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As the Spring 2026 couture shows draw to a close, we can’t help but look back in awe at all of the gobsmackingly beautiful designs that have graced the Paris runways this season. From breathtaking debuts at Chanel and Dior, to high-flying theatrics of Viktor & Rolf, to Erté-inflected old Hollywood glamour at Valentino, there was so much to gush over and be inspired by.
Schiaparelli
Daniel Roseberry is more than a designer. He’s an artist and an explorer and this season he took Schiaparelli to places it’s never been before: darker, edgier, and thornier than ever before. It was like a trip to the Island of Dr. Moreau, as models were spliced with insects and birds and fungi and flowering plants. And all of it so beautiful. Even the snail-like horns protruding from the fronts of some of the jackets were oddly alluring. It takes a real master to pull off something like that!
Christian Dior
Designer Jonathan Anderson had been working on this collection since he started at Dior last year. Couture was his proving ground for shapes and concepts and techniques he’s been adapting into Dior’s ready-to-wear collections ever since, so there were familiar motifs like the bows at the hems of the dresses that opened the show, but all of it rendered in more extreme proportions, with volumes and shapes and levels of handiwork that could only ever be created in couture. And the colors! If you’d forgotten that Dior could be colorful and experimental and fanciful and truly beautiful, let this collection stand as a reminder that, indeed, it can. Bravo, Mr. Anderson. Bravo!
Chanel
There was a softness about Matthieu Blazy’s couture debut for the house of Chanel. There was much more of an emphasis on daywear compared to other couture shows, but with no less wow factor — some sheer, some featheres, some bursting with fringe. All of it set against a storybook-like backdrop of colorful mushrooms and pink willow trees. It was a dream, but one firmly grounded in reality.
Armani Prive
What even is Armani without Giorgio Armani? The late designer’s niece, Silvana Armani, showed us with a collection that honored the heritage of the house her uncle built into the global phenomenon it is today. Honestly, the collection was so true to the house that it felt alsmost as if Mr. Armani was still there. And yet, there was also a lightness and modernity to it that felt ever so slightly new. And that certainly bodes well for the future of one of Italy’s greatest fashion brands.
Ronald van der Kemp
Looking at van der Kemp’s show, you can’t help but get the sense that the designer really enjoys his job. There’s a freedom and an exuberance to the collections he puts out season after season, and this season in particular. At moments, what he presented felt like the best versions of Versace or Ungaro — two brands that might benefit from his particular talents as a consultant, if not something more. In either case, it’s hard not to look at these designs and smile. One imagines whoever wears them in the real world must be the life of the party.
Zuhair Murad
No one does beading quite like Zuhair Murad. His dresses must weigh a ton and yet they appear weightless. That’s his power as a designer. And the way he drapes! The volumes and folds — soft and inviting. It’s pure glamour and fantasy and in a world full of so much darkness, a much needed moment of optimism and joy.
Viktor & Rolf
Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren don’t so much design clothes as they do create art installations. And this season their show was as much about process as it was about the final product, with dresses transformed before the audience’s very eyes. And the model rising into the sky on a giant silken kite? Well that was just really cool.
Ashi Studio
Ashi’s show notes spoke of Victorian mourning rituals and the blurring of the line between preservation and decay — and I can see that in the ghostly print of hans on a corset, the hairlike embroideries and the perfectly destroyed silk tulle hems. But what I really can’t stop thinking about those crocodile corset dresses! Go gorgeous.
Elie Saab
It’s glamour pure and simple. That’s what Elie Saab is all about. And it need not be about anything else.
Valentino
For his sophomore couture collection, designer Alessandro Michele looked to one of the late Valentino Garavani’s favorite sources of inspiration: Hollywood. After all it was the Hollywood cinema — specifically the costumes in the 1941 film Ziegfeld Girl — that made Garavani want to become a designer in the first place. The film is set in the 1920s and dripping with that decades bygone glamour, as was Michele’s collection, which looked as if it could have been ripped straight from some forgotten MGM costume archive.
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