{"id":3134,"date":"2026-01-29T10:18:03","date_gmt":"2026-01-29T10:18:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/facesjournal.com\/?p=3134"},"modified":"2026-01-29T10:18:03","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T10:18:03","slug":"how-blazy-anderson-turned-paris-haute-couture-ss26-into-a-fantasy-filled-dreamscape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/facesjournal.com\/?p=3134","title":{"rendered":"How Blazy & Anderson Turned Paris Haute Couture SS26 Into a Fantasy-Filled Dreamscape"},"content":{"rendered":"

From towering mushrooms to whisper-light fabrics, Anna Murphy goes behind Blazy and Anderson\u2019s couture visions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Chanel<\/div>\n

They\u2019ve been working their way up the designer hierarchy for a couple of decades. But now they are at the very top, ensconced as of last year as creative directors at the two most esteemed fashion houses in the business, they have gone through the looking glass into another world \u2013 the world of couture. They are fashion\u2019s Alices, and what a wonderland they have found themselves in.<\/p>\n

Couture is something different, as they each admitted to me backstage at their respective shows. They talked with palpable excitement about getting to work with the greatest technicians in fashion; about getting to helm of what amounts to fashion\u2019s version of a Formula 1<\/a> racing car. Because that\u2019s the strange thing about couture; it\u2019s built on tradition, but at its best it\u2019s about remarkable innovation, akin to \u2013 as Anderson put it to me \u2013 \u201ca laboratory that you use to put out ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Dior
Dior Haute Couture Spring Summer 2026 \u00a9Spotlight<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Both men almost swooned over the technical mastery they were being exposed to for the first time. \u201cThese are people who have an expertise I don\u2019t have,\u201d said Blazy<\/a>, eyes sparkling. \u201cIt is such a great adventure for me and I have already learnt so much.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere might be a three-hour fitting for one jacket,\u201d said Anderson, at once disbelieving and delighted. \u201cI didn\u2019t learn to make a jacket like that<\/em> in school. There might,\u201d he continued, \u201cbe 12 different toiles,\u201d referring to the calico prototypes that are created in order to finesse a design before it is rendered in the final (expensive) fabric. \u201cIt\u2019s such an enjoyable process. It\u2019s all about the make. It reminds you why you went into fashion.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is a realm in which everything is produced by hand by highly skilled artisans known as petites mains<\/em>; in which a dress can take months to deliver and cost a six-figure sum; in which only a few of the most illustrious and \u2013 often, though not always \u2013 most storied brands take part.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Couture is a prefigurement of the industrialization of fashion, when clothes were made for you and you alone, by someone you paid if you had the money, or by you or someone in your family if you didn\u2019t. Even the clothes on the ready-to-wear runways, with their price tags that start at around four figures and often go far higher, are, in truth, akin to fast fashion in disguise.<\/p>\n

\"Chanel
Chanel Haute Couture Spring Summer 2026 \u00a9Spotlight<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cCouture works to its own timings,\u201d is how Blazy put it. \u201cThe timings of the atelier.\u201d He paused. \u201cAnd the air in the room is so joyful.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no sound in the atelier, no machinery, just people working in silence,\u201d Anderson told me, going on to note that those people have a sense of ownership, of pride, that isn\u2019t found to the same degree elsewhere in fashion. \u201cA dress that took three months\u2026 for the person who worked on it to see it finished, that is a big deal.\u201d<\/p>\n

From both designers we saw fantasies worthy of Lewis Carroll, not least in their respective Wonderland-ish mise en sc\u00e8nes. At Dior<\/a> thousands of cyclamen appeared to grow upside down from a mossy ceiling. At Chanel giant pink mushrooms looked positively psychedelic. Theirs were topsy-turvy universes, and they played with gravity \u2013 in both senses of the word \u2013 with clothes too.<\/p>\n

\"Dior
Dior Haute Couture Spring Summer 2026 \u00a9Spotlight<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Both returned again and again in our conversations to the notion of ‘lightness;’ of how to deliver the specialness of couture without the structures \u2013 and indeed strictures \u2013 of yore. Both interrogated what could (and couldn\u2019t) be couture. Could a jumper be couture, asked Anderson. Could a pair of jeans be couture, asked Blazy.<\/p>\n

Definitively yes. Blazy\u2019s denim was, in fact, blue mousseline, so delicate to be almost immaterial. He used that same whisper of a fabric to riff on the flapper-girl lines first drawn in the early decades of the last century by Gabrielle Chanel. It was the same, but so very, very different. He presented evening wear that seemed to explode like fireworks; little black dresses (and suits) that, as Chanel herself once memorably put it, \u201cwipe out everything else around.\u201d The craftsmanship was breathtaking, from the buttons that looked more like fine jewellery than mere fastenings to the co-ords covered in shaved mother of pearl.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Blazy didn\u2019t put a foot wrong. From the front row it was a unanimous yes. Anderson trod less of a straight path. Was it too difficult to be Dior, some asked. Too challenging? I didn\u2019t think so. There was much that I loved, as he took the language of flowers that lies at the heart of Christian Dior\u2019s creations in the 1940s and ’50s and made it look edgy, even iconoclastic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Chanel
Chanel Haute Couture Spring Summer 2026 \u00a9Spotlight<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Besides, as Anderson himself pointed out, \u201cWe think now that what Christian Dior did in the 1940s and 50s was classicism, but at the time people were often confused by it.\u201d It\u2019s easy to forget that the New Look of 1947 caused nothing less than a furore, prompting newspaper headlines across the globe.<\/p>\n

In a collection that felt like the essence of spring, there were dresses that presented like a herbaceous border, skirts, and bags like pieces of turf. As well as the red-carpet-ready floorsweepers, there were slouchy layered up separates that came across as grungy, but also beyond chic.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very intimidating to do a job like this,\u201d said Anderson. \u201cYou know you are going up against people who are in the history books.\u201d On this week\u2019s evidence, neither he nor Blazy worry about that.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe world is harsh,\u201d said his counterpart at Chanel. \u201cI wanted this couture show to be a break, a kind of poetic parenthesis.\u201d\u00a0 It was, Matthieu, it was. And that, more than anything, is what couture is about.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From towering mushrooms to whisper-light fabrics, Anna Murphy goes behind Blazy and Anderson\u2019s couture visions.\u00a0 They\u2019ve been working their way up the designer hierarchy for a couple of decades. But now they are at the very top, ensconced as of last year as creative directors at the two most esteemed fashion houses in the business, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3135,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","beyondwords_generate_audio":"","beyondwords_project_id":"","beyondwords_content_id":"","beyondwords_preview_token":"","beyondwords_player_content":"","beyondwords_player_style":"","beyondwords_language_id":"","beyondwords_title_voice_id":"","beyondwords_body_voice_id":"","beyondwords_summary_voice_id":"","beyondwords_error_message":"","beyondwords_disabled":"","beyondwords_delete_content":"","beyondwords_podcast_id":"","beyondwords_hash":"","publish_post_to_speechkit":"","speechkit_hash":"","speechkit_generate_audio":"","speechkit_project_id":"","speechkit_podcast_id":"","speechkit_error_message":"","speechkit_disabled":"","speechkit_access_key":"","speechkit_error":"","speechkit_info":"","speechkit_response":"","speechkit_retries":"","speechkit_status":"","speechkit_updated_at":"","_speechkit_link":"","_speechkit_text":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/facesjournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/facesjournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/facesjournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/facesjournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/facesjournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/facesjournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3134\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/facesjournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/facesjournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/facesjournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/facesjournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}