Luxury house Chanel presented its Fall Winter 2026 Haute Couture collection on July 7 in Paris, with Matthieu Blazy delivering his second couture season for the House as Artistic Director of Fashion Activities. Titled Gaby and the Beanstalk, the collection begins with a question drawn from Gabrielle Chanel’s own life and library: could couture tell stories like a book?
COUTURE COLLECTIONS
Blazy found a small volume in Chanel’s apartment library, Les Fées, Contes des Contes, and used it as the starting point for a collection shaped by fairy tales, private memory, daily use, and the women who wear Chanel. The collection refers to Jack and the Beanstalk and Goldilocks and the Three Bears, yet Blazy keeps the clothes anchored in Chanel’s couture practice. The House’s tailleur, flou, and galon ateliers guide the work, joined by fabric-making, embroidery, pleating, hat-making, goldsmithing, and shoemaking from le19M. Craft gives the fairy-tale references their physical form.
“I created my life because my life did not please me” – Gabrielle Chanel
A Chanel suit opens the show, cut from guipure that recalls magic beans and paired with transparent light silk mousseline. The model carries Les Fées, Contes des Contes, taken from the shelf of Gabrielle Chanel’s apartment library. From that first look, the storybook enters the garments directly. A vine climbs the heel of a shoe. A small minaudière takes the shape of a sleeping bear. Buttons shift from duckling to swan.
Blazy also places much of the collection’s meaning inside the garments. Painted-silk linings offer private pleasure for the wearer, while notes, charms, and small objects appear inside pockets, interiors, and along the famous Chanel weighting chain. These details treat couture as a private exchange between maker, garment, body, and mind.
The thieving magpie becomes a key figure in this accumulation. Memo notes, charms, bric-a-brac, and everyday artefacts gather through the collection, then pass from interior detail to outer decoration. Necklines, hems, fabrics, and accessories change through embroidery, layering, appliqué, and handwork. Blazy raises ordinary objects into couture materials, placing make-do-and-mend ideas beside noble fabrics and refined atelier skills.
“I started to wonder, was Gabrielle Chanel’s life a fairy tale? I found a small book in her library, Les Fées, Contes des Contes, and asked myself if, together with the Haute Couture ateliers, we could make garments that tell stories like a book.” – Matthieu Blazy
The show salon adds another layer to the story, filled with poisoned vines and toxic flowers. Inside that setting, Chanel histories gather around construction and the body. Blazy focuses on the cutting skills of the tailleur and the fluid work of the flou, using slashed clothes and bisected forms to recall Gabrielle Chanel’s physical approach to dressing. The garments address the salon, yet they also suggest action and daily life.
Blazy returns to the idea of the purposely imperfect, giving couture a lived quality. His Chanel Haute Couture links fantasy to women, reality, dress, and the daily adventures held inside clothes.
