New Eras, Old Icons: The Season of Parisian Reinvention
Introduction
Paris is buzzing once again. The Spring/Summer 2026 shows marked a wave of creative rebirths across the city’s historic maisons. Matthieu Blazy brought quiet magic to Chanel, turning tweed into poetry under a galaxy of lights at the Grand Palais. Jonathan Anderson shook up Dior with sculptural femininity and cerebral grace, while Pierpaolo Piccioli gave Balenciaga new emotional depth through architectural beauty. At Mugler, Miguel Castro Freitas revived pure drama, and Duran Lantink electrified Jean Paul Gaultier with raw, youthful energy. This season, Paris didn’t look back, it reinvented its legends.
Jonathan Anderson at Dior
This is one of the marquee debuts: taking the helm at one of fashion’s most storied houses, and reinterpreting iconic codes (Bar jacket, New Look references). Because Dior is so central, any change is magnified in industry and media.
Jonathan Anderson’s debut for Dior Women Spring/Summer 2026 feels like a deep breath after years of certainty. It’s one of the most interesting shifts in recent fashion. It represents a rethinking of Dior’s femininity that feels alive, present, and curious rather than nostalgic. Taking over from Maria Grazia Chiuri, Anderson moves away from overt feminist slogans and toward something quieter and more tactile. His message comes through in the way clothes move, how they’re built, and how they refuse to sit still.
The Bar jacket, long the house’s emblem of structure and postwar elegance, becomes Anderson’s main point of play. Cropped, perforated, or puffed into new proportions, it loses its strictness and finds rhythm in asymmetry. The “New Look” hourglass gives way to softer shapes: fluid tailoring, relaxed waists, wrapped organza layers, and easy trousers that flare gently at the ankle. There’s a push and pull between control and freedom, precision and spontaneity.
The color story stays close to Dior’s DNA: black, ivory, and grey. However, it feels refreshed through new textures. Metallic shimmer catches the light, glossy vinyl adds a modern edge and, finally, soft feathers lend a sense of motion. Nothing feels static. Accessories carry Anderson’s Loewe touch: surreal, witty, yet crafted to perfection. Inflated hats, molded leather bags, and sculptural heels twist classic Dior codes into playful new forms. They’re objects as much as accessories, practical but also theatrical.
Jack McCollough & Lazaro Hernandez at Loewe
They are moving from their own label (Proenza Schouler) into a major house. Their first Loewe collection is framed as a pivotal “new chapter” for the house.
Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez made their debut at Loewe with a collection that sought to reconcile structure and fluidity, redefining the house’s codes through color, material and touch.
The collection opened with glossy, heat-sealed leather jackets molded in sculptural bell shapes, setting the tone for a collection where structure met movement. Meticulous craftsmanship then elevated everyday garments – denim, shirting and windbreakers – transforming them through shredded leather, precise pleating and wire-threaded knits.
Texture became the collection’s defining language: grated leathers softened to a terry-like touch, compact relief knits added dimension and polished pieces reflected light like liquid architecture.
Ultimately, color shaped the narrative. Bold geometric compositions of yellow, red, and black recalled Ellsworth Kelly’s Yellow Panel with Red Curve (1989), while chartreuse, cobalt and persimmon added pulse to the palette’s calm neutrals. Striped and paneled pieces translated these chromatic blocks into movement across the body, while accessories – oversized sunglasses, sculptural heels and structured leather bags, including a revival of Loewe’s iconic Amazona – sharpened the silhouette.
With their debut, McCollough and Hernandez defined a new chapter for Loewe – refined yet dynamic, rooted in craftsmanship and modern design.
Pierpaolo Piccioli at Balenciaga
Known for redefining modern couture at Valentino, Pierpaolo Piccioli now turns his attention to Balenciaga, seeking harmony between tradition and transformation. His debut unfolded inside the house’s historic headquarters, where fifty-three looks bridged heritage and evolution.
The show opened with a modern take on the 1957 sack dress, a silhouette originally conceived to liberate women from the imposing weight of their clothes, reimagined by blending ease with precision.
Neo-gazar, introduced as a dual-layer union of organza and gauze, revived Cristóbal Balenciaga’s signature textile, combining structure and lightness to sculpt volume without rigidity.
Floral embroideries, metallic accents and oversized visor sunglasses punctuated the clean silhouettes, while bold shades of absinthe, magenta and crimson animated a palette grounded in neutral calm. Among the highlights, a strapless yellow gown entirely covered in hand-cut flowers embodied his pursuit of balance between his romantic sensitivity and Balenciaga’s architectural rigor.
The finale – a blush-pink gown trailing in silence – captured the essence of Piccioli’s new Balenciaga: emotional yet disciplined, sculptural yet weightless, an act of renewal rooted in reverence.
Miguel Castro Freitas at Mugler
For his first show as Mugler’s new creative director, Miguel Castro Freitas presented the Spring-Summer 2026 collection, “Stardust Aphrodite,” in a dark, brutalist underground car park in Paris.
The industrial setting emphasized his vision of a structured yet glamorous Mugler, making it stand out even more by contrast.
Freitas clearly wanted the collection to reflect his own interpretation of the brand.
He brought back the classic hourglass silhouette with wide shoulders, tight waists, and sculpted hips, using double-faced wool and satin tailoring that emphasized Mugler’s precision and power dressing.
At the same time, he reintroduced the detailed handwork Thierry Mugler was famous for, including jeweled bodices, corseted jackets, and plume-covered coats.
The looks played with contrast mixing simplicity with excess. There were second-skin bodysuits paired with feathered skirts, nip-waist coats and dresses in black patent.
Overall, Freitas’s debut was a reminder of the house’s dramatic heritage but seen with a set of fresh eyes.
Matthieu Blazy at Chanel
The “Wizard of Milan”, aka Matthieu Blazy, made his Chanel debut a truly ethereal experience by presenting the Spring-Summer 2026 show under a ceiling of planets at the Grand Palais in Paris. The cosmic atmosphere matched the collection defined by elegance, lightness, and extreme attention to detail, showing Blazy’s ability to merge technical skills with artistic vision.
He focused on keeping Chanel’s classic tweeds and tailoring while giving them a more modern and much-needed refresh. His approach reflected his idea of “silent luxury”, where the looks speak through craftsmanship, fabric, and construction rather than logos or spectacle. The result was a quieter type of sophistication that invited the viewer to look at the details rather than feel overwhelmed.
Blazy also updated Chanel’s house codes through fine layering and subtle details, adding knit tops, camellia embroidery, and a reimagined 2.55 bag with a flexible wire flap that gave it a personal, lived-in touch. His use of color was sober yet luminous, with shades of ivory, champagne and pastels.
The tweed suits were made lighter through a viscose blend and cropped jackets were paired with sleek trousers. Followed by satin T-shirts paired with feathered ball skirts, soft knits and chiffon skirts. These looks balance structure and softness, mixing elegance with modernity.
This collection brought the freshness and modernity the house needed, while preserving Chanel timeless elegance and sophistication, marking the start of a new era for Chanel after Karl Lagerfeld and Virginie Viard.
Duran Lantink at Jean Paul Gaultier
Duran Lantink made a memorable debut in Paris as the latest guest designer for Jean Paul Gaultier, delivering a collection that was equal parts chaotic, sensual, and subversively intelligent. Presented in the basement of the Musée du Quai Branly, the show unfolded in a dim, industrial setting filled with scattered relics such as glasses, cards, and cigarette butts, creating the feeling of an afterparty suspended in time. The atmosphere perfectly captured Lantink’s fascination with beauty in disorder, and with clothes that tell stories of real, lived-in lives.
Rather than mining the archives literally, Lantink approached Gaultier’s legacy conceptually, questioning what it means to be Gaultier today. The collection, titled “Junior,” referenced the house’s youthful 1980s line but reinterpreted it through Lantink’s lens of queerness, deconstruction, and sustainability. He is known for upcycling and splicing garments into new forms, and here that sensibility became couture. The result was a mash-up of contrasts: padded cone bras inflated into sculptural busts, striped sailor tops distorted into surreal vertical patterns, and sheer printed bodysuits showing photographed skin, hair, and anatomy, a literal layering of image over flesh.
Lantink’s rationale was to explore the human body not as perfection but as a site of play, imperfection, and transformation. His pieces celebrated physical diversity and the tension between attraction and discomfort. The exaggerated, bulbous shapes hinted at protection and self-armor, while the revealing cuts and transparent layers spoke of exposure and vulnerability. It was fashion that invited the viewer to confront their own ideas of beauty and desire.
The show’s energy felt like a rebellion against nostalgia, a refusal to sanitize Gaultier’s daring legacy. Instead, Lantink infused it with his own chaotic tenderness, proving that the true spirit of Gaultier lies not in imitation but in fearless reinvention.
Conclusion
Paris this season felt like a city reborn. Across its storied maisons, each debut offered a distinct vision of what heritage can mean in 2026, not as repetition but as transformation. From Matthieu Blazy’s quiet refinement at Chanel to Jonathan Anderson’s cerebral fluidity at Dior, from Pierpaolo Piccioli’s poetic rigor at Balenciaga to Miguel Castro Freitas’s high-voltage glamour at Mugler, and finally Duran Lantink’s raw, rebellious energy at Jean Paul Gaultier, a shared narrative emerged: fashion is moving beyond nostalgia.
What united these shows was not a single aesthetic but a new honesty, a willingness to embrace imperfection, contradiction, and emotion. Each designer approached legacy as a living language, rewriting it through craftsmanship, experimentation, and personality. Paris Fashion Week became less about spectacle and more about evolution, with creativity grounded in purpose rather than excess.
In this new era, heritage no longer weighs down; it propels forward. The city that once defined the past of fashion now seems intent on shaping its future, bold, human, and gloriously alive.
