Haute couture is not about fashion. Handmade and costing hundreds of thousands of dirhams per piece, it exists so far beyond everyday life that it occupies a realm of its own. From this elevated position, designers are free to explore ideas and cultural storytelling that stretch both their imagination and the virtuosity of the atelier.
It is a world of wonder and exquisite beauty, offering either a narrative response to – or an escape from – the realities of daily life. In an era of constant uncertainty, couture feels more than ever like a space to pause, and to breathe.
As Paris Haute Couture Week 2026 – which runs until January 29 – gets under way, we look at some of our favourite designers.
Georges Hobeika
Love. That was the message from Lebanese couturier Georges Hobeika in Paris. His collection, titled L’Amour, spoke of surrendering to a love that consumes both body and soul. “Do you remember ever loving deeply?” he asked – a timely question. As the world slides towards uncertainty, for a designer from a country that has experienced more than its share of upheaval, to offer love as the solution for this exact moment is a powerful reminder to us all
To tell this story, Hobeika leaned into love’s fragility. One look featured a skirt built from layers of stiffened satin, its surface animated by dense swirls of embroidery and beading; another used sheer tulle cascading from a wide, flat disc. Elsewhere, an embroidered golden cage encased the body like an imprisoned songbird – tragic, delicate and hauntingly beautiful.
Christian Dior
Jonathan Anderson made his hotly anticipated couture debut at Dior, watched from the audience by one of the house’s most storied predecessors, John Galliano.
The natural world – a bedrock of Dior – became the foundation of Anderson’s first couture offering. It opened with a procession of bulbous dresses that rotated around the body, twisting like trees as they grew. An asymmetrical skirt bloomed with tiny pink ribbon flower-buds; an evening gown was constructed from folds of black organza, pinned at the shoulder and hip with embroidered posies. Elsewhere, a coat appeared to be conjured entirely from grey and white feathers.
Orchids and chrysanthemums became earrings; a giant leaf was transformed into a sun shield. Nature is a language Anderson knows well – one he spoke fluently at Loewe – but with the skill of the Dior atelier now at his command, the possibilities feel boundless. Galliano, one suspects, would agree.
Rahul Mishra
Alchemy was the title of Rahul Mishra’s couture collection, which translated the elemental forces of earth, air, fire, water and ether into clothing. It opened with a long, fitted black look, the shoulders and head encased in a sheer cone dusted with silvery stardust; elsewhere, a catsuit appeared to burn, its torso wrapped in flames of orange tulle.
A procession of minidresses echoed the swirling motion of weather systems, rendered in sweeps of silver, white and blue beading that rose and spiralled like a blizzard. Looking deeper into the ether of outer space, Mishra closed with a column dress and shrug dappled in the blues and mauves of a distant nebula.
Schiaparelli
“I stopped thinking for the first time in years about how something should look, and instead about how I feel when creating it,” wrote Daniel Roseberry in his show notes, reflecting on a visit to the Sistine Chapel that gave him permission to feel clothes, rather than simply design them.
The result was a collection that was beautiful – and beautifully strange: a series of “infantas terribles”, hypnotic chimeras that were part woman, part beast, drawing on animals and birds of paradise. A reptilian dress sprouted a bustle of feathers and frills; sculpted jackets grew wings of plumage at the collar. One bustier dress, with a ballerina-like skirt, was smothered in tiny silken peacock feathers; another curved into the sting of a scorpion’s tail. Elsewhere, the spiked armour of a blowfish appeared in a look named after Isabella Blow, the late stylist who famously discovered designer Alexander McQueen.
Lavish, beguiling and utterly assured, the collection stayed true to Schiaparelli’s DNA – a charged collision of art and fashion. And in a neat case of life imitating art, actress Teyana Taylor sat front row in Roseberry’s reimagined Louvre jewels: a pearl-and-diamond crown and elaborate bow necklace inspired by Empress Eugenie’s pieces stolen in the infamous Louvre heist last October.
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