Paris Haute Couture Week Fall/Winter 2026-27 opened on Monday with six shows across the day, from Schiaparelli’s opening slot at the Petit Palais to Rahul Mishra’s evening presentation. The season landed under unusual circumstances, arriving just days after Jonathan Anderson’s Dior wedding dress for Taylor Swift generated a reported 15 million dollars in media impact value over the July Fourth weekend, and with France’s World Cup run adding an extra layer of excitement to the city. Between Daniel Roseberry’s silicone experiments, Anderson’s ode to sculptor Lynda Benglis, and a run of shows from Iris van Herpen, Georges Hobeika, Rahul Mishra and Imane Ayissi, day one set a high bar for the four days to follow.
Schiaparelli
Daniel Roseberry kicked off the season with a collection called The Abyss, staged at the Petit Palais in front of a front row that included Bad Bunny, Michelle Yeoh and Emma Corrin. Roseberry traded couture’s usual satin and velvet for silicone and latex, casting full bodices from clay before rendering them in rubbery material worn by Amelia Gray and Karlie Kloss. A humanoid corset he described as Prometheus-inspired came with eyelets punched into the back to suggest a spine, while the runway overall leaned into aquatic imagery, with inflatable tentacles, jelly-like molded bustiers, fish scales and seashells worked into the silhouettes. Roseberry pulled his color palette from artist Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle and developed his silicone techniques with a Paris workshop known for making photorealistic silicone babies for film. He framed the direction as a deliberate answer to AI-generated design, telling press backstage that he still sketches every look by hand and that couture, at its best, should never be one-dimensional.
Dior
Jonathan Anderson presented his second haute couture collection for Dior at the Musée Rodin, transformed for the occasion into a garden filled with palm leaves and foliage. The collection took its cue from American sculptor Lynda Benglis, whose poured and knotted sculptural forms Anderson translated directly into fabric, including a silver lamé dress draped into a bow that echoed Benglis’s pleated metallic Goliath sculpture. Chintz sourced from an 18th-century Indian textile dealer appeared on bags and in the collection’s embroidery, a nod to Benglis’s own connection to Ahmedabad in Gujarat, and jewelry handmade in Jaipur featured carved green onyx and mother of pearl. Four new bags were produced in collaboration with Benglis herself, among them the Dior Cigale in metallic plissé. Anderson also reworked a 1948 Dior coat, the Arizona, with Benglis-inspired pleating, tying the collection back to the house archive even as it pushed into new material territory. The show arrived days after Anderson designed Taylor Swift’s wedding dress, a fact he addressed only briefly before returning to the work itself.
Georges Hobeika
Georges Hobeika returned to the couture calendar with father and son Georges and Jad Hobeika continuing to lead the house together, thirty years after it first opened its doors in Beirut. The collection kept faith with the maison’s signature red-carpet register, built around heavily embroidered textiles, delicate lace, satin and tulle. Beaded bodices, crystal fringe and metallic appliqués ran through the lineup, adding texture across structured floor-length gowns, A-line dresses and voluminous skirts alongside sleeker, form-fitting eveningwear. The palette stayed within a soft, restrained range, and the show closed with Georges and Jad walking the runway together, a gesture that has become something of a house ritual at the end of each season.
Rahul Mishra
Rahul Mishra, the first Indian designer to show on the official Paris Haute Couture Week calendar, presented a collection titled Devi that he called the most India-inspired lineup of his career. He drew on the Ajanta Caves in Maharashtra, a twelfth-century stone sculpture of a dancer, and the Tarakeshwara Temple in Karnataka, translating motifs that are thousands of years old through his own embroidery and construction techniques. Silhouettes took on the aura of black granite or copper, with one look built around a model whose head was flanked by sculpted faces mirroring the stonelike headdress she wore. The collection also marked Mishra’s first fine jewelry line, developed with Tanishq and incorporating his signature hexagon shapes and geometric cityscapes worked in precious stones. Isha Ambani and Cardi B sat front row together, both dressed in custom Mishra, with Cardi B in an ivory ensemble and Ambani in a slate grey-blue draped look.
Iris van Herpen
Iris van Herpen filled the Élysée Montmartre with smoke for a collection inspired by plasma, lightning and the geometries of galaxies, incorporating roughly 30,000 hand-blown glass spheres across the lineup. A standout piece, the Nebula dress, was built from two lunar-like forms of hand-blown glass filled with plasma that reacted to the wearer’s own magnetic field, glowing and shifting whenever a hand came near. Another look, made in an annealing PMMA, was charged inside a particle accelerator and kept at close to minus 100 degrees Celsius in a cryogenic crate before the show, emerging with Lichtenberg lightning patterns fused into its structure. Van Herpen said the process left her newly attuned to fractal patterns in nature, from root systems to river deltas, and noted that the making of the collection coincided with the strongest thunderstorms she has experienced in the Netherlands. The result continued her ongoing project of pairing couture with material science most designers would not think to touch.
Imane Ayissi
Imane Ayissi opened his show with a voiceover inviting guests to fasten their seatbelts, setting up a collection built around the idea of flight and dedicated to his late mother, a former model and air stewardess. Saturated silks in varying weights met dramatic raffia fringing shaped into wing-like forms and headwear, with the house’s usual references to Cameroonian craft appearing more sparingly than in past seasons. A handful of tie-dye looks stood out, including a dusty pink and white cape and tapered trouser combination, alongside a loose beaded top in floral motifs that marked a new technique for the designer. Ayissi also played with volume, sending out a boxy shift dress that unfolded into a bias-cut train and cape at the back, and closing the show himself with a walk down the runway, having missed his January show after a back injury.
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Images: Supplied & Feature Image: Supplied
