Chanel Fall 2026 Ready-to-Wear Runway, Fashion Show & Collection Review

Being a creative director at a heritage house involves its fair share of talking with ghosts — assuming you want to engage with the founder, which is not always a given.

At Chanel, that dialogue is hard to avoid, so much is the spirit of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel enshrined in her former private apartment on Rue Cambon. Since taking over as creative director last year, Matthieu Blazy has framed his collections as a fictional conversation with the legendary couturier, often letting her words guide his path.

For his second mainline collection, he took his cue from an interview she gave to French newspaper Le Figaro in the 1950s. Backstage after the show, he read an extract.

“Fashion is both caterpillar and butterfly,” he said. “Be a caterpillar by day and a butterfly by night. There is nothing more comfortable than a caterpillar and nothing more made for love than a butterfly. We need dresses that crawl and dresses that fly. The butterfly doesn’t go to the market, and the caterpillar doesn’t go to the ball.”

With the benefit of hindsight, it was a marvel to see just how closely his fall collection hewed to that concept, with looks that went from plain black jersey to metal mesh in a rainbow of iridescent color.

The venue, dotted with colored cranes reminiscent of a child’s construction set, was less transporting than last season’s planetarium, though the holographic floor was a nice foil for Blazy’s spiky 3D floral embellishments and glimmering surface effects.

“I was interested in the idea of building a dream,” he explained, hence his building block approach, with the Chanel suit as the first brick.

Stephanie Cavalli, who opened his couture show in January, was first out of the gate in a black knit zip-up jacket barely livened by four gold buttons.

In the cavernous setting of the Grand Palais, the workwear-inspired overshirts and tweed blousons could read as underwhelming. Switch their matching knee-length skirts for a pair of jeans, and you had a savvy update on the classic tweed jacket — one that worked equally well for women and men, a growing cohort of Chanel customers.

Again, Blazy was taking a leaf straight from the founder.

“There is in her apartment a gauze fabric that is applied on the wall and that has been painted in gold, and for me, it’s the best definition of Chanel — because she takes something poor, she adds something to it,” he said. “She took clothes from the working class, and she just shifted to luxury.”

References to the 1920s underpinned the daywear, from a silky drop-waisted twinset with a pleated coat to patchwork flapper dresses dusted with floral embroidery. There were Jazz Age echoes to the electric patterned knits, a pleated dress in sound graph stripes, and a furry coat in a colorful pattern that could have sprung out of a Sonia Delaunay painting.

Blazy yanked down waistlines with belts that hovered below the hips, but his idea of turning this area — a magnet for women’s anxieties — into a new “erogenous zone” struck one of the few false notes in the show.

What felt relevant and new was his idea of serving both the caterpillar and the butterfly. A caviar-beaded coat with silver constellation trim, or a pleated red sack dress, served drama without ostentation. Metal mesh suits with printed tweed motifs — and hair dyed to match — appeared like a final fireworks burst.

Blazy’s debut collection has finally landed in stores, with an exclusive launch in Paris last Thursday, to be followed by an international rollout on Friday. Judging from early feedback, Chanel has a hit on its hands, with editors thronging stores, and social media and group chats blowing up with accounts of long wait times and impossible-to-find styles.

Perched on her legendary mirrored staircase, the ghost of Chanel must be smiling.