They say that when Daniel Roseberry, creative director of Schiaparelli, was asked how he felt now that he had become "the old guard" of Haute Couture week, the Texan was taken aback. "The what?" he asked. At 41! His experience on the runway of craftsmanship and skill surpassed that of his peers. He, in charge of opening the presentation for the spring-summer 2026 season, has, despite the freshness of his identity document, earned the veteran diploma.
For his proposal, the American has stirred heaven and hell. In the Sistine Chapel, during an artistic retreat in Rome, creativity ignited. Didactic images, the confrontation between glory and punishment, the colors of paradise birds, the tension of bodies, and the delicacy of strokes elevated his proposal. Intuition transformed into a parade of fantastical creatures observed through the surrealism of the maison: cascades where an eagle's head peeks out, beaded jackets from which snake teeth sprout on the shoulder blades and chest, structures that, like scorpion tails, curve over the back.
Layers of tulle overlap in search of the sfumato effect, and feathers - natural (from workshop reserves, so when they run out, designs must be modified) or created as optical illusions from silk bouquets - are hand-embroidered for up to 8,000 hours. Roseberry does not yearn for over-intellectualization. With his winged women, he aims to take flight.
Jonathan Anderson took off, amidst Arnaud's applause, with grace and lightness. For his debut in Haute Couture, Dior's creative director feels like he has "embarked on a doctorate." What was once "irrelevant" to him has now been revealed as a craftsmanship "in danger of extinction." Memory encapsulated in material has become the germ of his proposal: fossils like the ammonite inspire accessories, and a scrap of an 18th-century veil breathes life into pieces that, in motion, seem to blur like a shaken photograph.
The icons he presented in his ready-to-wear debut reverberate exalted: bows and drapes, botanical applications, and malleable forms are sublimated. Beneath earrings of peony and extraordinary orchid stems, even the most sober pieces give in to color: alongside a Bar jacket transformed into leather dresses or hand-knitted wool sweaters using almost forgotten techniques, vibrant silk clutches that handcuff the wrist. French craftsmanship, in Anderson's debut for Dior, leverages past techniques to solidify its future.
In his debut, Matthieu Blazy also spread his wings. Drawing from a haiku (bird on mushroom/ beauty in an instant/ suddenly, empty), the Belgian, creative director of Chanel, strengthened the house's new direction. With established models like Laura Ponte and bright promises like Bhavitha Mandava, a new joy was proclaimed in fringes, feathers, and iridescent scales that herald, festively, the arrival of the woman and in the lightest organzas, embroidered with techniques preserved by the Le19M collective, materializing her fleeting beauty.
From bags that seemed to float, a chiffon note with embroidered words in black emerged, like the scribbled note of lovers that had to be protected in the inner pocket of accessories designed by Gabrielle, a repository of secrets. That the future of the French house, jovial, focused on the exceptionalism of technique rather than visual shock, shines anew is not one of them.
The Italian houses looked at theirs, for the first time, without the eyes of their creators. Silvana Armani preserved the heritage received in a collection that safeguards the language constructed by her late uncle last September: silhouettes and fabrics whose sinuosity makes them seem liquid.
Alessandro Michele once again emphasized, now without Garavani, his discursive fashion: his collection for Valentino was displayed - superb, threaded with memories of the 1968 season and references to Metropolis - in a Kaiserpanorama, a panoptic structure through which guests viewed the proposals through a small window. Attention, freed from distractions. The meticulousness of the technique that prevents mass reproduction and the physical reaction of the fabrics mock in the last week of Haute Couture the internet's prison, where the algorithm that regurgitates is its warden and the suppression of concentration, the torture.