The Fall 2026 haute couture season in Paris unfolded under a single governing impulse: a deliberate and unfettered embrace of the fantastical. Across the week’s presentations, designers reached beyond the quotidian — not to escape reality, but to propose an alternative one, rendered in silk faille, sculpted organza, and hand-painted tulle.
At Schiaparelli, Daniel Roseberry continued his exploration of cosmic surrealism. A column gown embroidered with a hand-painted galaxy across its bodice and a tailored jacket whose shoulders tapered into architectural fins suggested a wardrobe for a celestial traveller. The collection leaned heavily on the house’s signature motifs — the keyhole neckline, the anatomical jewellery — but pushed them into a register that felt more mythological than terrestrial.
What united the season’s most memorable moments was not a common silhouette or colour story but a shared willingness to treat the garment as a vessel for narrative. In an industry increasingly dominated by data-informed product decisions and speed-to-market imperatives, the couture weeks’ embrace of the irrational, the elaborate, and the frankly impractical reads not as escapism but as an insistence on fashion’s right to be art before it is commerce.
Iris Van Herpen opened the conversation with a collection that seemed to have been dredged from the deep ocean. Translucent panels layered over bioluminescent hues caught the light in rippling patterns, while silhouettes that evoked jellyfish, coral, and bioluminescent plankton moved with an aquatic weightlessness. Van Herpen’s command of 3D-printed textile construction, combined with her signature laser-cut organza, delivered a show that was less a collection of clothes than an argument for fashion as a biological science.
