The fall/winter 2026 season came to a close on a high note, with a trio of shows that effectively captured and reflected where fashion is heading next. As brands compete for eyeballs and revenue, there has been a correlating tendency in recent years for clothes to get bigger, bolder and ever more bombastic. Nicolas Ghesquière did indulge in that tendency for spectacle at Louis Vuitton, but hidden amidst the showstoppers were also real wardrobe heroes that will stand the test of trend and time. At Chanel, Matthieu Blazy continued distilling and deconstructing the codes of Coco Chanel, who was all about the liberation of the female form. Now four collections in, he's proved why he is her true successor. Meanwhile, Miuccia Prada rejected excess at Miu Miu in favour of something more intimate and immediate, and ultimately, more impactful.

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CHANEL

Now that Matthieu Blazy has gotten all his big Chanel firsts out of the way—first ready-to-wear, first Metiers d’Art, first haute couture—he is settling in and really building out his Chanel universe. To drive the point home, the set at the Grand Palais was filled with towering cranes in primary brights. The starting point for his sophomore ready-to-wear show was a quote by Coco Chanel about the duality of women. “Be a caterpillar by day and a butterfly by night. There is nothing more comfortable than a caterpillar and nothing more made for love than a butterfly,” she once said. What she meant was that women needed both sensible pieces for their day-to-day lives, and sensational statements when it came time to shine. And Blazy delivered. He opened with the former, turning the Chanel skirt suit into ribbed knits—their jackets as easy as quarter-zip fleeces. He also transformed the brand’s signature tweed jacket into casual overshirts, polos and blousons. Inspired by Coco Chanel’s own languid wardrobe in the ‘20s and ‘30s, there were also pleated jersey polo dresses with dropped waists. 

Blazy doubled down on last season’s low-slung silhouettes, with dresses that feature a belt and a trompe l’oeil slit on the upper thigh.  While the shapes were simple and effortless, the textures were anything but. In fact, Blazy and the Chanel ateliers seemed to have upped the level of craft that went into the tweeds and the tweedy-looking things. Some of them were actually latex squiggled onto gauze; some looked like they'd been hacked away to reveal the lining and chainlink hems underneath; others were embroidered but see-through, offering a peekaboo glimpse of the silk lining below printed with the same patterns. There were tweeds shot through with Lurex and lace. And towards the end, there was a glorious Technicolour procession of fine chain mesh made to look like tweed. After all that spectacle, it was back to the cocoon. Blazy closed with two eternal Chanel-isms: A slim, black trouser suit; and a jersey LBD, its back scooped out to showcase a black camelia dangling between the shoulder blades. 

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LOUIS VUITTON 

For his latest show, Nicolas Ghesquière enlisted the Severance production designer, Jeremy Hindle, to transform the Cour Carrée at the Louvre into a scenography of rolling hills, but not as one might expect. These grassy knolls were blocky and boxy, as though in a lo-fi video game, or rendered by aliens mimicking Earthly nature. Super Nature was the title Ghesquière gave the collection. His starting point was clothing shaped by nature; fashion in reaction to the elements—think of the garb worn by shepherds, farmers, mountain tribes; people who live off and in harmony with the land. He transmogrified them into something that felt a little sci-fi but also paganistic and folksy at the same time, as though a future race of people cherry-picked from the past and their surroundings to fashion a wardrobe. Ghesquière’s opening statement consisted of a series of capes with monumental, mountainous shoulders. That attention-grabbing salvo out of the way, he got down to the business of making some truly great, wearable clothes like floaty, handkerchief-hemmed dresses collaged from many contrasting panels, and glossy leather jackets topped with wild tufts of shearling. Other standouts include perfectly tailored suits with shearling on the lapels and running down the sides of pants, as well as cropped mohair sweaters with matching miniskirts, occasionally adorned with whimsical paintings of lambs by the artist Nazar Strelyaev-Nazarko. 

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MIU MIU 

In a season that has veered towards too-muchness more often than not—oversized silhouettes, overwrought embroideries, overly complicated layers or constructions—the best collections were the ones that distilled things down to a pure essence, a clear idea. Miuccia Prada did just that with her fall/winter 2026 Miu Miu collection, which is a meditation on the smallness of the human body against the vastness of the world. She wanted to show that bigger isn’t always better, that small and quiet too can be beautiful, powerful, meaningful. It was one of the most stripped-down Miu Miu collections in a long time, harking back to the brand’s ‘90s visual identity. Suits, tunic-trouser combos, and slip dresses came in unadorned, plainly coloured fabrics washed and treated to look aged. Leather coats and jackets lent a sense of protectiveness to the pared-back looks, though these were not quite as simple—the shearling sprouting from their hems made you do a double take. Elsewhere, the fuzzy material lined car coats and windbreakers, giving unassuming pieces an inner richness. Prada also reclaimed a style that is undeniably hers: Slim, crinkled blazers worn over equally slim button-downs and pencil skirts in cool slate tones or warm neutrals. While everyone is trying (and oft failing) to mimic Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s inimitable style, Prada nailed the effortless minimalism of that era perfectly, without it coming off as reductive. That’s not to say that the designer has jettisoned decorative elements entirely. Many of the looks were accessorised with big trapper-fedora hybrid hats, and bedazzled slides and sneakers. Towards the end, she referenced flapper dresses but also reduced them to their bare bones—sheer and underwear-like, with just a smattering of sparkling bits. At a time when so much is going on, sometimes less is truly more.