Paris was in the grip of an unseasonal heatwave when Chanel transformed the Grand Palais into a moonlit, enchanted garden. Giant twisted stems and oversized blossoms rose from the floor, while models walked in hats woven like bird nests and shoes that nodded to Jack and the Beanstalk. The setting, drawn from a book of fairy tales found in Gabrielle Chanel’s apartment, was the second couture outing for Matthieu Blazy, and it set a tone that would echo across the week: a deliberate turn away from the merely beautiful toward the wilfully strange.

Across the fall/winter 2026-27 haute couture presentations, a cluster of designers—many new to their houses—seemed to share an instinct that the discipline’s remaining function is to be irrational on purpose. Jonathan Anderson, in his second couture collection for Dior, took the American sculptor Lynda Benglis as his starting point, translating her poured, twisted forms into hand-pleated, knotted, and draped garments that stood away from the body like soft armour. The show, staged in the gardens of the Musée Rodin, was described by observers in the Italian press as a laboratory where the garment became sculpture, its surfaces shifting between metallic iridescence and the hand-painted cotton traditions of 18th-century India—a nod to Benglis’s long connection with Ahmedabad.

Elsewhere, the Lebanese designer Elie Saab, long synonymous with red-carpet glamour, presented a collection that Arab commentators read as a pivot toward storytelling. Titled ‘The Ball of Untamed Dreams’, it sent out models in sculpted headpieces and masks, the embroidery so dense it appeared to change colour with each step, culminating in a champagne-and-gold wedding dress that seemed to emit its own light. Alexis Mabille, meanwhile, built his entire show around the act of transformation: assistants on the runway unzipped panels, reversed jackets, and unfolded a black satin cloak into a full bridal gown before the audience’s eyes, a literal demonstration of his ‘Dual’ theme. Robert Wun, the first Hong Kong-born designer on the official calendar, filled his set with white balloons and childhood toys, crafting dresses that incorporated plush animals and transparent spherical headpieces, a vision of couture as recovered memory.

At Armani Privé, the late Giorgio Armani’s niece Silvana titled her collection ‘Boudoir’, evoking the private room where a woman dresses for herself. Italian fashion writers noted the collection’s fidelity to the house codes—fluid lines, muted iridescent velvets, a quiet sensuality—as a deliberate act of preservation rather than reinvention. But it was Blazy’s Chanel that delivered the week’s most pointed closing statement. Breaking with six decades of tradition, he sent out not a bridal gown but a little black dress, the very garment Coco Chanel herself wore as a woman who never married. In a season that had already bent one menswear schedule out of shape, the gesture felt less like a provocation than a quiet insistence that couture’s real luxury is the freedom to write its own rules.