By the time Paris rolls around, fashion month fatigue usually sets in, yet this season, the city had everyone leaning forward again. With major creative director debuts and house codes being rewritten in real time, there was a sense of fashion finding its balance: between legacy and experiment, restraint and reinvention. 

Across the runways, heritage met experimentation, and craftsmanship became the common language. It wasn’t about excess or spectacle, but about clarity, how to say more with less, how to make fashion feel alive again. Paris didn’t just close the season; it distilled it.

Courrèges

At Courrèges, Nicolas Di Felice quite literally turned up the heat. His SS26 collection traced the arc of a solar cycle, from 21 degrees at dawn to 30 degrees at full blaze, as colours thawed from ice blue to molten orange, and silhouettes softened in the glare. Guests were warned of what was coming: each received a pair of Courrèges sunglasses as their show invite. They’d need them.

Under an ever-brightening light, Di Felice’s signature futurism grew fluid. Draped caps with misty visors melted into bodysuits, mini skirts flashed check patterns reimagined as solar panels, and swimsuits morphed into cut-out dresses. Plant-based vinyl glowed in sunset tones, sequins and silks caught the light like heat haze. Even the accessories seemed to bend in the warmth, soft leather bags, slouched and sun-ready.

Set within a circular space and scored by Di Felice and Erwan Sene, the show built to a literal whiteout. Courrèges at full zenith: intelligent, sensual, and dazzling enough to leave you seeing stars.

Dior

Anticipation hung thick in the air for Jonathan Anderson’s first women’s collection for Dior and what unfolded felt like a recalibration of the house. Anderson approached Dior’s history not as something to preserve, but to pull apart and quietly reassemble.

He stripped back the theatre and sentimentality, leaving something cooler, silhouettes that balanced gesture and restraint. Familiar house codes reappeared in distortion: tailoring unfastened at the seams, draped jersey replacing rigidity, flashes of underpinnings suggesting both armour and undoing. It was Dior seen through a refracted lens, still romantic, but with the haze cleared.

The set, created by Luca Guadagnino and Stefano Baisi, played like an emotional echo chamber, while an Adam Curtis film looped ideas of control and change from the Dior archives. Together, they framed a debut that posed questions, a designer unpacking what Dior means today, and daring to leave some of it unsaid.

Carven

At Carven, a new chapter opened quietly. Mark Thomas’s debut as design director traced a refined silhouette through Paris, confident, calm, and unmistakably French. The clothes moved with deliberate ease: loose, joyful tops that skimmed the body; foulard details that caught the air with every step; and waistlines contoured in the house’s signature Esperanto line, reimagined as relaxed sportswear for the modern city rhythm.

The palette was soft with orchid white (Madame Carven’s favourite), smoky black, gentle ecru, tones that flattered skin and invited touch. Lace, voile, jacquard, and silk grounded the collection in French savoir-faire.

A collection built on quiet sensuality and restraint, it felt like Carven returning to itself, light, poised, and perfectly in motion.

Issey Miyake

At the Centre Pompidou, Issey Miyake presented Being Garments, Being Sentient a show divided into five concepts that felt like chapters in a living textbook on imagination. Each explored a different facet of what clothes can be when they stop behaving as we expect them to.

In “ARMS”, sleeves multiplied and curved around the body, turning outerwear into something almost creaturely. “GENERIC WEAR” played with the idea of clothes in flux, garments that seemed to shed and reshape themselves mid-motion. “CONCEALED” toyed with protection, wrapping the wearer in tubular folds that held both space and air. “RUSH” introduced hand-woven plant fibres, reconnecting craft with futurism, while “INTERLINK” closed the loop with structures shifting from rigid to fluid, like movement itself materialised.

Sound artist Tarek Atoui underscored it all with a score built from skin, stone, and water, turning the room into something sensory and alive. In a season of nostalgia, Miyake reminded us that true futurism isn’t about machines but about imagination made physical.

Givenchy by Sarah Burton

For her second collection at Givenchy, Sarah Burton continued to prove why her approach resonates so deeply. Clothes that consider the body rather than command it; fuller cups, ease in the tailoring, and a cast that looked like real women, confident, sensual, unforced.

This season, opulence returned, not through volume but through detail. Oversized jewels draped across silhouettes caught the light like armour made intimate.  The styling was quietly brilliant: bags looped around wrists with metal chain straps, tangled among bangles, becoming jewellery themselves.  

Statement cuts remained, but the exaggerations eased, sharpness softened, proportions gentled, bringing a newfound lightness to the collection. Those shifts between strength and softness, polish and ease, felt like more than just design language, instead they created room. Room for Givenchy to speak to different kinds of women, for women to shape the clothes rather than be shaped by them. Burton’s power is in that openness: she designs with trust, not control, and it shows.