CHANEL Spring-Summer 2026 Haute Couture Collection

Bird on a mushroom

I saw the beauty at once

Then gone, flown away

(Anonymous haiku)

“Haute Couture is the very soul of Chanel – it is the foundation and the full expression of the House. These are clothes that are as much about the wearer as the designer. It’s the clothes worn that give them a true story; their own story and an emotional resonance, giving women a canvas to tell their own story.” Matthieu Blazy

What makes Chanel, Chanel? What is the essence and essentialism of the House? How do you bare its soul? In his debut Haute Couture collection and show for the House, Matthieu Blazy, as Artistic Director of Fashion Activities, refines and reexamines the heart of Chanel.

In this emotional exchange between maker and wearer, the very essence of Haute Couture is the body and the soul. Revealed through lightness, movement and self-expression, the woman who wears the clothes is celebrated, each in her distinct individuality. A poetic scene is set, as simple and complex as a haiku; of stylised nature, a suspension in time, embracing the poignancy of the moment, to frame and tell their story.

Delineated and defined, stripped to its essential dimensions and constructed from transparencies of silk mousseline in tender shades, the Chanel suit opens the show. It appears almost as a memory of Chanel’s layered histories, entwined with the wearer’s own; a delicate embroidered love letter, a bottle of N°5, a red lipstick… tokens and emotional artefacts appear, in silk mousseline or as jewellery. Slipped into pockets, stitched into interiors, suspended from the famous chain that weights, or in a ‘palimpsest’ of the iconic bag; a symbolic interior life is exposed to the exterior. A love letter, both to the craft and construction of Haute Couture, and in its literal form.

Yet during this process, a metamorphosis occurs; the women at the centre of the collection, begin to transform into birds. A multiplicity of birds is imagined, each singular in shape and form, realised through the rituals of the Haute Couture flou and tailleur ateliers, together with the artisans of fabric making, embroidery, and pleating at le19M.

From raven black looks, with a concentration on the supreme cutting skills of the tailleur and their flow in the flou, to complex coloured plumage evoked in embroidery, layering, pleating and weaving, where the feather is often conjured, yet hardly used. A host of birds appear from the domestic to the exotic: the simple grey pigeon to the extravagant pink spoonbill; the linear heron to the crested cockatoo. Like a conspiracy of ravens, or a mischief of magpies, the birds congregate around towering mushrooms in an enchanted willow wood, then disappear, free to fly away.

Here, birds are seen as ultimate symbols of freedom – or simply as themselves. The natural world metamorphosed, or merely celebrated. Chanel archetypes at once ground the collection and are equally part of a dream world. For a brief moment, the Haute Couture gives poetic pause, and then it is gone.

Flown away.