Summary
- Paris Fashion Week, running from September 29 to October 7, will host a significant number of creative director debuts for the Spring 2026 women’s RTW season, including Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, Jonathan Anderson at Dior women’s, and Pierpaolo Piccioli at Balenciaga, as the luxury sector grapples with dwindling sales and other challenges.
From September 29 to October 7, Paris will host a surge of creative director debuts centering on the Spring 2026 women’s RTW season.
Released on Thursday by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, the Paris Fashion Week calendar will include 76 runway shows and 36 presentations, but all eyes will be on the luxury establishment, which has seen a historic year of creative overhauls and challenges.
Leading the charge with perhaps the most highly anticipated debuts is Chanel, where Matthieu Blazy will present his first-ever line at 8 p.m., October 6, at the Grand Palais. Jonathan Anderson, among fashion’s busiest visionaries today, will follow up on his Dior men’s debut with his first Dior women’s collection on October 1 at 2:30 p.m. With big (chunky) shoes to fill following Demna‘s departure, Pierpaolo Piccioli‘s Balenciaga debut is another key event taking place on October 4 at 8 p.m.
On October 2 at noon, Miguel Castro Freitas will debut as creative director of Mugler, and the next day at 11:30 a.m., Proenza Schouler vets Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez are set to debut their first Loewe collection.
Glenn Martens, who presented his lauded couture debut for Maison Margiela in July, will shift gears to show his first RTW collection for the avant-garde label on October 4 at noon. Bringing Jean Paul Gaultier back to the ready-to-wear schedule after more than a decade, Duran Lantink will show his first JPG collection on October 5 at 4:30 p.m.
The question remains whether the wave of creative turnarounds will rescue the luxury sector from the hurricane of dwindling sales, labor scandals, data breaches, and tariff legislations that have taken a toll on the industry. While “the luxury slowdown” has become a common label for the current era’s woes, conscious brand evolution and aesthetic novelty could jump-start recovery.
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