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Background:
Couture Spring/Summer 2026 arrived with a rare alignment between hype and delivery.
Jonathan Anderson’s couture debut at Dior reframed the craft as a six-month creative lab, channelling atelier know-how into objects of beauty with clear downstream impact.
At Chanel, Matthieu Blazy stripped back familiar codes to put construction, movement and the body first. Valentino offered a show of panoramic peepholes to slow the gaze, while Schiaparelli dialled up theatre for a global audience. Across the week’s shows, Amed and Blanks unpack how craft, intimacy and operational clarity can cut through a tougher luxury backdrop in 2026.
“Their sensitivity to the world that they’re working in seems more acute than it’s ever been,” says Blanks. “Perhaps it’s a sense of responsibility and gratitude about the positions they’re in and a strong intent to make the most of what they’re being given.”
Key Insights:
- Departing from the codes of previous designers, Blanks was struck by how much of Anderson’s own sensibility made it onto the Dior runway, from Magdalene Odundo’s vase forms to historic textiles and witty, collectible accessories. “I felt like there was real synthesis … I think he showed some of the most beautiful things he’s ever shown, and some of the most joyful clothes.” Within 90 minutes of the show, the full collection was installed at Villa Dior for clients to handle and order, underscoring Anderson’s structured, end-to-end planning. As Amed notes, “He’s operational … He thinks about the way it all works together. That’s quite rare in a designer.”
- Mathieu Blazy pared Chanel back to construction and movement, dialling down overt couture signatures to foreground cut and daytime dressing. The result read as a wardrobe built on the body rather than surface effect, with exquisitely fine details — budgies perched on pocket anchors, bird-on-mushroom motifs, slingbacks with tiny avian heels — that reward close looking. The Grand Palais spectacle amplified the tension between intimacy and scale, but as Blanks notes, “It does underscore in a very graphic way that couture is the ultimate private pleasure.”
- Alessandro Michele’s Specula Mundi for Valentino revived the 19th-century Kaiserpanorama to slow the audience’s gaze and amplify detail. Reading from Alessandro’s letter, Blanks highlights: “We continue to work within this space not to fill an absence, but to preserve it. Only by accepting such a void, with no intention to fill it, can Valentino’s legacy remain what it has always been.” Another line reads: “There is no fantasy without beauty, and there is no freedom without beauty and fantasy.”
- A common thread this season is that designers are newly humbled by the expertise of the craft. “Everybody was talking about their ateliers, all these ready-to-wear designers being confronted with what a couture atelier is capable of,” Blanks says. After visiting Valentino, he notes: “There were five separate ateliers working on the clothes … I can’t thread a needle, but I got kind of palpitations walking through — it’s just so incredible, that kind of artistry.” Anderson himself calls Dior’s workrooms a “mini city” of ultra-specialists.
