Congratulations team, another season is done and dusted. If you count the official beginning of fashion week as the moment the first model stepped out for Michael Kors’ runway at 11am on September 11th in New York, then this SS26 fashion “week” has lasted 26 consecutive days. Since then we have seen hundreds of catwalks, over ten thousands outfits, and one children’s orchestra.

The highlight of this season was the abundance of debuts, whether first womenswear collections or first collections altogether. Mostly focused in Paris, these debuts meant that most of the fashion pack — the journalists, the buyers, the influencers — approached the season with little knowledge of what was in store. Some debuts, such as Jonathan Anderson’s first womenswear collection at Dior, made global headlines. Others, such as Pierpaolo Piccioli’s debut for Balenciaga and Haider Ackermann’s womenswear debut for Tom Ford, suggested that these legendary houses had been left in capable hands. Some provoked strong reactions, like Glenn Martens at Maison Margiela and Duran Lantink at Jean Paul Gaultier. While others, like Jack and Lorenzo at Loewe and Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, signalled an exciting new chapter for their brands.

It was always destined to be the show that drew the most attention this season. When Jonathan Anderson made his Dior debut during the menswear schedule back in June, he demonstrated an exceptional familiarity with the house’s archives. His distinctive takes on the Bar Jacket and the Book Tote were celebrated for their playful reimagining of some of Dior’s most enduring icons. For his womenswear offering, he further proved his intimacy with the archives.

The presentation opened with a short film by cult documentarian Adam Curtis. Using Curtis’s signature rapid-cut style, the film traced Dior’s story from 1947 to the present day, setting the tone for what felt like a true new beginning. The show space, often as important to Jonathan Anderson as the collection itself, was an inverted pyramid, an uncanny mirror of the ones in the nearby Louvre courtyard.
As we wrote in our report for the show: “Anderson’s inaugural collection boasted 74 looks. Opening with a pristine white dress draped into a crinoline silhouette, anchored by two bows, a series of garments which blended the past with the present followed. Archival references were palpable yet distinctly Anderson; the pirate-esque headwear harked back to Galliano’s Dior, while iconic silhouettes such as the Bar Jacket were reinterpreted with structured shoulders and navel-grazing cuts.”

Another womenswear debut came just a few hours after Anderson’s for Dior. Haider Ackermann debuted his dark and sexy vision for Tom Ford back in June, but this season he ramped it up to the next level. Eschewing the traditional catwalk formation, his models instead came out in groups, like packs heading on a night out. Their gate was almost alien, a quality accentuated by the otherworldliness of the severe, matching haircuts and permanent sunglasses. To a soundtrack of disorientating pulses and throbs, it was easy to lose yourself entirely in the show. Was it day or night? What city are we in?

As we reported: “Steamy mirrors around the show space, guests seated on plush benches. We’re in a club, somewhere. We’re not sure how we made it past the door. Why is everyone wearing sunglasses inside? There’s women wearing full leather. Their skirts have delicate doily patterns on them, their bras are mesh, but it’s all black leather. It all comes together with a shocking red lip. The men are in jock straps. They’re black and you can see them through their shorts. One’s carrying a newspaper. Another has a white jumper wrapped around his neck. Where are they coming from and where are they going?”

Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez’s rise to the creative directorship of Loewe was one of the season’s most intriguing moves. As the founders of Proenza Schouler, a brand named for their mother’s maiden names, they had been stalwarts of New York Fashion Week, becoming one of the most popular and successful brands to come out of the city this century. Moving to Loewe marked the first time the designers ever worked outside of the brand they’d founded over twenty years previously.

Before the show, they’d teased their new era for Loewe with a series of sun-drenched images by Talia Chetrit, unveiling a new cast of faces such as Lewis Gribben, Eva Victor and Isla Johnston alongside shots of wet t-shirts, bikini bottoms and cherries. Taking inspiration from the colour-field painter Ellsworth Kelly, their debut collection saw incredible colour blocking, matched with sleek leathers that harked to Loewe’s history as a leather brand. Hot pants were paired with sculptural leather jackets, slouchy five-pocket denim jeans were worn with nothing but a jumper slung over the shoulders, and rigid mini dresses held an hourglass shape. Touches of sportswear came through in technical anoraks and tank tops, walking alongside sweeping fuzzy outerwear, beaded skirts and streamlined trenches – immortalising the duality of the Spanish house’s enduring codes.

Glenn Martens’ presented his first ready-to-wear collection for Maison Margiela, after debuting with a couture collection back in July. The show opened with 61 young musicians, all dressed in oversized tuxedos, playing through a selection of classical music. The problem, however, was that not a single one of them could hit the right note. The resulting runway, paired with some deeply four-stitch sinister mouth pieces, had an unsettling air to it. You couldn’t help but laugh at the sheer insanity of it.

On the runway, Martens was keen to display his knowledge of the house and its founder. The long leather coats and low crotch trousers were distinctly 90s Margiela, matched with the deconstructed tailoring of the following jacket and waistcoat looks that is one of the house’s signatures. Many of the coats and jackets, be they leather or denim, had ribbons of fabrics hanging from them, which was a reference to the ties on the house’s famously anonymising white lab coats (the blouse blanche) that are worn by all staff. A number of pieces required a closer look to reveal their peculiarities, such as a slip dress that looks like it’s being cinched by a belt but it’s actually duct tape, another bit of tape is also keeping the lace together at its top.

The award for biggest transformation between creative directors has to go to Balenciaga. During Demna’s tenure, he made the brand entirely his own, injecting his satirical, often controversial, humour into the brand. For Pierpaolo Piccioli, it was all about bringing the house back to something that Cristóbal Balenciaga himself would recognise. At the show, each guest was greeted with a letter from Piccoli on their seats upon arrival, opening with the lines, “The heartbeat is the rhythm we share—the pulse that reminds us we are human. Even so, every heart beats differently. […] This collection exists because we recognised, saw, and welcomed one another.”

Turning directly to the legendary designs of Cristóbal Balenciaga, Piccioli’s debut collection recalibrated traditional principles for today, bridging the past with the present and looking to the future. Intricately feathered skirts were paired with opera gloves snaking up the arms and hi-low silhouettes of ultra-cropped tops and sweeping trousers or skirts left midriffs on display. The collection also offered up a series of highly wearable looks featuring denim jeans, leather bombers, bermuda shorts, tailored suit trousers and enveloping car coats. The bug-eyed shades nodded to Demna’s tenure, while the brand’s BB logo, first invented for the house’s relaunch as a ready-to-wear brand in the 1980s, featured across bags and belt buckles.

It was a match made in heaven. One enfant terribles passing the mantle onto another. Duran Lantink’s debut for Jean Paul Gaultier astonished and confounded audiences in equal measure, as it rightfully should have. Although he has been quoted as saying that he has yet to look into the archives, Lantink’s debut owed much to the house’s nearly 50-year history. There were plenty of Breton stripes, conical bras, sailor hats and tattoo motifs. The name of the collection, Junior, also harked back to JPG’s late-80s diffusion line of the same name. The DNA was clearly there, even if the specific archive pulls weren’t.

But for a debut collection, it made sense that Lantink wanted to introduce more of himself than Jean Paul Gaultier. Some of the most surprising pieces referenced Lantink’s namesake brand, such as the naked body suits and the lumpy bras, more than anything in the JPG vocabulary. And yet, in the provocation of these pieces, Monsieur Gaultier was present all along. In a moment where fashion seems obsessed with notions of “wearability”, Lantink’s collection was iconoclastically unwearable. Or, not unless you’re a very brave soul. That JPG sense of playfulness was there throughout and even the man himself sat smiling in the front row.

Under a whole solar system of warmly illuminated planets, we got our first glimpse of Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel. It was obvious that he was thinking big for his debut. After a short but perfect tenure at Bottega Veneta, where the world learned his name and witnessed his sartorial alchemy, Blazy’s ascendancy to the top of Chanel brought a renewed excitement to one of the world’s most popular brands. But with that came a certain challenge: Where do you begin? Even those without an interest in fashion can spot Chanel’s house icons — the tweed jackets, the double-C emblem, the little black dress. Blazy had to not only win over the fashion pack but the rest of the universe, too. Suddenly, the planets made sense.

In a move that felt typically Blazy, his first look for Chanel was distinctly masculine — a two-piece houndstooth set, a slightly loose but pleated trouser with a cropped jacket, buttoned closed, with rolled-up cuffs. For a house that has famously never produced menswear, it was bold. In the show notes, Blazy spoke of bringing “Chanel proportions” to masculine silhouettes. The tweed suits, because there had to be tweed suits, were remixed and remodelled. Some were given frayed edges, some were rendered to resemble burlap, some looked completely inside-out, and some had exaggerated round shoulders. The brilliance of Blazy’s debut lies in the fact that he’s managed to bring so much of himself to Chanel, whilst also keeping the unique language of the French house totally intact.