Mon dieu, it’s over. Paris Fashion Week crowned an ever-extending fashion month with a seismic shakeup that resulted in 14 designers presenting debuts, and the “essence” of brands brought into question more than ever by pundits and social media commentators alike.

Now that we’ve had a moment to metabolize the week (and a half), we pluck three golden threads that glinted through this season’s gorgeous, tangled weave: a yearning for grandeur, a thriving avant-garde, and a renewed vision of womanhood.

Echoes of Grandeur

A wave of splendor swept through Paris as designers indulged in ceremony, drapery, and emotional excess, reaching back into history’s wardrobe to conjure a kind of baroque futurist reverie. A bygone opulence echoed through Saint Laurent’s countess silhouettes, Valentino’s eerie vintage, and Chloé’s sunlit nostalgia, with each marque tapping into the grandeur of silk and lace, ruffles and ruching in its own way.

Saint Laurent
Beyond the show’s breathtaking spectacle, Anthony Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent collection was focused and undiluted—three essential looks that will be instantly recognizable in the wild as this season’s signature. First the smoking tuxedo, next the safari jacket, and in the show’s third act, beneath the shimmer of the Eiffel Tower, models in billowing, jewel-toned gowns flurried through a garden of begonias. Ruffled capes and collars bloomed like the petals of an overblown flower, the gowns’ silhouettes at once ecclesiastical and operatic. Part aristocrat, part diva in exile.

Valentino
For his debut, Alessandro Michele bathed Valentino in satin and light. Silk scoop collars, lace empire sleeves, and sequined peacock-pattern gowns emerged, refracted through his singular romanticism. It was opulence as séance, an oldschool glam spliced from across decades. Opening and closing with a reading of an antifascist letter, the show unfolded like a requiem, each look an invocation polished to a devotional, delirious glimmer.

Chloé
For the Summer 26 collection, nostalgia bloomed from Chloé’s ’50s archive. Peppy watercolor florals are printed across draped silks, followed by layered dresses folded, ruched, and knotted, with slung hemlines to form plush silhouettes. With a bag slumped over their shoulder, models evoked the glamour of poolside starlets and reluctant bridesmaids alike, their beauty casual and wistful.

The avant-garde plays as hard as it dies

Once home to Duchamp, Matisse and Picasso, this season reflected the full spectrum of Paris’s Avant-Garde spirit. From Schiaparelli’s surrealism, to Loewe’s duality of precision and play, to Alaïa’s conceptualism, designers lauded the city’s cutting-edge legacy, while prompting timely thought about what the future of fashion and the world-at-large might look like.

Schiaparelli
A sculptural study in subtraction, almost every look in Daniel Roseberry’s latest ready-to-wear collection featured some sort of perforation or sheer element resulting in Dalí-esque optical illusions. Gold-trimmed asymmetric circles, evocative of the melting clocks in the Spanish surrealist’s The Persistence of Memory, were cut from several garments to reveal bare skin underneath. Others boasted three-dimensional protruding necklines and blooming collars. An ode to Elsa Schiaparelli’s own surrealist spirit, the show read like an exhibition, making the storied Centre Pompidou a fitting location for its display.

Alaïa
Dramatic restraint was at the crux of Alaïa’s Spring 2026 ready-to-wear collection. Creative director Pieter Mulier revisited and revived founder Azzedine Alaïa’s sculptural codes based around the natural shape of the female body, particularly his signature balloon pants, and elaborated them with his own humour and wit. Waistbands were pulled up so far they morphed into cocoonesque tops, swaddling models’ arms, with fringe so long it swept the floor. The collection was silly, but in its own Duchampian, thought-provoking Alaïa way. 

Loewe
New Loewe is both kiki and bouba. Seamless flared leather minidresses, otherwise sleek and sharp, bounce down the runway, while crumpled knit minis look like they could draw blood to the touch. Towel dresses hastily wrapped, soft yellow cottons are layered over bright reds with jet black leather shorts peeking out underneath. Loewe’s play with materiality, color blocking, shape, and tone is at once cartoonish and precise. The transparent pointed jelly heels revealing the bright orange socks underneath sum it all up, really.

Une Femme Moderne

With women’s rights under intense global scrutiny, and the ever-rotating musical chairs of Creative Directors at fashion houses, several collections both from legacy designers and new faces at the helm seemed to address a singular question: what does it mean to dress the modern woman?

Chanel
Not only did Matthieu Blazy breathe new life into the historic house with his debut collection for Chanel, he harkened back to the core vision and ethos that founder Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel set for the brand over a century ago. Her vision centered around comfort and power and largely inspired by menswear, broke many of the rules and codes of womenswear at the time. In Blazy’s Chanel, this masculinity is pushed a step further. Shoulders, waists and hems were taken down a notch from their classic Chanel proportions, signature pinks and creams were swapped for reds, greys and blues. Yet the house’s trademark tweed endured, as did its art deco influences. Blazy looked to the cosmos for the show’s set, turning The Grand Palais into an interstellar starscape. While Gabrielle defined a singular Chanel woman, Blazy’s Chanel addresses the universal.

Miu Miu
For Spring/Summer 2026, Miuccia Prada paid homage to women’s work. In contrast to the female creative communities the Miu Miu brand supports through initiatives like its ‘Women’s Tales’ film platform, this latest collection honored women in the kitchen, in the garden, in the factory, even in the operating room. Yet across all-things Miu Miu there remains a female gaze that—try as they may—male creative directors can’t quite embody. Overalls and aprons were colored in ‘60s-mod cobalts and deep teals. With the rise of the “tradwife” trend over the past year, Miuccia Prada kept her finger on the pop-culture pulse with a collection that serves as both a mirror and a critique.

Givenchy 
“I want to address everything about modern women. Strength, vulnerability, emotional intelligence, feeling powerful or very sexy–all of it” wrote Creative Director Sarah Burton in the show notes for her inaugural Fall/Winter 2025 Givenchy collection. And that she did. One season later, in her sophomore show for the house, Burton lays the modern woman bare with an erotic array of plunging necklines, bodysuits cut high to show as much leg as possible, and sleek-yet-wearable bras. Amid trends towards suiting, menswear, and covering up, Burton reminds women that power lies in their sensuality, which they reveal at their own discretion.

Hermès
In Spring/Summer 2026, the Hermes equestrian goes rogue in the best way possible. Nadège Vanhee’s latest offering received a notable and well-deserved outpouring of praise, largely centered around the collection’s wearability. Once confined to equestrian shows and saddles, this season’s Hermès woman is riding bareback through the plains and mountains of the Wild West. Corseted in her sumptuous utilitarian earthtone leather bra and knee-length chaps, she is unconstricted, she is free.

In the end, Paris was a web well-spun. Across all the sequins and subversion, the drama and the restraint, and the reaching to pasts and futures, these golden threads formed an image of fashion still endlessly in the making.