new lines from luxury houses, including Hermès, Prada, Dries Van Noten, Celine, Rabanne and, most recently, Louis Vuitton.

The proliferation of beauty brands by fashion houses is a testament to the increasingly symbiotic relationship between the two industries, and this season proved that that relationship is poised to grow even closer. The most notable example of this is the launch of Coperni’s C+ line, a collection of skincare-infused activewear that is designed to deliver a blend of probiotics and prebiotics to the wearer. ‘We are rethinking the connection between clothing and the body,’ said designers Arnaud Vaillant and Sébastien Meyer in a press release. ‘Beyond covering, protecting or expressing, garments can now care for, nourish, and support the body where it feels most alive. That vision gave birth to carewear: a new category of clothing with a new role to play.’

Whether skincare-infused clothing will take off is yet to be seen (although the success of Skims’ ‘collagen yarn’ face mask suggests it might), but New York brand Eckhaus Latta also incorporated skincare into its latest collection, with models walking down the runway in limited-edition eye masks designed by skincare brand Dieux.

When it came to fragrance, Vaquera released a scent designed with Comme des Garçons Parfums a few days before its Paris show. The brand's first fragrance is 'a scent that feels like a perfume you once knew, then forgot, and have just stumbled upon in the back of a clearance shelf'. Designed to evoke the feeling of being young in the 1990s-early 2000s, it recreates the scent of perfume ads in 1990s fashion magazines, the scent of freshly shampooed hair, and ‘the secret of your childhood car’s air conditioning’.

London-based brand Chopova Lowena pumped its runway with a rotation of its three fragrances, which it launched earlier this year, adding to the high-energy atmosphere of the show’s cheerleader-inspired collection. Its designers are certainly not the first to incorporate fragrance into their collections – Willy Chavarria perfumed Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse with Parfums de Marly’s Haltane fragrance for his A/W 2024 collection and Demna frequently tapped scent artist Sissel Tolaas to perfume Balenciaga's shows when he was still creative director of the house (including a scent of antiseptic, blood, money and petrol for its S/S 2020 show).

For his first show at Gucci this season, however, Demna played with beauty in a different way, spoofing wellness culture in The Tiger, a film that accompanied the collection and saw stars Demi Moore, Edward Norton and more falling down a psychedelic wormhole after taking a ‘homopathic, collagen-based root-infused vitamin tincture’.

Unlike with fashion, runway shows these days hold little sway when it comes to the beauty trends we see on the street. Beauty’s trend arbiters tend to be celebrities and influencers, and while certain beauty moments can go viral (cue Pat McGrath’s glassy skin for Maison Margiela), the beauty looks that stand out from the shows tend not to seep into the culture at large (McGrath’s at-home glassy skin mask did not find wide commercial success).

This season, however, hinted that the relationship between beauty trends and the runway might be changing. Not because fashion brands are presenting make-up and hair looks that people want to recreate at home, but because they are finding novel ways to bring other aspects of the industry – namely skincare – to the public and using fragrance to amplify the experience of their clothes. As wearable wellness becomes increasingly popular, it will be interesting to see if major fashion houses start incorporating developments in skincare, fragrance, and wellness into their collections moving forward, dissolving the line between what we typically think of as beauty and fashion.

‘The heartbeat is the rhythm we share, the pulse that reminds us we are human,’ he wrote in a letter released just prior to the show, which took place yesterday evening. ‘For every heartbeat there is a name, a moment, a gesture. This collection comes from that place of love and connection. It is as much mine as it is of those who lived it with me-in every way. Perhaps with a different pulse, but always with the same soul.’

Pierpaolo Piccioli puts poetic stamp on codes of Balenciaga

At Valentino, where he was creative director from 2008 – first alongside Maria Grazia Chiuri, from 2008-2016, and then solo until his departure last year – his collections were defined by this heartfelt approach, where expressions of contemporary romance met a generosity of silhouette and a vivid use of colour, inspired by both the women around him and the work of house founder Valentino Garavani. This was perhaps most evident in his haute couture collections, which distilled his vision: one even took place on the Spanish Steps in Rome, a theatrical, kaleidoscopic display that saw gowns bloom with roses and feathers, or adorned with sequins. The names of the seamstresses who created each gown were stitched into the lining – a reminder of the intimacy of their craft.

It has made him one of fashion’s best-loved designers, a reputation further bolstered by his personal charm and affability. So as guests arrived at last night’s show, held in the cross-shaped lobby of Kering’s HQ on Paris’ Rue de Sèvres (the luxury conglomerate that owns the house), there was a palpable sense of anticipation, and plenty of goodwill. His supporters were out in force, including longtime muse Anne Hathaway and, in a surprise showing, the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle. The appearance marked her first fashion show since marrying Prince Harry, and a rare appearance on European soil.

Though despite the occasion, there were no signs of nerves here. Instead, the designer looked to the house’s archive with a laser focus, honing in on Cristóbal Balenciaga’s 1957 ‘Sack Dress’, a loose, trapeze-like cut that opposed the waist-defining shapes of the era. Reinterpreting this silhouette in his clean, contemporary style, Piccioli played with its proportions, shortening the shape into tunic tops worn with slim press-front trousers, or elongating into a gown (the original style falls just beneath the knee). ‘Not homage, but recalibration,’ read the collection notes. Everyday components of a woman’s wardrobe – from shirting to overcoats – were also reimagined through references to the house’s archive, twisted and transformed by a manipulation of volume, with cocooning and ballooning shapes appearing throughout.

Elsewhere, flourishes of embellishment provided a throughline to Piccioli’s previous work, from appliqué flowers to the feathered hem of a dress, as did a vivid use of colour. Meanwhile, tougher looks in black leather – like a series of T-shirts and capes slashed just below the chest – and shielding bug-eye sunglasses were a nod to his subversive predecessor, Demna (the handover between the pair has been amicable, with Piccioli attending Demna’s final show earlier this summer).

The show ended with a standing ovation for the deep-feeling designer, who once again led from the heart – the only way he knows how. ‘What brought me here has been a journey [of] emotions, pushing me forward with force-not only teaching me, but revealing parts of myself I hardly knew,’ he said. ‘[I] ‘embraced unpredictability, the endless days, and the act of working with the heart – letting it lead, learn, and act on its own.’

Catch up on live coverage of Paris Fashion Week S/S 2026 here.

Inside, the white-walled space was bare beyond rows of colourful tiled benches and one artwork. Hung in the show’s entranceway, the abstract masterpiece, Yellow Panel with Red Curve, was painted by Ellsworth Kelly in 1989 (and, like other celebrity attendees, came with its own pair of security guards).

The collection that followed – which had been teased prior to the show in a series of sensual, sun-soaked images by Talia Chetrit – drew upon Kelly’s hard-edge technicolour minimalism, translating it into a wardrobe that celebrated the Spanish house’s long-standing commitment to craft. ‘In [the painting] lies an optimism and spirit that we deeply identify with,’ said the pair. ‘It operates as a starting point, a prelude of sorts, to what lies ahead.’

McCollough and Hernandez, who are partners in both life and work, arrive at Loewe after stepping away from their own label, Proenza Schouler – a portmanteau of their mothers’ maiden names – earlier this year after almost two decades honing a vision of contemporary and eclectic femininity, inspired by the brand’s native city of New York (the label is in good hands: CFDA award-winning designer Rachel Scott of Diotima has stepped into the role, presenting her first collection at a New York Fashion Week last month).

Taking up the mantle of the Spanish house from Jonathan Anderson, who left his 11-year tenure to embark on a new chapter at Dior, McCollough and Hernandez faced two challenges: firstly, how two Americans might interpret the 180-year history of the Madrid-founded house, and secondly, how they might continue the vast commercial success of their predecessor, who lifted Loewe from relative obscurity into the creative behemoth it is today. To begin, they asked themselves a series of questions: ‘How might craft be redefined today? How far can one push the expression of the handmade before its very traces of making disappear? What constitutes Spanishness in 2025?’

Using the ‘chromatic intensity’ of Kelly as a guiding throughline, their answers came in a storyline of ‘clarity and colour, sensual physicality, and sunniness’. Models charged through the space to a pulsating soundtrack, opening with thigh-skimming looks that played with the house’s signature material – leather – in colour block mini dresses and mock-neck jackets so rigid that they held hourglass shapes away from the body.

The looks that followed were cut sharp and clean, seeing wardrobe staples and athletic sportswear take on a ‘sensuality and fervour’; billowing windbreakers worn with frill-edged micro shorts, straight-edge trenchcoats in fuzzy yellow and orange wools, body-clinging striped dresses and jeans worn topless with chunky knits slung on shoulders and tied over bare chests. It was all the expressive colour and texture that has come to be synonymous with Loewe, restrained in the pair's New York language of easy, eclectic cool. It made for a collection not of revolution but redirection – fans of Anderson’s Loewe will find plenty to enjoy here, but there was a fresh eye that made this astute collection their own.

Catch up on live coverage of Paris Fashion Week S/S 2026 here

Jonathan Anderson’s first Dior womenswear collection recodes the archive

As the show began, the pyramid transformed into a screen for a specially commissioned film by British director Adam Curtis, best known for his documentaries on individualism, power, and the collapse of 20th-century ideologies, including The Century of the Self, HyperNormalisation, and the recent 2025 series Shifty, which examined late-20th-century Britain under Conservative rule. Collaging archival footage in his atmospheric style, the short film gathered moments from the house’s near-eight-decade-long history, from clips of Christian Dior himself to collections from the designers at the house who followed, including John Galliano and Maria Grazia Chiuri, which flashed across the screens at the show’s start (interspersed horror movie scenes lent the feeling of anxiety that pulsates through Curtis’ work).

Beneath the pyramid’s point was the box guests had received the week prior, containing the show’s invitation – a plate of walnuts rendered entirely in china, inspired by ceramic curiosities Anderson had discovered in the house’s archive. The illusion was that the footage was emerging, genie-like, from inside. ‘Daring to enter the house of Dior requires an empathy with its history, a willingness to decode its language, which is part of the collective imagination, and the resoluteness to put all of it in a box,’ said Anderson via the collection notes. ‘Not to erase it, but to store it, looking ahead, coming back to bits, traces or entire silhouettes from time to time, like revisiting memories.’

Anderson described his approach as having an ‘empathy’ for the past, though the film’s end – a shuddering rush of crackled footage before the screen turned a bright, optic white – was symbolic of a clean slate, a shedding of the weight of history. ‘Change is inevitable,’ he said in typically direct manner, presenting a collection which took elements of the archive and refracted them in his inventive, idiosyncratic style, warping archival silhouettes into strange and intriguing new proportions. Like the Tailleur Bar suit, which was shrunken and cropped in size, with a minuscule, abbreviated pleated skirt, while another riff on the nipped-waist Bar jacket scooped up at the front, as if tied like a bow. Indeed, the bow was a recurring motif: a series of bow ties (worn with matching shirts and skirts) reflected the subversion of formalwear in Anderson’s menswear collection for the house back in June, while hourglass dresses looked like they had been constructed from twists of fabric, tied at the end with bows.

A sense of theatricality came in dramatic cornette-style headwear and face-covering trims of lace inspired by another archival design. Micro-mini skirts were constructed from frothy mille-feuille layers of fabric, while the distinctive cantilevered waistline of Christian Dior’s 1952 La Cigale dress seemed to inspire the sculpted silhouette of trapeze dresses and double-breasted overcoats, which folded cleverly across their front. More grounded in reality were mini leather skirts (an abbreviated silhouette ran throughout), slouchy suede handbags with metal ‘Dior’ hardware embedded in their straps, and pointed pumps adorned with the house’s signature ’C’ on one foot, and ‘D’ on the other. Anderson said the collection was built on this ‘tension’ – between fantasy and reality, ‘dressing as a way to become a character on the stage that is life’.

More so than the menswear show earlier this year, there was a clarity to Anderson’s vision, which seeks to imagine the tropes of Dior – namely, an architectural construction combined with a mood of femininity and romance – in a sharp, contemporary style. This is only becoming clearer as he builds out his universe: alongside the collaborations with Guadagnino and Curtis, his trio of muses – and new house ambassadors – Mia Goth, Greta Lee and Mikey Madison, were in attendance today and watched on from the front row. The bolder looks on the runway might be more suited for their upcoming red carpet appearances than the everyday, but Anderson – a strong-willed designer who brims with confidence – knows that to build a brand requires bravery, vision and instinct, rather than safety. It’s how he built Loewe into a mega brand – now, with Dior, and the eyes of the world watching, this unwavering approach continues. Call it his New Look.

Stay tuned for live coverage of Paris Fashion Week S/S 2026

This season, the label turned to Brooklyn-based artist Pacifico Silano for the job. Well-regarded in New York’s art scene but little-known on a global stage (with only a few thousand Instagram followers), Silano creates languidly homoerotic works from archival printed matter dating between the Stonewall riots and the height of the Aids crisis. Two facts of his youth have shaped his practice. His parents owned an adult novelty store called Undercover Pleasures in the 2000s, and so niche pornographic titles were somewhat a part of life growing up. However, it was when Silano’s uncle died of an Aids-related illness when he was a young child – a loss his family largely avoided discussing – that he became deeply engaged with America’s mishandling of the Aids epidemic, using his gesturally fragmented work to trace threads of longing, loss and queer legacy left in its wake.

Acne Studios S/S 2026 runway set, a collaboration with artist Pacifico Silano

Working from his Brooklyn studio, in practice this sees Silano re-photograph forgotten 1970s and 1980s ephemera and gay erotica, ignoring explicit content to hone in on small details, such as gym weights on a floor or skin exposed beneath unbuttoned denim. Weaving collective histories into a colour-saturated new present, the resulting works form suggestive meditations on desire, erasure, and the fragility of queer history in print culture. For Acne Studios, the artist has drawn upon his archive alongside newly created works, which are suspended through the stony arches of the church, creating an atmosphere that evokes the moody intimacy of a ‘cigar salon’.

‘This is my first time working with Acne Studios and also my first time dipping a toe in the fashion world,’ he says. ‘Acne Studios has this incredible ability to take something familiar and make it feel radical again, whether it’s denim, tailoring, or a silhouette. That really resonates with my own process because I’m always asking, how can I reframe what already exists so it speaks to this moment? Acne Studios doesn’t treat fashion as just clothing. It’s part of a bigger cultural conversation – about art, identity, and expression. That’s exactly how I approach my work.’

While the artist’s practice is image-based, the challenge of translating his work into a show setting wasn’t as difficult as one might think. ‘I really like to think of photographs as objects of desire, I’m always considering how they can take up physical space,’ he explains. ‘I have been wanting to do an installation of my work with this beautiful dark wood panelling from the 1970s for a couple of years now but couldn’t find the right venue for it. During our first meeting, Acne Studios shared some references that were this exact idea I had been dreaming of. It felt like kismet, like I was supposed to do this with them.’

The artist’s work sets a stage for an S/S 2026 collection that is, the brand says, an exercise in ‘breaking down archetypes’. Grounded in Acne Studios’ core of denim and functional outerwear, this season boundaries between men’s and womenswear wardrobes are blurred to propose a ‘strong, androgyne energy’. Shuffling and twisting wardrobe classics, transposed suit jackets are worn with sharp uniform shirts; lumberjack flannels are tucked into gauzy slip skirts; and couture lace is sliced and stitched into second-skin shapes that play with the meaning of precious materials. ‘Strong, playful, poised and most of all free, these women have been here all along,’ said the brand. ‘Only now, as Acne Studios advances towards its 30th year, they are leading us into the next chapter.’

Silano wanted to create a set that reflected the collection’s states of toughness and tenderness. He hung fabric samples on the walls of his studio and began collaging new works inspired by their eclectic textures and hues, printing these new scenes onto aluminium panels to be installed in Paris. ‘I wanted to create works that balanced stereotypical masculine depictions with more quiet, sensitive and evocative imagery,’ he explains. ‘They might seem contradictory at first glance, but the longer you spend with these works the more you see how they feed off one another.’

With the brand’s birthday approaching, Johansson has been thinking not so much about clothes but – as ever with the unconventional designer – about the constellation of thinkers and creatives who have inspired him through the years. ‘I’ve always felt that creativity is perhaps about being able to see the world in a way you didn’t realise could be seen,’ he said. ‘There are people who can do that to you – they make the world feel different, they stand out and tell you a new story.’

Brought to life with Johansson’s studio team, musical contributions from Robyn and Yung Lean, and Silano’s evocative world-building, the S/S 2026 show is a celebration of this hive of interdisciplinary creation that has long fuelled Acne Studios as it steps into the next decade. ‘This has been an incredible learning experience for me,’ says Silano. ‘It’s made me reinvestigate my archive and my artistic practice through a new lens. I’m so used to working alone in my studio, doing everything myself. To be in dialogue with the Acne Studios team and to create this visual experience together has been incredible.’

Stay tuned for live coverage of Paris Fashion Week S/S 2026

And, while there were a handful of debuts in New York and Milan, Paris saw opening gambits from some major players: most notably that of Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, which took place yesterday evening, a debut that has had fervent anticipation since the former Bottega Veneta designer’s appointment was announced in December (he presented a joyous collection which looked towards Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel’s ideas of ‘modernity and freedom’). Elsewhere, Jonathan Anderson presented his first womenswear collection for Dior on Wednesday, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez debuted their vision for Loewe on Friday, and Pierpaolo Piccioli and Duran Lantink also made high-profile debuts at Balenciaga and Jean Paul Gaultier respectively.

Here, in our round-up of the standout shows of Paris Fashion Week S/S 2026 – reported from the French capital – we unpack these debuts, alongside a slew of other runway shows that took place across the week, from the blockbuster (Louis Vuitton, Saint Laurent) to the avant-garde (Junya Watanabe, Rick Owens).

Kiko Kostadinov

The closing Tuesday of Paris Fashion Week had just a handful of shows from designers who work on a smaller scale – a welcome gear-shift after the sensory overload of a week of blockbuster debuts and fervent online chatter. In an all-white gallery on the sunlit upper floor of the Palais de Tokyo, sisters Laura and Deanna Fanning presented their latest collection for Kiko Kostadinov, a London-based label which has established a close-knit community of followers (many were in attendance today). Known for an avant-garde approach to pattern-cutting and colour combinations – garments have an almost futurist feel – this season the Australian sisters, who helm the brand’s womens line said they wanted to ‘look inwards’.‘ ‘It is not just the clothes we made that matter, but how we made them,’ they said. ‘[We wanted to] return to the practices that defined our beginnings in fashion: [an] exploration of material, composition, proportion, and construction.’

As such, the collection took on a feeling of experimentation and collage, with elements that recalled traditional quilting, folk attire and workwear mixed up in the sisters’ typically offbeat style, while a series of bold three-dimensional chestpieces were more sculpture than clothing. One inspiration was the work of American artist Christina Ramberg and her female figures, ‘hulking bodies with stiff brassieres, jagged corsetry, and backcombed bangs,’ as they described, having been struck by her work on a recent trip to Berlin. ‘We push ourselves to design audaciously, think dynamically and abstractly,’ they said. ‘Even in the most uncertain times, we strive to find a silver lining: a freedom of body and mind.’

Chanel

It was the most anticipated moment of fashion month, the subject of fervent speculation and hearsay, a noise which was momentarily hushed yesterday evening as guests walked into the Grand Palais for Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel debut. Inside, the French-Belgian designer had conjured a solar system: a series of enormous glowing planets hung from the ceiling, while a black runway recalled the boundless stretch of the universe. In its scale, it recalled the show sets of Karl Lagerfeld, a statement from Blazy – who previously was at Bottega Veneta – that despite the weight of this debut, he wasn’t afraid of going big. In fact, as he told Business of Fashion prior to the show, he saw this as a one-time shot: how many times do you get to debut with Chanel? ‘We can go two ways. Either we do a clean, modern, by the codes, by the book Chanel show, and it’s a first step. Or we do this show as if it were our last,’ he said. ‘I took the last option. Let’s do a show as if it was the last one.’

Inspired by the feeling of ‘modernity and freedom’ which infused house founder Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel’s designs, the show began with a men’s suit and shirt – the jacket a recreation of Blazy’s own blazer (‘I only changed the buttons and added a chain’), the shirt made by Parisian shirtmaker Charvet, in a rare collaboration. He had become fascinated with the couturier’s relationship with the English polo player Boy Capel, who Blazy called her ‘most significant other’ – here, he imagined Gabrielle Chanel wearing Capel’s clothing, something she purportedly did. The latter two chapters of the show were more expressive, and recalled the experimentations with materiality Blazy excelled at during his time at Bottega Veneta: tweed jackets were cleverly manipulated to appear as if they were frayed at their edges (’the worn familiarity of the truly chic, items feel passed down and utilised’), while gowns bloomed with appliqué flowers or dramatic flourishes of feathers, like that worn by the model Awar Odhiang.

Indeed, the Ethiopia-born, Canadian model seemed to encapsulate the collection’s joyous mood: at the end of the show, she twirled across the runway as the sounds Snap’s ‘Rhythm is a Dancer’ boomed over the speakers. A grinning Blazy joined her for his final bow. ‘I just wanted to have fun,’ he said backstage. ‘Something beautiful and enjoyable – [that’s] what we have to propose in fashion.’ Jack Moss

Thom Browne

You’ve probably wondered what aliens might be like if they arrived on earth. If you asked Thom Browne, he’d say they’d wear 7-inch platform heels and have glittering green heads. Presented yesterday on the final day of the S/S 2026 season, the designer’s playful show offered a much-needed injection of fun to tired editors, staging a campy alien invasion in the centre of Paris. Starting off with silver extraterrestrial characters who handed out cards that read ‘We come in peace’, the collection that followed was soundtracked by ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’ by The Carpenters.

The clothes themselves saw an over-the-top layering of Thom Browne signatures: assertive sport coats with shoulders twisted forward into sculptural shapes, drop-waist pleated skirts, and shrunken cricket sweaters cropped high on the torso. Bright, preppy palettes and stripes collided with sequinned tulle, while patchwork tweeds and flashes of metallic hardware shimmered ‘like signals from another planet’. It was both surreal and expertly tailored – as Browne’s wardrobe always is – a cosmic collision of classic Americana and otherworldly fantasy. As our fashion features editor Jack Moss noted, ‘it was impossible not to raise a smile.’ Orla Brennan

Miu Miu

In the mid-1980s, the German photographer Helga Paris spent time at a clothing factory in East Berlin, documenting its female workers in a series of black-and-white portraits. In the images, almost every woman wears an apron, or tabard; despite their function, they remain decorated with markers of femininity, from flowers and polka dots to ruffle trims. Paris’ photographs – as well as those of Dorothea Lange of women at work – provided the starting point of Miu Miu’s latest collection. Miuccia Prada said she had been thinking about ‘the importance of work. Its significance, its relevance and meaning.’ ‘We in fashion always talk about glamour or rich people, but we have to recognise that life is also very difficult,’ she said backstage. ‘And to me the apron contains the real difficult life and pain women in history, from factories to the home.’

Watched on by guests perched on rows of Formica tables in place of chairs or benches – they suggested the kitchen, or perhaps a worker’s canteen – this consideration of a woman at work led her to the apron, a garment writ with connotations. Versions spanned the resolutely utilitarian (like that in canvas, worn by actress Sandra Hüller to open the show), to the vaguely fetishistic (iterations came in leather or black taffeta, with French Maid-like ruffles), to those featuring floral prints, recalling cleaners and kitchen staff. A series of bejewelled versions, meanwhile, exalted and transformed the garment. ‘The apron is my favourite piece of clothing in general,’ said Mrs Prada backstage, which is no surprise. The uniform has always been a fascination for this designer: here, in this latest study, it was valorised – a recognition, said the designer, of the oftentimes invisible weight of women’s work. Jack Moss

Sacai

In the summer, Chitose Abe found a new home for Sacai – a brightly lit studio space in the 6th arrondissement, where Nicolas Ghesquière was based during his fabled tenure at Balenciaga in the 2000s. Sparking ideas of home and what it means to stay – and indeed, to leave – a place, her S/S 2026 collection arrived yesterday against ‘a backdrop of changing tides in fashion’ (the designer showed on the final day of a season of never-before-seen house-hopping, and the morning of Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel debut). Away from the noise of it all, she turned her attention to ‘what is undeniably and irrefutably Sacai.’

A storyline of the brand’s signature hybridisations unfolded in tailored looks of beautifully exaggerated proportions, moving from formal black and white to shades that recalled the explosion of spring – earthy greens and pink florals. Taking the simple act of ‘up-turning’ garments to extremes, sculptural silhouettes emerged from cargo pant legs folded into voluminous skirts and tank tops turned up to form blouses; while elsewhere, ideas of falling and unravelling appeared in fringed tweeds and hoodies that morphed into ruffled dresses. Beautiful and quintessentially Sacai, it was, said the show notes, the designer’s ‘boldest expression of her vision’. With it, she seemed to say: I’m not going anywhere. Orla Brennan

Chloé

Gaby Aghion founded Chloé in 1952 as an antithesis to the unrestrained luxury of couture, finding its exclusivity out of step with the contemporary woman. ‘A thing of beauty and quality should be seen on women in the streets,’ she famously once said. At the risk of going against the principles of the house’s founder, Chemena Kamali’s S/S 2026 collection looked to the world of couture for inspiration, parsing its meticulous craftsmanship through the brand’s effortless, liberated codes. ‘I liked the idea of going back to what Gaby Aghion rejected without betraying the original DNA of the house,’ she said. ‘I wanted to explore what the idea of couture could mean in the Chloé context.’

Shown at the UNESCO headquarters, Kamali’s collection found its starting point in the first collections Aghion presented for Chloé nearly 70 years ago at Café Flore and Brasserie Lipp – silhouettes that drew on the resplendent femininity of couture without the formality of boning, padding or ornate decoration. Employing a similar sense of lightness, Kamali’s clothes took on an instinctive volume and movement, transforming humble fabrics like cotton poplin into elegant silhouettes through pleating, knotting and drapery. Breaking from the soft neutral palette associated with Chloé, bright florals plucked from the house’s archives brought an enlivened spirit to the collection, which translated the grandeur of couture into a wardrobe that, as Aghion would have it, one could imagine on real women in the street. The setting – a postmodern building that serves the public – was, said the designer, intentional: ‘UNESCO is a place that stands for open dialogue and exchange, freedom and openness,’ she said. ‘A place that honours creativity in all its forms.’ Orla Brennan

Jean Paul Gaultier

The buzzy Dutch Duran Lantink has made a name with collections which take the archetypal elements of a wardrobe and exaggerate their proportions to surreal effect. It made his eponymous label – currently on pause – one of Paris’ most talked-about, and indeed critically lauded, labels, the winner of the Karl Lagerfeld award at the 2024 LVMH Prize (though not without some controversy: a pair of bouncing fake breasts worn by a male model at his A/W 2025 show proved divisive).

For his debut collection for Jean Paul Gaultier, held in the bunker-like basement of the Musée du Quai Branly on Sunday afternoon, Lantink brought this playful approach to the Gaultier archive, undertaking what he called a ‘Duranification’ of the house and its signatures. The conical bra was exaggerated into cushion-like protrusions which jutted outwards from the body; the sailor’s hat was blown up to become a hem of a top, while trompe l’oeil prints gave the illusion that the model was completely nude.

Lantink said he had been inspired by the younger Jean Paul Gaultier ‘Junior’ line, which ran from 1988-1994, and – while generally eschewing the moodboard in favour of working intuitively – photographs from Amsterdam nightclub RoXY taken by Cleo Camper in 1988, a nightspot Gaultier himself had attended. ‘RoXY was sweaty, debaucherous, anarchic, stylish in the most careless way,’ said Duran – an apt description of the collection itself, which in its bold, unapologetic vision felt like a welcome jolt to the system. An emotional Gaultier, himself a master of the shock factor, seemed to approve. Jack Moss

Valentino

The show set for Alessandro Michele’s latest Valentino show was, by the designer’s standards at least, relatively minimal. Centred around a square-shaped black runway, interest came from a series of lights which whizzed and swirled across the ceiling – a symbolic representation of a swarm of fireflies, the glowing insect from which this S/S 2026 collection took its name. A voiceover at the start of the show explained their relevance: Michele had begun this collection by looking towards a 1941 letter sent by Pier Paolo Pasolini to a childhood friend in which he talks about the magic of seeing fireflies in the forest. ‘We envied them because they loved each other, because they longed for each other through amorous flights and lights,’ it read. For Michele, as the voiceover (read by Pamela Anderson) continued, these ‘erratic luminescences bursting with life’ represented ‘the ability to resist the darkest night’ – namely, the rise of fascism and the onset of World War II.

Such an evocation was a clear allusion to our current tremulous era of political discontent, which Michele likened to an onset of ‘darkness’. He said that fashion is an unlikely but ‘precious ally’ in such moments – a reminder of ‘beauty that resists standardisation’, something resolutely human that connects us to the body. Clothing this season was a little more stripped back than the past two collections for the house, though still came with gestures of glamour: voluminous blouses were worn with gathered velvet skirts, sinuous gowns came in bold jewel tones or were sheer and adorned with crystals, while the bow continued to be a motif, appearing on the necks of blouses or the hem of a skirt. At the end of the show, the colourful coterie of models gathered on the runway, gazing upwards to the swirling lights above – it made for a cinematic tableau, a reminder of Michele’s ability to draw emotion with his runway shows, which are always directed with a showman’s flourish. Jack Moss

Akris

American abstract art is having a moment at Paris Fashion Week. For their Loewe debut, duo Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez drew upon the work of Ellsworth Kelly, using a 1989 masterpiece by the artist as a symbol of the ‘optimism and spirit’ they hope to bring to the Spanish house. Yesterday, in the Grand Verrièr space at the Palais de Tokyo, designer Albert Kriemler looked to the work of Oklahoma-born Leon Polk Smith for his latest Akris collection, using the vivid, hard-edged style of Smith’s paintings as a starting point for a collection rooted in ‘sensuality and intuition’. Unlike McCollough and Hernandez, however, Kriemler is no stranger to the brand he leads – the Swiss designer took over duties at Akris from his parents in 1980 (the brand was founded by his grandmother over a century ago, in 1922).

Kriemler first encountered Smith’s painting ‘Seven Involvements in One’ at Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich in 2023, describing the work as a ‘free-standing object full of pulse and offbeat bravado’. Beyond the obvious parallels in the collection’s bright colour palette, Kriemler says he was most inspired by the idea of paring clothes back to their essence. As such, classically elegant shirting and sweeping skirts appeared in shades of red, orange and yellow, while structure emerged through the properties of the materials themselves: trapezoid gowns crafted from embroidered couture-level fabrications, draped fringe knits, sharp cotton suiting and horsehair accessories. ‘Smith once said he thought of his work as the opposite of minimal,’ said the designer. ‘I can relate to that. [Akris] is not about looking minimal; it’s about being essential. It's about using form and fabric to bring a person to light.’ Orla Brennan

Celine

‘I thought it would be nice on a Sunday if we get out of the city and to a park,’ said the American designer Michael Rider of his decision to show in Parc de Saint-Cloud, a bucolic estate just outside of Paris which was once the grounds of chateau owned by Philippe I, Duke of Orléans (the building no longer remains, having been bombed during the Franco-Prussian War). The journey was worth it: here, in the fresh midday air, Rider presented a collection of clarity and focus, which he said was a ‘continuation’ of his debut for the house, a resort show held this past July during Haute Couture Week. With that collection, he cleverly synthesised elements of Hedi Slimane and Phoebe Philo’s tenures at the house (he previously worked there under the latter), with his own vision of French style – a little preppy, modern but timeless (his previous role at Polo Ralph Lauren was also an influence). ‘[I] did not want there to be a sense of erasure. There was a foundation to build on. That to me felt modern, it felt ethical, it felt strong,’ he said at the time.

Here, for men and women, the idea of a full wardrobe continued: there was brilliant tailoring, widened at the shoulder and long in the body (iterations came in bourgeois navy blazers and tuxedo jackets), volumnious trench coats with colourful foulard-print linings, and dresses which shifted between flared minis in 1960s floral prints, and billowing twisted gowns, the latter a pitch to the Philo woman. Elements of preppiness continued, like colour-blocked silk rugby shirts for men (though could equally be shared by women), or crisp white shirts and chinos. Trousers were cut both baggy and wide, or super-skinny (a nod, perhaps, to Slimane’s most well-known silhouette). In another designer’s hands, this kind of wide-ranging collection could fall flat, but Rider already seems to have honed in on what makes a shopper tick. ‘We were thinking about what Celine is and what it isn’t,’ he said. ‘About things that last, and things that are just a moment. And about how clothes, shoes, and all of it become a part of the memories we make wearing them.’ Jack Moss

Balenciaga

At Valentino, Pierpaolo Piccioli established himself as one of fashion’s best-loved designers with straight-from-the-heart collections, defined by an expressive use of colour and a generosity of silhouette. No wonder, then, that his first show for Balenciaga last night – taking the reins of the Parisian house from Demna – was titled ‘Heartbeat.’ Teased with a show invite in the form of a cassette tape which played the sound of a beating heart, the mood at the Kering HQ on Rue de Sevres was buoyant, with a starry front row of longtime muses, including Anne Hathaway, as well as some newer fans gathered to witness his debut (notably, the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, in a rare public appearance).

Though there were no signs of nerves here: instead, the confident opening outing was an exercise in form and silhouette, with Piccioli translating archetypal Balenciaga couture garments – in particular, the trapeze-like line of the 1957 ‘Sack Dress’ – into resolutely modern pieces nonetheless infused with the mood of romance which has run through Piccioli’s oeuvre. The latter was expressed in moments of embellishment, whether the blooming floral appliqué across a hooded jacket, or flourishes of tassels and feathers. Colour was typically vivid, though a series of pieces in black leather – and the bug-eyed sunglasses worn throughout – felt a nod to the moodier aesthetic of his subversive predecessor (and a bid, no doubt, to retain that customer).

It ended with a standing ovation: this was another heartfelt collection from Piccioli – it’s the only way he knows how. ‘For every heartbeat there is a name, a moment, a gesture,’ he wrote in a letter distributed at the show. ‘This collection comes from that place of love and connection. It is as much mine as it is of those who lived it with me – in every way.’ Jack Moss

Vivienne Westwood

In 1998, Vivienne Westwood and Andreas Kronthaler released a scent created in collaboration with master perfumer Martin Gras. Inspired by the heavy, antique perfumes of Versailles, the couple named it Boudoir. Shown in the Ikebana room of L’Institut de France, Kronthaler’s S/S 2026 collection for the house shared the same name. ‘It’s all about a private, secret space without non-stop distraction,’ he said after the show. ‘It’s this space where you are nearest to yourself, where truth lies.’

The collection that followed made for a particularly sensual display from the eccentric Austrian designer, who has designed in Westwood’s memory since her passing in 2021. Starting by looking at designs of decadent antique bedroom drapes, this season an attention to fabrics recalled the deep romance of Italy – where Kronthaler spent much of the summer – mixing the brand’s cult patterns with brocade lace you’d find in typical Italian markets, embroideries left in drawers of Sicilian villas, and punched leather that appeared worn and ‘lived in’.

Silhouettes, meanwhile, were typically esoteric: waist-cinching bodices, bunched and chaotically draped hemlines, and off-kilter tailoring rooted in Westwood’s subversive codes. It was a love letter to Milan, where the designer lives; to London, the brand’s spiritual home; and to Paris, where Westwood had long presented its shows. Kronthaler’s final message came through the show’s soundtrack. ‘We are living in a world of great change; therefore, I’ve chosen the last movement of Jupiter by Mozart as the music,’ he said. ‘It’s a sound that foresees the future in the most hopeful way.‘ Orla Brennan

Junya Watanabe

Set to a soundtrack configured by Brian Eno, Junya Watanabe’s S/S 2026 display felt more like a piece of theatre than a runway show. Models moved down the runway showing cards that explained their looks to the audience – designs that weren’t ordinary clothes, but that used ordinary clothes to shape their surreal forms. Piles of red high heels made the shoulders of a black cascading gown, layers of shirts on hangers formed a tent-like dress that looked like the model had tumbled through a dry cleaner, and a series of black looks that closed the show used wire and soft inky jersey to create villainous silhouettes that clung and jutted from the body in geometric forms. As ever, it was a display that pushed the boundaries of what clothing can be, offering a moment to revel in Watanabe’s unbridled imagination amid a packed day of shows in the French capital. ‘I took a different approach to making clothes than before,’ said the designer in a statement. ‘By treating ready-made items – objects originally intended for specific purposes – as materials, I recontextualised them and explored forms that could never be achieved through conventional methods.’ It was, as the designer intended, ‘extraordinary art born from the everyday.’ Orla Brennan

Maison Margiela

In 1989, Martin Margiela hosted his S/S 1999 show in a derelict playground on the outskirts of Paris. Local children designed the invitations in crayon and marker; when the show began, they ran around models' feet or crouched, watching on from the front row. Back then, it was a revolution: far away from Paris’ gilded salons and ballrooms, it stripped away the artifice of the 1980s and altered what a fashion show could be. ‘I always thought fashion was a bit superficial, but this show changed everything for me,’ said Raf Simons, one of the several notable people who gathered that evening.

For his first ready-to-wear collection for Maison Margiela – Martin Margiela’s eponymous house, which he exited in 2009 – the Belgian creative director Glenn Martens seemed to have the 1989 show on his mind. Presenting at the Centquatre-Paris cultural centre in the north of the city, where he showed his debut Artisanal show for the house earlier this year, Martens drafted an orchestra of local children from Romilly-sur-Seine to provide a live soundtrack. Clad in Margiela suits in sizes too big, the miniature musicians (who prompted smiles from even the stoniest of the fashion crowd) proceeded on a whistlestop tour through classical music’s radio greats – from Mozart’s to Symphonie N°40 to Strauss’ Le Beau Danube bleu. While it might be hard to replicate the energy of that initial show, the happily unpolished performance captured some of the house’s DIY spirit.

The collection itself was a selection of ‘concepts and proposals for real life’ which drew heavily on the Maison Margiela archive. Models’ lips were pulled open with contraptions that gave the illusion that their mouths had been stitched open at each corner – a nod to the house’s signature branding – wearing a collection of deconstructed glamour, which largely drew on, and warped, tropes of eveningwear. Tuxedo jackets were worn with torn shirts beneath; a column gown was remade in leather, and the scooped line of a waistcoat informed the cut of the collection’s outerwear. Elsewhere, dresses were pieced together from an energetic collage of fabrics, from sequins to jewellery-like appliqué, while the collection’s closing gown looked to have been wrapped in red plastic bags – a typically Margiela flourish. Jack Moss

Hermès

Horseriding is part of the Hermès DNA, something that Nadège Vanhée embraced for her S/S 2026 outing for the house. Staged on a sand-covered runway, its surface strewn with tiny shards of shells, she said that this season’s collection had begun with an antique Camargue saddle she had discovered in the house’s archive. The famous white horses of Camargue, located in southern France, are known for living wild in herds on the marshes of the region, an unusually harsh environment for the animal which has made them a local attraction. Vanhée sought to channel this wild spirit with a collection she titled ‘Free Rein’, using the saddle’s construction to inform the silhouettes of the collection, while bra tops took their cue from harnesses. There was a bohemian inflection to looks here – Vanhée called Camargue France’s ‘Wild West’ – which came in the Hermès silk carré, twisted around the neck or becoming a ‘makeshift top’, as well as buckles, criss-crossing fastenings and traditional ‘boutis’ needlework. As ever, accessories were particularly seductive, from the practical – a brilliant riding boot with chevron quilting – to the tiniest of crescent-shaped handbags, with just enough room for a lipstick and house keys. Jack Moss

Alaïa

This season, Pieter Mulier was thinking about the rituals of uniform. Not the stiffness of army gear or the naivety of school dresses, but the idea of ‘clothes as machines for living’. As such, the collection he presented (shown as part of the official calendar, rather than during couture week) saw a sharpening of the wardrobe that has become a cult favourite – a uniform of its own sorts – to women around the world since he took over the house in 2021.

‘Reduced, sculptural’ and ‘precise’, it drew upon the essential glamour of the house’s namesake in a series of looks rendered with inventive attention to craft. Playing with extremes of luxury and simplicity, bold shades of humble cotton mixed with textures of python, leather, and silk, cut in womanly silhouettes that ergonomically wrapped around the body in shapes prioritising freedom of function. Amid these looks, which Mulier described as ‘uncompromising’, flourishes of decorative beauty appeared through intricate textures of macramé feathers, knitted pearls, and the movement of fringe. Accessories – a strong category for the house – were all sharp lines, from pointed chunky stilettos to skinny rectangular snakeskin-embossed handbags.

Shown at the Cartier Foundation on a digital screen floor that played footage of his model muses – reflected onto a mirrored ceiling – the clothes, as ever, displayed Mulier’s attention to what women want to wear, and his understanding of how his designs make them feel. As he wrote in the show’s notes, ‘there is a sense, always, of the woman’s body within – moving, alive’. Orla Brennan

Givenchy

Backstage after her sophomore show for Givenchy, creative director Sarah Burton said that for women, power dressing doesn’t always have to mean wearing a suit (although, in this confident second outing, there was plenty of brilliant tailoring, one of the former McQueen designer’s strengths). Why, she questioned, does power in fashion always have to be figured through traditionally menswear garments? Instead, she looked to find strength in what a note on attendees’ seats called ‘feminine archetypes’ – there were bra tops and bodysuits emblazoned with pearls, frilled mini dresses which flared out like tutus, and bold flourishes of jewellery, like a twisted metal and crystal bodysuit worn by model Vittoria Cerretti in a rare runway outing (Naomi Campbell, a longtime Sarah Burton muse, also walked the show, as did Kaia Gerber).

‘It started by peeling back the structure of tailoring to reveal skin and a sense of lightness and ease – and then exploring the female vocabulary of dress and undress,’ she explained. As such, other garments had a feeling of intuition – the designer said she was thinking about the idea of a woman taking a piece of fabric and wrapping it around her body – like a ‘bedsheet gown’ in rose-stitch satin, held closed by the model across the chest, or nets of tulle which appeared thrown on. Free of the weight of her debut, this expressive collection showed a designer now in full flow – a feeling of liberation which was felt in the clothes. Jack Moss

Victoria Beckham

Looking back at pictures of herself as a teenager, this season Victoria Beckham was thinking about how, ‘as we transition from girls into women, we search for our voice not only verbally but visually, too’. Choosing to show in the 17th-century Val-de-Grâce church in the center of Paris yesterday evening, her S/S 2026 collection was a love letter to the ‘coming-of-age wardrobe’ – the naïve fantasies, compositions, and accidents that shape how we learn to express ourselves through clothes.

The rewatching cult rite-of-passage films Romeo and Juliet and The Virgin Suicides led to a storyline of feathers that opened the show, which plumed from inky black scoop-necked minidresses and crisp white tank tops worn with tuxedo suit trousers. These looks moved to sprayed jersey top and dresses, which nodded to the girly glamour of Beckham’s own youth, while pastel negligees, camisoles and slip skirts in silky pinks and organza florals unmistakably evoked the wardrobes of Sofia Coppola’s Lisbon sisters. The youthful spontaneity of these looks were grounded in Beckham’s sharp, contemporary silhouettes – especially in her tailoring, which this season came in shades of Herringbone cotton that nodded to inherited pieces and tailored trousers suspended from georgette basques, winking at the teenage accident of tucking your top into tights.

Adolescence may have been the theme but Beckham’s wardrobe was still grown up, restrained and desirable in the way her clothes always are. The collection, said the show’s notes, was designed from the perspective of a mother to a teenage daughter, a celebration of ‘the pure joy of dressing inherent to the exceptional stage of girlhood.’ Orla Brennan

Issey Miyake

Recent seasons have seen Satoshi Kondo push the boundaries of what clothing can be. His experiments continued for S/S 2026, asking the question: ‘What if garments are conscious?’. As such, polo shirts and hoodies crept up the neck in strange, sculptural forms, like the model was in a perpetual shrug, while trousers and tops were inset with bulging pockets (through the semi-sheer fabric, you could see objects like pens and stacks of plastic mugs lurking inside). Other garments seemed to grow with extra sleeves, or were printed with slogans like ‘I am autonomous’ and ‘I am animated’, while bold expressions of print and texture – from tropical motifs to dresses adorned with leaf-like fronds of fabric – added a feeling of collage. It made for an enlivening, mood-elevating collection and continued a brilliant run from Kondo, who is readily embracing the house founder’s spirit of innovation and play. But more cleverly, it was also desirable: in amongst the more expressive pieces were his riffs on the everyday, from slouchy twisted shirting to layered dresses with stretch – you could see anyone in the Pompidou Centre showspace being seduced by them. Jack Moss

Loewe

The entrance to Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez’s debut show for Loewe, held in a specially constructed box in the grounds of Paris’ Parc Cité Internationale Universitaire on Friday morning, was hung with a 1989 work by Ellsworth Kelly. That work, Yellow Panel with Red Curve, and indeed the American artist’s wider oeuvre, provided what the pair called a ‘visual language’ with which to approach their tenure at the Spanish house (they take over from Jonathan Anderson, who is now at Loewe, having left Proenza Schouler, their own New York-based label founded in 2002).

‘Reduced, sometimes sculptural forms and elemental colour,’ is how they described both Kelly’s work and their own S/S 2026 collection, which was defined by graphic silhouettes and a bold use of colour – like a series of brightly hued hourglass mini dresses in moulded leather, Loewe’s signature material. Elsewhere, wardrobe staples were approached with what they called a ‘sensuality and fervour’ – from slouchy polos and windbreakers, to a cleverly textured fabric which gave the illusion of frayed denim.

‘[In Yellow Panel with Red Curve] lies a vibrancy and tactility that feels fundamental to the house,’ said the pair. ‘A chromatic intensity and sensuality that feels inherent to its Spanish roots, and ultimately an optimism and spirit that we deeply identify with. Hung within the show space, it operates as a starting point, a prelude of sorts, to what lies ahead.’ Jack Moss

Schiaparelli

When Daniel Roseberry presented his first ready-to-wear collection for Schiaparelli two years ago, the designer wrote in his S/S 2026 show notes, he would often hear, ‘This is ready-to-wear? I thought I was looking at couture.’ Once unsure what to make of such critiques, he now sees things differently. ‘What felt like a liability now feels like a strength. Why can’t fashion – even everyday fashion – be art?’ As such, his latest collection, shown last night at the Pompidou Centre, possessed all the unrestrained glamour and spectacle one might expect during couture week.

The designer looked to the house’s namesake Elsa for inspiration, exploring her love of ‘unexpected frictions’ in exaggerated-shouldered jackets cut with ‘tailleur rigour’, and texturally expressive gowns that captured a feeling of ‘hard chic’ – gauzy black chiffon dotted with bird-like polka dot feathers, shimmering gold chainmail torn to reveal skin beneath, and satin columns of deep crimson. Elsewhere, Roseberry drew from Elsa’s personal wardrobe, presenting a series of trompe l’oeil knits in loud triple-tone jacquards (‘shocking then, shocking now’ he joked), while the house’s flair for the surreal came in accessories made to ‘surprise and delight’, from gold metallic sandals to handbags inspired by Dalí’s melting clocks.

Both a celebration of Schiaparelli’s codes and the emotive experience of a runway show, Roseberry wanted the display to offer a moment of light amid the ‘cultural black hole’ of our times. ‘I read that while attendance to movies has plummeted in recent years, museum attendance has skyrocketed,’ he said. ‘It made perfect sense to me. Our phones are a slophouse of cheap thrills, with lifespans no longer than a few hours. That’s why I leapt at the opportunity to show at Centre Pompidou. Not because I wanted this collection to explicitly centre on the relationship between fashion and art, but because I felt, and feel, that going to a Schiaparelli show should feel like going to a museum: an experience equally inspirational, aspirational, and reassuring.’ Orla Brennan

Rick Owens

Just across the road from Rick Owens’ Palais de Tokyo showspace is the Palais Galliera, where the American designer’s career-spanning retrospective ‘Temple of Love’ continues until January. At his menswear show in June, which coincided with the opening, Owens said that the process of putting together the exhibition had inspired the collection: ‘a retrospective summons up thoughts of tenacity, peaking and decline, and I relished leaning into that,’ he said. As such, the theatrical presentation saw a troupe of models descending from an enormous scaffold structure erected in the Palais de Tokyo’s front pool and into the water below, before hauling themselves back up again – platform boots on and dripping wet – and triumphantly exiting the catwalk. Back then, I said that the display was ‘a symbolic gesture of Owens’ tenacity and staying power’, a testament to continuing, unwaveringly, on.

The exhibition’s presence continued to be felt at this season’s womenswear show, which saw models descend a vast staircase and into the water below – a similarly cinematic scene (both collections were titled ‘Temple’). ‘[The] exhibition tracks the pursuit of glamour and sleaze that I was looking for on Hollywood Boulevard, and eventually, improbably, ended up displaying in a Paris museum,’ he said in an email distributed to guests prior to the show. ‘I have always thought of what I do as a fascination with the denseness of European aesthetic sophistication seen through a filter of American bluntness.’ This idea of ‘glamour and bluntness’ ran through the collection: sinuous semi-sheer dresses, with criss-crossing exposed seams, were his subversion of the classic column gown, while sculptural twists of fabric protruded from the body, at once intuitive and elegant. Widened shoulders, elongated bomber jackets and spiky leather tassels, meanwhile, suggested a mood of protection. ‘Steely tenacity,’ Owens concluded. ‘Rough clothes for tough times.’ Jack Moss

Carven

How do the women of Paris dress when the weather turns warm? It’s a question British-born designer Mark Thomas asked himself in preparation for his debut collection as Carven’s new creative director, shown yesterday afternoon at the 85-year-old maison’s stately headquarters on the Champs-Élysées. Unlike many of this season’s appointments, Thomas is an in-house hire, designing under Louise Trotter before her move to Bottega Veneta earlier this year. Building on the wardrobe they established together – but dialling up the sensuality – Thomas’s women appeared in looks that held a distinctly Parisian air, elegant and effortlessly undone. Colours were ‘confident and calm’, taking inspiration from Madame Carven’s favourite flower – the orchid – offset by smoky shades of black and grey. A play between looseness and the body came in subtly layered looks that drew upon ideas of the bedroom – lacey nightgown dresses worn over basics, billowing strapless dresses that reminded of French bedlinens, and lightweight sporty jackets paired with delicate organza skirts that revealed lingerie beneath. Bringing the house’s history into the present, Thomas put his own spin on ‘esperanto’ – the graceful waistline contour detail that has been a house signature since the 50s – employing it in sportswear pieces designed to keep up ‘with the pace of city life’. Balancing deliberate lines with an insouciant kind of ease, it was a clean, clear and sensuous debut – a love letter to the women of the city, and the quiet power of the small but mighty maison he now leads. Orla Brennan

Rabanne

A bold use of colour and print has run throughout the S/S 2026 season so far, as have themes of freedom and escape. Yesterday afternoon, Rabanne designer Julien Dossena took it to another level. His kaleidoscopic summer outing was a heady melange of vivid sorbetto hues, graphic stripes, tropical motifs, floral appliqué and futuristic ‘car crash’ metallic ruffles – a nod to the Parisian house’s foundational material (founder Paco Rabanne loved the space-age sheen of the material; ‘he’s not a couturier, he’s a metal worker,’ Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel once cattily quipped).

Dossena said this season began with a consideration of the construction and shape of 1950s swimwear, a garment he said epitomised the era’s ‘sheen of optimism and a foreshadowing of disruptive change’ – one which the French designer linked with our current moment of turbulence and change. It lent the collection a mood of surreal escapism: the construction of those bathing suits inspired the cut of bra-tops and bustiers, layered under cut-out, chest-exposing jackets or adorned with spikes of fabric around their edges, while neoprene trousers – evocative of wetsuits – were rolled down as if after a day on the surf.

Accessories were equally expressive: a brilliant high-heeled sandal, teased by Dossena on Instagram prior to the show, sprouted with fronds of fern-like metal leaves, while enormous sunglasses evoked vintage goggles. Dossena said the collection was an expression of his ‘yearning for a hopeful horizon [with] a touch of surrealist shine’ amid the ‘tranquil and turbulent episodes of life’. In its no-holds-barred vision, it was impossible not to be seduced – or, perhaps more shocking still, feel optimistic. Jack Moss

Acne Studios

Transforming the inside of the 13th-century Gothic church Collège des Bernardins in Paris into a moody ‘cigar salon’, Acne Studios’ S/S 2026 collection was an exercise in balancing contrasts. Unveiled with a cast of protagonists chosen for their ‘strong, androgyne energy’, models wore looks that not only wilfully ignored the boundaries of mens- and womenswear, but that slashed and stitched evening glamour with the everyday. Lumberjack flannel was tucked into girlish lace slip skirts, cotton poplin was washed into soft dishevelment, and couturier’s lace was sliced and patchworked into contemporary body-hugging dresses. Elsewhere, the house’s denim and knitwear staples were reworked with tactile materiality and cut, so that straight-leg 1996 jeans were distressed and coated with latex, and chunky jumpers came with windowpane holes that exposed shirting beneath.

Together, it proposed a wardrobe where toughness and tenderness can co-exist. The collection’s story was reflected in the works of Brooklyn-based collage artist Pacifico Silano, whose gestural scenes made from vintage gay erotica were suspended throughout the wood-clad space. The show was soundtracked by Swedish pop icon Robyn, who stated she felt aligned with Acne Studios’ vision this season – the way it ‘questions and celebrates the typical idea of female identity’. Honouring the community of artists that has long surrounded the brand since it was co-founded by Jonny Johansson in 1996, the show also marked the beginning of Acne Studios’ anniversary celebrations. ‘Strong, playful, poised and most of all free, these women have been here all along,’ said the brand. ‘Only now, as Acne Studios advances towards its 30th year, they are leading us into the next chapters.’ Orla Brennan

READ: Acne Studios’ cigar salon runway set is decorated with Pacifico Silano’s homoerotic ‘objects of desire’

Dior

Jonathan Anderson’s debut womenswear show began with a short film by British documentary maker Adam Curtis.‘Do you dare enter the house of Dior?’ it began, before shuddering through archival footage from the house’s near-eight-decade-long history, intercut with clips from horror movies in Curtis’ dizzying, anxious style. And then – just like that – the screen turned a bright optic white and the room was illuminated, a symbolic gesture of Anderson shrugging off all that weight of history to begin anew. In the light, this was his clean slate. ‘Daring to enter the house of Dior requires an empathy with its history, a willingness to decode its language, which is part of the collective imagination, and the resoluteness to put all of it in a box,’ said Anderson via the collection notes. ‘Not to erase it, but to store it, looking ahead, coming back to bits, traces or entire silhouettes from time to time, like revisiting memories.’

So here Anderson drew on Dior’s venerable archive not in whole but in fragment, refracting silhouettes through his typically inventive lens. The Tailleur Bar – the nipped-waist Bar suit which pioneered Christian Dior’s ‘new look’ – was shrunken in size, its full skirt swapped for a mini that grazed the upper thigh, while the cantilevered waistline of a 1952 La Cigale dress appeared to inspire sculpted trapeze dresses, or double-breasted overcoats which folded across their front. Anderson said he was thinking about the ‘tension’ between fantasy and reality, of dressing up and dressing down. As such, there was theatrical cornette-style headwear, face-covering trims of lace and hourglass dresses which descended into a melange of bows, but also denim skirts, shirts and jeans, slouchy suede handbags, and classic pointed pumps. Before the show, Anderson had said he wanted to bring new women into the house of Dior, something he was no doubt thinking of in the collection’s breadth.

It made for a statement-making collection which has already got everybody talking. That is what Anderson does best. The Northern Irish designer is well aware that to sell a handbag or a pair of shoes, one must also create a distinctive, surprising universe to surround them – here, he did so in a collection that was both audacious and intuitive. It is what he did so well at Loewe, transforming the formerly sleepy Spanish house into a megabrand that he taught the world to pronounce. Now, with the eyes of the world watching, he seeks to make similar magic. Or to go back to that clever opening film, Anderson not only dares to enter the house of Dior, but he wants to renovate it too. Jack Moss

READ: ‘Change is inevitable’: Jonathan Anderson’s first Dior womenswear collection recodes the house’s archive

Louis Vuitton

Though Nicolas Ghesquière has presented his collections numerous times at the Louvre across his tenure at Louis Vuitton – all the way back to his debut in 2014, which was held in the palace’s Cour Carrée – for S/S 2026, he chose the lesser-visited former summer apartments of Anne of Austria, Queen of France as his runway (in fact, the spaces are currently closed to public as they are in the midst of a renovation, opening again in 2027). Ghesquière said he had been thinking about the idea of intimacy, ‘the boundless freedom of the private sphere’.

In the opulent apartments, where Anne of Austria would once have roamed, Ghesquière presented a collection which reimagined hallmarks of ‘indoor’ dressing – swaddling robes, nightdresses, slippers – in imaginative style. As ever, it was an idiosyncratic melange of elements, traversing eras and styles – elongated pointed collars looked picked from a monarch’s wardrobe, while shaggy shearling collars, plissé ruffles and turbans suggested a louche 1970s glamour. Other elements seemed to recall domestic interiors: sweeping draped dresses could be read as curtains, while bows, tassels and opulent embroidered flowers evoked home furnishings.

As is Ghesquière’s skill, the borrowed elements were both recognisable and hard to place – his Vuitton woman is never restrained to a singular place or time. Instead, it was a testament, said Ghesquière, to the idea of individual style: ‘The ultimate luxury of dressing for oneself and revealing one’s true personality,’ he described. With this, it fits neatly into the season’s emerging theme: the idea of liberation through clothing, the freedom to dress as you please. Jack Moss