From Matthieu Blazy’s quiet Chanel debut to Alessandro Michele’s slow, voyeuristic couture at Valentino, Spring–Summer 2026 marked a collective shift away from spectacle. Across Paris, designers chose restraint, slowness, and craft as their sharpest tools—proving that in a season of visual excess, couture’s most radical gesture was to soften, pause, and mean less in order to say more.
Lightness as Strategy: Matthieu Blazy’s First Chanel Couture
For his Haute Couture debut at Chanel, Matthieu Blazy approached the weight of expectation by deliberately avoiding spectacle.
Inside the Grand Palais, a pale pink set dotted with oversized, toadstool-like mushrooms offered a striking contrast to the building’s steel architecture and the grey Parisian sky outside. Inspired by fairytale imagery and fantasy worlds such as Alice in Wonderland, the scenography established a mood of softness and restraint, framing a collection built around clarity rather than drama.
That restraint extended to the clothes. Blazy opened with a near-nude chiffon interpretation of the Chanel suit, its translucent layers anchored only by fine chains and pearls sewn into the hems. Overt brand signifiers—tweed, camellias, bold logos—were largely absent. Instead, the house’s most recognisable codes were distilled to structure, proportion, and movement. It felt like a conscious step away from the visual density of recent decades, and a return to the modernist principles of Gabrielle Chanel.
Coco Chanel’s famous dictum—“Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off”—appeared to guide the collection’s minimalism. Silhouettes were pared back to the point of near transparency. Haute Couture here focused on the body in motion, privileging freedom and ease over embellishment as display.
Birds served as the collection’s central visual reference, realised through the specialist ateliers of le19M. Rather than literal feathers, plumage was suggested through embroidery, pleating, raffia, and raw threads. Pigeon-grey petal textures shimmered across weightless suits, peacock effects emerged through layered threadwork, and raven-black tailoring highlighted the precision of Chanel’s cutting.
Subtle references to Blazy’s own design language appeared throughout. Trompe-l’œil organza evoking a tank top and jeans nodded to his work at Bottega Veneta, while psychedelic embroideries echoed the surreal mushroom-filled set. A red evening gown topped with a cocoon-like texture stood out as the collection’s most overt statement—playful, but controlled.
Rather than attempting to redefine Chanel couture, Blazy’s debut focused on recalibration. By stripping away excess and expectation, he positioned Haute Couture not as spectacle, but as an exercise in lightness, craft, and quiet confidence.
In a season dominated by visual excess, restraint became the clearest statement of intent.
Valentino Haute Couture SS26: On Looking, Slowly
“People in fashion are voyeurs,” Alessandro Michele said after Valentino’s Spring/Summer 2026 haute couture show. Rarely has a collection taken that observation so literally.
The show opened with a voiceover from the late Valentino Garavani, taken from Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary The Last Emperor. Speaking about his love of Old Hollywood and cinema, Garavani framed the maison’s first couture show since his passing as both tribute and continuation. Appropriately, the collection was titled Specula Mundi—Mirror of the World.
Instead of a runway, Michele built a contemporary Kaiserpanorama, a 19th-century optical device that predated cinema. Guests sat on stools and peered through small viewing windows into circular structures, each seeing the clothes alone, from a fixed position. Everyone was present, yet no one shared the same image.
By restricting visibility, Michele reversed fashion’s usual pursuit of total exposure. Seeing became deliberate. There was no scrolling, no instant comprehension—only waiting, focusing, looking. Photography felt beside the point. Attention returned to fabric, embroidery, and posture.
The format functioned as a couture peep show: provocative, controlled, slightly unsettling. Desire intensified because access was limited. The clothes appeared briefly, then vanished.
They rewarded that concentration. Old Hollywood ran through the collection: a drop-waisted gown in Valentino red, feather fans and Busby Berkeley–style headpieces, silhouettes recalling the heightened glamour of the 1930s. Elsewhere, restraint surfaced—precise tailoring, fluid jersey, velvet embroideries echoing the house’s cultivated opulence of the 1980s.
In Specula Mundi, Michele proposed a different ethics of vision. In an age of visual overload, couture slowed things down. It asked not to be captured, but to be contemplated—and in doing so, made Valentino’s legacy feel quietly, powerfully present.
Zuhair Murad Couture Spring–Summer 2026: After the Night, the Light
Some couture seasons feel ornamental; others feel essential. Zuhair Murad’s Spring–Summer 2026 collection, Chiaroscuro, belongs to the latter—a quiet meditation on beauty’s power to heal after darkness.
The silhouettes emerged slowly, almost reverently, recalling figures from a Renaissance painting. There was no spectacle here, only poise. References to Humanist Italy and the hopeful 1950s shaped sculpted hourglass forms: conical corsets, defined waists, generous skirts. These were not fragile gowns, but dresses worn like soft armor.
Murad’s atelier spoke through refined embroidery inspired by frescoes and cathedral ceilings, rendered in silk threads with subtle metallic glints. Fabrics balanced structure and lightness—mikado and duchess satin grounding the body, chiffon and jersey allowing it to breathe.
The palette unfolded in sfumato, pastels rising gently from shadow. Across 45 looks, Chiaroscuro became a calm procession of strength and optimism. In choosing restraint over noise, Murad delivered a couture collection that felt quietly, profoundly necessary.
Where Starstuff Becomes Silk: Inside Rahul Mishra’s Spring 2026 Couture
Rahul Mishra’s Spring 2026 couture collection is not designed to command attention, but to hold it. Alchemy unfolds quietly, inviting the viewer to absorb rather than observe, where cosmology, ancient philosophy, and handcraft converge with restraint and clarity.
Guided by Carl Sagan’s idea that we are made of “starstuff,” Mishra treats the body as a temporary gathering of elements. Science meets the Rig Veda through the panchabhuta—earth, water, fire, air, and space—understood as forces in motion. Ether appears in weightless, hovering forms; air in fluid drapery that moves instinctively. Fire glows from within through subtle embroidery, while water is rendered in reflective, adaptive silks. Earth grounds the collection with dense textures that feel archival, carrying memory rather than weight.
Photo by Valerio Mezzanotti
The strength of Alchemy lies in translation, not illustration. In the atelier, time slows and couture becomes a meditative act—each stitch deliberate, balancing fantasy with discipline.
The narrative extends through jewellery, as Tanishq returns to Paris Couture Week with its Desert Diamonds collection. Formed deep within the earth over millennia, these natural diamonds—crafted with De Beers—mirror Mishra’s focus on origin, restraint, and individuality. Introduced to India on the couture runway, they appear as sculptural, quietly powerful companions to the clothes.
Photo by Valerio Mezzanotti
In Alchemy, Mishra reminds us that couture’s true power lies not in permanence, but in cycles—of making, dissolving, and beginning again.
A Parade of Elegance at Cirque d’Hiver: Stéphane Rolland Haute Couture SS26
Stéphane Rolland brought a rare sense of silence to Paris couture this season. Presented at the Cirque d’Hiver, his Spring–Summer 2026 collection felt less like a fashion show and more like a composed ritual. Inspired by Picasso’s Parade, it was a meditation on presence, movement, and memory rather than trends.
The show unfolded slowly, almost ceremonially. Models entered the ring as if crossing into a sacred space, dressed in asymmetrical coats, sculptural capes, and precisely cut jumpsuits. Gazar, duchesse satin, and crepe were treated architecturally—structured yet fluid, rich without excess. The focus was on shape, discipline, and the tension between body and material.
Circus figures hovered in suggestion rather than costume. The ringmaster, the clown, Pierrot appeared through contrast and volume: a severe black-and-white silhouette, a flash of red at the shoulder, a circular collar. Nothing was literal, and that restraint gave the collection its depth.
Embroidery functioned as emotion rather than ornament. Crystals and stones appeared like points of light—stars, stage lamps—illuminating the darkness. Plexiglass brooches and sculptural accessories added a contemporary edge, turning garments into moving set pieces.
Rolland’s circus did not perform for applause. It passed through quietly, elegant and controlled, leaving behind the impression of something timeless—fashion as atmosphere, not spectacle.
Text by Akgün Akdil
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