Fashion often refers to haute couture as a fairy tale, and Matthieu Blazy embraced this comparison rather than resisting it. His second couture collection for Chanel, presented on Tuesday at the Grand Palais, featured a set built around the mythology of Jack and the Beanstalk, with the runway wrapped in oversized vines and flowers that looked as though they had grown wild overnight. The Fall 2026 couture show at Chanel became a study in what happens when a designer treats a brand’s founding myth literally rather than as marketing shorthand.
The reference point was personal rather than borrowed. Backstage, Blazy held a leather-bound volume of fairy tales, Les Fées by Charles Perrault, which once belonged to Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel and was discovered in her old Paris apartment. This find became the collection’s organizing idea, pairing storybook fantasy with daily practicality. Blazy wondered aloud if Chanel’s rise from a convent orphanage to the top of French fashion followed the same arc as the stories she kept on her shelf.
That question shaped nearly everything on the runway. Bean motifs, which Blazy’s team had planted and photographed as research, sprouted and grew into the show’s opening look: a sheer guipure vest and skirt that echoed a tweed weave blown up to a giant scale. Vine embroidery crawled across jackets adorned with three-dimensional blossoms. Spidery florals climbed a lilac linen shift, and insect-shaped buttons dotted a black jacket flecked with poison-green thread. None of it shouted. Blazy has plainly stated that Chanel couture resists spectacle for its own sake, favoring instead the kind of detail a client discovers only after owning the garment.
Some of that detail was hidden by design. Draped dresses and tweed suits carried tangled gold chains, crystals, and pearls, as if hastily grabbed from a jewelry box on the way out the door. Jacket linings held painted illustrations and mock to-do lists embroidered in sheer silk – a nod to the unglamorous errands that fill most women’s days. Frayed edges appeared throughout, nodding to Chanel’s famously rough treatment of fabric during fittings. She reportedly tore at sleeves rather than pinning them. Blazy has cited that physical aggression as an influence he shares with his years at Maison Margiela’s Artisanal atelier.
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Accessories carried the fairy-tale logic furthest. Minaudières took the shape of sleeping bears and plump hens. Heels were sculpted into butterflies, pea pods, and golden eggs, giving literal form to the idea of finding treasure in unlikely places. The house’s now-familiar dip-toe pump reappeared, too, reworked in iridescent and leopard patchwork finishes for the season. None of these objects read as costume. Instead, they functioned as small, wearable jokes that reward a second look rather than demand a first one.
Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion, framed the collection as a return to what distinguishes couture from ready-to-wear, calling nature the ultimate luxury and crediting Blazy with restoring a sense of purpose to a category that can veer toward pure fantasy. His enthusiasm was not hard to understand. Couture relies on scarcity and craftsmanship, and Blazy’s designs made both accessible again rather than abstract.
The closing look deliberately broke with convention. Instead of sending out a bridal gown, the traditional finale, Blazy chose a black, off-the-shoulder dress to follow the wedding look rather than replace it. Coco Chanel never married, and Blazy called this choice a fitting end to her fairy tale – one written on her own terms, not someone else’s. In other words, Fall 2026 couture at Chanel ended exactly where its subject would have wanted it to.
