New Delhi, July 12 -- Paris Haute Couture Week Fall/Winter 2026-27 saw designers mining their maisons' archives, revisiting founders' personal histories and using exceptional craft to tell evocative stories.

For his sophomore haute couture collection for Chanel, for instance, Matthieu Blazy transformed the runway into a fantasy garden, with each look unfolding like a fairytale drawn from the storybooks that lined Gabrielle Chanel's apartment library. It was a vivid interplay of fiction and function. From Jack and the Beanstalk to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the collection married whimsical narratives with the rigour of couture cut and construction, embracing both traditional and contemporary ways of seeing and making.

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