Beyond the Fairy Tale Chanel Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2026
The fairy tale is over. Or at least, the old one is.
For decades, Chanel has sold a carefully preserved mythology: Gabrielle Chanel as visionary founder, the tweed suit, the camellia, the house codes repeated so often they hardened into scripture. Most creative directors inherit that mythology and learn how to preserve it. Matthieu Blazy seems far more interested in testing it.
Paris was already in the middle of a heatwave, the front row visibly feeling every degree of it, but Blazy brought a sharper kind of heat to Chanel Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2026.
Since stepping into the house, Blazy has not treated Chanel like something sacred and untouchable. What interests him is not preservation for the sake of image, but transformation. He seems drawn to the tension between the mythology of Chanel and the possibility of disrupting it from within. That is what made this collection feel like fantasy brought convincingly into reality. It did not feel like an archive reanimated. It felt like a world being reopened.
The fairy-tale thread was there, of course, but never in any childish or overly literal way. What made it compelling was how Blazy used that language to speak about women in a more layered sense – not as fantasies, but as people who carry private narratives, contradictions, rituals, and forms of self-invention. The clothes suggested that what matters is not only what is visible, but also what is hidden: the inner life of a garment, and the inner life of the woman wearing it.
That is where the collection became more than beautiful. The silhouettes held femininity in a way that felt shifting rather than fixed. Nothing was too resolved. Nothing felt one-dimensional. There was romance, yes, but also discipline. Precision. Restraint. A sense that couture, here, was not about escaping reality but about making reality feel more charged, more self-authored, more deliberate.
The point was not fantasy as decoration, but fantasy as language. At Chanel, that distinction matters. Because fantasy without structure is just styling, and craft without feeling is just technique. This collection held both – dream and rigour, private symbolism and exact construction – without collapsing into sentimentality.
Chanel presented the world, but it was never really about disappearing into it. It asked women to create their own. And that may be the boldest chapter Chanel has written in years.
imager courtesy CHANEL
