Chanel Haute Couture Spring Summer 2026
A moment, held briefly
“I saw the beauty at once. Then gone, flown away.”
The anonymous haiku that opens Chanel’s Spring Summer 2026 Haute Couture collection feels less like an introduction and more like a quiet instruction: pay attention, this will not last.
Haute Couture has always been the soul of Chanel. Not simply as an exercise in craftsmanship, but as a deeply personal exchange between the House and the woman who wears its creations. Clothes here are not finished when they leave the atelier; they are completed by the life that inhabits them. As Matthieu Blazy reminds us, it is the wearer who gives couture its true story.
With his debut Haute Couture collection for the house, Blazy does not attempt to redefine Chanel. Instead, he returns to its core, carefully stripping it back to its essence. What remains is something both intimate and expansive: the body, the soul, and the quiet power of self-expression.
The collection opens almost like a memory. The Chanel suit appears in transparent silk mousseline, softly constructed, tender in tone. It feels less worn than remembered. Embedded within it are small emotional artefacts: a love letter, a bottle of N°5, a trace of red lipstick. Some are stitched into interiors, others hidden in pockets or suspended from the signature chain. The inside life of the garment gently reveals itself to the outside world.
This exposure of intimacy is not literal but poetic. A palimpsest of personal history, layered with the House’s own. Haute Couture here becomes both garment and confession, an embroidered love letter to craft, construction, and memory.
As the show unfolds, a transformation begins. Almost imperceptibly at first, the women evolve into birds. Not costumes, not disguises, but embodiments. Feathers emerge through pleating, embroidery, weaving, and layering. Rarely used outright, they are instead evoked through the mastery of the flou and tailleur ateliers, and through the exceptional artisans of le19M.
From deep raven-black silhouettes that showcase the precision of tailoring, to intricate compositions of colour that recall plumage in motion, the birds take many forms. Familiar and exotic coexist: the humble pigeon alongside the pink spoonbill, the linear heron beside the crested cockatoo. Each is singular, each free.
They gather briefly in an imagined landscape of towering mushrooms and an enchanted willow wood, then disperse. Like birds do. Like moments do.
Here, birds are neither symbols nor metaphors alone. They are simply themselves. As is Haute Couture at its most honest: grounded in archetype, suspended in dream. For a fleeting instant, it asks us to pause. And then, just as quietly, it is gone.
Flown away.
