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Paris Haute Couture Week’s Fall/Winter 2026 season ran from July 6 to July 9 across the French capital, and its most talked-about debut belonged to Manish Malhotra, who presented his first collection on the official calendar on July 8 at the Pavillon Cambon in Paris. Titled Maa, the show was a tribute to his late mother. Balenciaga built its Fall/Winter 2026 collection around a tribute to its own atelier this season. Schiaparelli’s collection grew out of its designer’s account of a personal creative crisis.
Malhotra’s Maa collection opened the show with velvets, silks and brocades layered with zardozi, resham, sequins and pearls, worked through techniques his ateliers have spent decades refining. In his show notes, Malhotra wrote that his mother’s passing had turned memory into reflection and reflection into creation, calling the collection a tribute to “the architecture of a mother’s unconditional love,” a connection he said endures beyond time and distance. The palette drew from the sarees his mother wore through the 1970s. Malhotra also unveiled a new Manish Malhotra Jewellery collection alongside the couture pieces.
Anna Wintour, Isha Ambani, Karan Johar and actress Fan Bingbing sat front row. Malhotra told AFP the recognition was overdue, arguing that few countries can match India’s depth across textile, architecture, jewellery and embroidery. With his first appearance on the official Paris schedule, Malhotra became the fourth Indian designer featured by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode this season.
Roseberry opened the week for Schiaparelli on July 6. Piccioli’s debut also marked Balenciaga’s 55th couture presentation since the fashion house was established by Cristóbal Balenciaga in 1917. His show notes and closing moment centred entirely on the people who make the clothes. The notes credited the collection to the atelier itself, closing with the line that “couture is made by the people who live it.” At the finale, staged in a courtyard at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, Piccioli walked out with the entire couture studio, all dressed in their white coats, and the audience rose to a standing ovation as the group descended the staircase together.
Roughly a year into the role, this marked Piccioli’s first couture collection since joining Balenciaga in 2025.
Daniel Roseberry opened the week for Schiaparelli with a collection called The Call of the Void, staged on a mirrored runway at the Petit Palais. After a widely praised previous season, he tried to repeat the same creative process that had worked before, taking a research trip to see Gaudí’s architecture in Barcelona. It did not work. He described entering a “possibility-denying, misery-making cycle,” and the collection only began to take shape once he abandoned the idea of a formula altogether.
What emerged was a collection built from latex, silicone, real flowers preserved in sugar water, seashells and baked fish scales, materials rarely associated with couture. The finished collection did not fully take shape until Roseberry let go of a fixed process altogether.
Malhotra’s debut sat alongside a broader shift already underway for Indian design in Paris this season. Rahul Mishra staged Devi: The Eternal Muse under the Gothic vaults of the Collège des Bernardins, pulling references from the Ajanta Caves, a twelfth-century stone dancer from Karnataka, and the Tarakeshwara Temple. Vaishali Shadangule, the first woman of Indian origin to present on the official calendar, showed Swayam, a Sanskrit word meaning through one’s own being, opening in tones of stone, ash, and deep green. Models walked barefoot as the 30-look collection brought together fourteen regional weaving traditions, reflecting more than two decades of Shadangule’s collaboration with over 4,500 weaving families across India. Malhotra, Mishra and Shadangule all appeared on the same four-day calendar this season.
Elsewhere on the calendar, Elie Saab drew on Surrealism for Le Bal des Rêves Indomptés, staging a masked ball inspired by Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. Zuhair Murad scattered butterflies across gowns for a collection built around a woman who “refuses to surrender”, and Mohammed Ashi turned to Victorian mourning rituals for Ashi Studio’s masquerade.
Jonathan Anderson’s second couture outing for Dior paid tribute to sculptor Lynda Benglis, a nod to the art world that ran through several looks on the runway. Iris van Herpen closed her own show with a mini dress that had been charged inside a particle accelerator, giving the fabric a faint glow as it moved down the runway. At Chanel, Matthieu Blazy sent out a model holding an antique fairytale book that had belonged to Coco Chanel, part of a whimsical collection featuring vine motifs and towering heel shapes.
Off the official runway, Cardi B became one of the week’s most photographed style guests, working across multiple looks with stylist Kollin Carter. The Fédération’s calendar also included Robert Wun, Georges Hobeika, Alexis Mabille, Stéphane Rolland and Giorgio Armani Privé, alongside Fendi and Adeline André closing the week on July 9.
Front rows across the week carried their own weight. Bad Bunny attended Schiaparelli in a pastel yellow suit, Pedro Pascal turned up at Chanel, and Josh O’Connor sat for Dior. Syrian designer Rami Al Ali, based in Dubai, lived through recent Iranian missile and drone strikes there and said the industry was hopeful things would return to normal by autumn.
Iris van Herpen’s glowing fabric and Ashi Studio’s masquerade kept plenty of pure spectacle on the calendar this season. Malhotra, Piccioli and Roseberry each drew inspiration from a specific moment in their own lives this year. Piccioli’s team applied 24,150 feathers of shredded gazar to a single bustier dress and hand-painted 8,000 petals onto another look in the same show. Standing ovations followed all three shows, closing out a season that ran four days across the French capital.
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