Chanel Autumn/Winter 2026: The Caterpillar and the Butterfly

Most designers arriving at Chanel reach for reverence. Matthieu Blazy filled the Grand Palais with construction cranes.

The Show

Shown on the evening of Monday 9 March 2026 at the Grand Palais, on the penultimate day of Paris Fashion Week, this was Blazy's second ready-to-wear collection for Chanel and his third collection overall — following his October 2025 debut and his couture debut in January 2026.

A note on the date, because the published record is a mess: several outlets give 10, 11 or 12 March. Those are their own publication dates. The Associated Press reported from the show on the 9th, and Wallpaper* wrote “this evening (9 March)”.

The Idea

The collection notes opened with Gabrielle Chanel: “Fashion is both caterpillar and butterfly. Be a caterpillar by day and a butterfly by night.” Blazy's own statement, quoted by Wallpaper*, built on it:

Chanel is function, Chanel is fiction. Chanel is sensible, Chanel is seductive. Chanel is day, Chanel is night. It represents the freedom to choose between the caterpillar and the butterfly whenever you want.

Backstage he told Alexander Fury of AnOther that he had wanted to make “a second part of the first show, like a conversation” — and, on the house's archival codes, offered the line that explains his whole approach: “Honestly, I don't find them un-modern at all. It's how we look at them.”

The Clothes

Tweed was taken apart. Bouclé arrived recast as masculine work shirts and blousons, oversized in a lumberjack register, with tailoring untucked and hems left raw. Fury's observation is the sharpest thing written about the collection: “You've never felt a Chanel jacket so light, hems raw-cut, their decorative chains actually serving their original job, anchoring a flyaway garment to the body.”

• Shapes: dropped-waist 1920s dresses with ribbon streamers; a little black dress in sinuous jersey; chainmail evening jackets and coats.
• Fabrics: bouclé, quilted suede, ribbed knits, jersey, gauze and lace — several woven with lurex, silicone and artificial fibres.
• Colour: celadon, bubblegum pink, sherbet, azure, burgundy and black, shot through with iridescence.
• Bags: quilted Caviar styles fusing hardware from the 1955 2.55 and Lagerfeld's 1983 11.12; a beige suede flap with cross-hatched stitching taken from the couch in Gabrielle Chanel's apartment; and squidgy crescent shapes that Wallpaper* compared to croissants.

The buttons deserve their own line: cocoa beans and lions' heads, the founder's birth sign rendered as hardware.

The Room

Brightly coloured cranes rose from a holographic purple floor beneath the Grand Palais glass, ceiling lights scattered overhead like stars. Read literally it is a construction site — a house visibly, deliberately unfinished. The casting ran multigenerational, from teenagers to women in their fifties, several with hair tinted to match their looks. A remix of Lady Gaga's Just Dance played.

Note what is absent from every account we could find: no bow, no ovation, no finale tableau. We mention it only because that sort of detail gets invented, and it was not there.

The Verdict

Reception was warm to the point of unanimity among the writers who filed. Fury's summary carried the most weight: “Matthieu Blazy sees his Chanel as a work in progress. He's probably the only one that does.” Thomas Adamson for the Associated Press framed the stakes commercially and correctly — “Blazy has found something rare at a heritage house: a way to honor the founder's voice without simply echoing it.” Wallpaper* ran the headline “pure joy”. In W, Alison S. Cohn wrote that “the lady who lunches shed her chrysalis, revealing a woman who contains multitudes”.

We could find no substantial published pan. That is worth stating plainly rather than pretending to a controversy — though it also means the real test is still ahead.

The Irish Note

None identified. No Irish model appears in any cast list we could read, no Irish name in the reported front row, and no Irish title filed from the Grand Palais. Sometimes there simply isn't a local angle, and it is better to say so than to reach for one.

Hero photograph by mathieu gauzy on Unsplash. It illustrates the article and is not from the show.