Paris Haute Couture Week is under way and runs until Thursday.
More than just another round of fashion shows, haute couture is the pinnacle of creativity, where designers can imagine the most fantastical creations – testing the skill of their atelier – for a client untroubled by price tags.
Some houses have couture clients who demand a wardrobe that will take them through every aspect of their day. Others turn to couture for eveningwear that speaks volumes about its wearer.
Here are the highlights from the show in the French capital.
Manish Malhotra
For his Paris Haute Couture Week debut, Indian designer Manish Malhotra turned inward. Rather than looking to spectacle, he presented Maa, a collection shaped by grief and dedicated to his mother, who died just three months before the show.
The collection traced a deeply personal journey from childhood to adulthood, with each look serving as a reflection of the bond that inform both the man and the designer.
“Her passing has transformed memory into reflection, and reflection into creation,” Malhotra wrote in his show notes. He described Maa as “a tribute to the architecture of a mother's unconditional love, a connection that transcends time, distance and words”.
This resonated throughout a collection where emotion was expressed not through overt symbolism, but through the exacting language of couture itself.
Figures of mother and child were lovingly stitched into surfaces, as fabric cocooned in protective embraces. Filled with longing – and scattered with countless hours of astonishingly delicate, impeccable handwork – Malhotra drew beauty from his grief, and turned it into something physical.
Zuhair Murad
Zuhair Murad's Love and Dominion collection arrived as a flurry of butterflies, feathers, shimmer, velvet and translucent layers, drawing on the full vocabulary of haute couture.
Presented as a celebration of the extraordinary savoir-faire of the Lebanese designer's atelier, it offered cinematic silhouettes and an unmistakable sense of occasion.
With one eye firmly on the red carpet, as per Jennifer Lopez seated front row, Murad’s heroine was a woman who “refuses to surrender”, with her bold spirit expressed through smoky hues, crystal embellishment, black lace, nocturnal florals, feathers and dramatic silhouettes that seemed to move between darkness and light.
The opening look set the tone. Emerging through clouds of white smoke, a nacre-toned gown appeared beneath a sweeping, feathered stole, its surface illuminated with crystal.
Behind the collection’s theatrical beauty lay hours of painstaking craftsmanship. A black duchesse satin coat, one of the show’s most intricate creations, required 2,500 hours of work, while a mermaid gown required 600 hours to complete.
The accompanying cape became a labour of devotion in itself, with flowers individually created by hand, each petal and feather carefully capturing the fragile beauty of nature transformed through couture.
Elie Saab
The title of Elie Saab's autumn/winter 2026–2027 haute couture collection, Le Bal des Reves Indomptes (The Ball of Untamed Dreams), offered an invitation into a world where fantasy dissolves into reality.
The collection drew on the dreamlike universe of Surrealism, a revolutionary cultural movement that emerged in France in the 1920s, echoing the works of Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte, and the decadent mystery of masked balls.
The result was a procession of ethereal goddess gowns, sculptural silhouettes and lavish embellishment, with each look imbued with an air of enigmatic glamour and transformation. It was couture as escapism, a theatrical exploration of beauty, illusion and metamorphosis.
Ashi Studio
Ashi Studio's autumn couture show, titled A Different Skin, featured Victorian-era mourning rituals and masquerades as its focal point.
As the Saudi label celebrates its 20th anniversary, it is using this show to explore transformation and metamorphosis through a refined gothic lens.
It was dramatic, with vintage corseting and boning techniques creating shapes that stood proud on the body, almost like armour. Designer Mohammed Ashi utilised feathers, raffia, moire taffeta, shredded chiffon and lace to conjure beautiful looks.
The palette of earthy browns, smoke greys, dusty shredded ivories and black added to the sense of exquisite dishevelment.
A drop-waist corseted look came with a puffed taffeta kick-flare skirt, while more corseting was covered in brown snakeskin and polished to a deep shine. Cream resin became cracked body armour, edged with coiled feathers, as more feathers – now in chocolatey brown – smothered a high-shouldered, fitted dress with wings.
Like something from a gothic dream, Ashi transported his audience to a decadently faded, otherworldly place.
Georges Hobeika
Lebanese label Georges Hobeika delivered its collection, The Visitor, on the opening day.
In what may yet emerge as a trend, it reworked the torso with tight corsetry wrapped in delicate lace or gleaming satin.
The fabric created an exaggerated new width as the father-and-son designer duo played lightly with proportions through folds, pleats and netted skirts.
Necklines were key throughout this show. Layers of sheer, scalloped fabric, weighted with beading, also shifted proportions into swaying tiers.
One rigid body was covered in a mosaic of beading, while another dress – drop-waisted and backless – was made entirely from fluid silver beads.
This was about night-time decadence, told through column dresses, sheath cuts and a few theatrical full skirts, which started at the hips rather than the waist.
With a palette of champagne, sea blue, eau-de-nil, pale moss, teal and plenty of silvery beads, every outfit seemed to shimmer, like fish scales in water.
Catering to a woman with a busy evening calendar, the Lebanese label knows how to deliver endless offerings that are striking yet delicate and refined.
Rahul Mishra
In arguably his most India-inspired work to date, New Delhi-based designer Rahul Mishra delivered a couture collection that drew on ancient goddesses, statues and divinities.
Trompe l'oeil appeared to be carved from stone and was finished with embroidered arches and even painted faces as he recalled the dancers and goddesses chiselled into temple rock centuries ago.
He mixed this with embroidery to suggest choli blouses and the drapery of saris – rendered as looping beading that hung in ropes from hips and shoulders – or as stitched pleats tracing the contours of hips and legs.
The central pleat (called a fan or Thavani) of Bharatanatyam dancers became a recurring motif, as a beaded design around the hips or fashioned into long, gossamer skirts, while the flowers of the Sala Tree – long associated with temple dancers – appeared scattered across long, fitted column dresses.
This sleek silhouette was punctuated by a handful of dramatic departures: a sensual swath of black taffeta tumbling from the hips; a wide undulating skirt in black devore velvet that evoked a giant parasol; and the kick-flare hem of a mermaid gown, delicately scattered with flowers.
FOLLOW TN MAGAZINE