Tuesday, October 27, 2026 / Spring/Summer 2027 season
The collections, the houses, and the business behind them
Group sales were flat, Gucci fell 6% and the shares lost about a tenth of their value in a day. The problem Kering named is not price or product. It is fewer people walking in.
In this issue
RunwayWednesday's debut was a new designer loosening a house known for rigour. Wednesday's second season was a designer from last year tightening his grip. Both worked, and both left one thing unresolved.
Jonathan Anderson built his spring collection around a walnut that takes fifty years to polish. Anthony Vaccarello marked ten years at Saint Laurent by gilding the archive from head to toe. One asked for time, the other summed it up.
Jonathan Anderson will show Cruise 2028 in Shanghai on May 14, 2027, seventeen years after the house last staged a major show there. Dior is the first big French house to say where its next cruise goes, and it said so the week before its Paris show.
The Spring/Summer 2027 week ended with one inheritance, one second season and one real debut. All three houses were answering the same question: what is left of a name once the person who made it is gone.
Spring/Summer 2027 runs from September 28 to October 6. Courrèges and Carven have new designers, Valentino and Margiela are back on the calendar, and Blazy, Tron and Lantink have to show that their first collections were not a one-off.
The Spring/Summer 2027 week runs 60 shows from September 22 to 28. Its opening days were about houses in their second season and a designer leaving, more than about anyone arriving.
The eyewear trade fair brings 950 exhibitors and more than 1,500 brands to Villepinte from September 25 to 28. Its program opens on smart glasses and closes on training opticians to sell them, which says a lot about where fashion's most dependable licensing category is heading.
The Spring/Summer 2027 week closed on September 21 with two homecomings and a Burberry show built with Celia Birtwell. For a city that has spent a decade losing its big names to Paris, the direction of travel changed.
The four-city calendar, the schedules, and the access hierarchy that decides who sees a collection first.
All of Fashion Weeks
Fashion WeeksThe 37th edition of 080 left Sant Pau for Port Vell in April with 26 brands. The 38th is due in October, applications are open and the dates are not out, which tells you what kind of fashion week this is.
Spring/Summer 2027 runs September 22 to 28 with 60 shows, 54 of them in person. Camera Moda opens the week with a new Fashion Hub at Palazzo Morando and closes it with Giorgio Armani, and the state is in the credits of both.
RunwayHenry Zankov opened the Spring 2027 week on the High Line with a collection that started from colour and let print follow. It was also the first New York season run under the CFDA's ban on real fur.
Demna's first Gucci built each look as a character in the house's family tree, re-proportioned the Bamboo 1947 and put the Horsebit loafer with sheer hosiery. The reviews were warm. The forums were not.
Creative directors, appointments, and the strategy behind who gets handed a heritage house.
All of Houses
HousesJonathan Anderson took all of Dior in 2025 and by July 2026 LVMH was attributing part of its first fashion growth in seven quarters to his effect. What it takes to move an €18 billion division, and what the credit actually proves.
Dior, Chanel, Gucci, Balenciaga, Celine, Maison Margiela, Fendi, Bottega Veneta. Fifteen debuts in the Spring/Summer 2026 season alone. A map of the largest creative reset in modern luxury, and why it happened all at once.
CoutureEstimates put the active haute couture clientele at roughly 4,000 to 5,000 people worldwide, down from around 20,000 after the New Look. Pieces run from €30,000 to well past €500,000 and the tier still rarely pays for itself, which is the whole point of it.
The Chambre Syndicale runs three tiers: haute couture members, correspondents, and guests. Guests may call their work couture and are barred from calling it haute couture, and they wait two years before the appellation is even on the table.
BusinessWhile 101 houses fill the Spring/Summer 2027 runway calendar, the Fédération runs Sphere at the Palais de Tokyo from September 30 to October 6. It is the least photographed part of Paris Fashion Week and the part that decides who is still here in three seasons.
First-half sales of €38.6 billion, a 3% second quarter, and a fashion and leather goods business still down 5% across the half. Kering posted its first positive quarter in three years. The recovery is real and it is thin.
Standards, regulation, materials, and which requirements have real teeth.
All of Sustainability
SustainabilityThe Digital Product Passport was written into the Ecodesign regulation in June 2024. The delegated act for textiles is indicated for 2027 and cannot bite for eighteen months after that, which puts real compliance in 2028 and makes the specification published this May the thing to read now.
Parliament passed the ultra-fast-fashion bill on June 29 after more than two years between the two chambers. Per-item penalties start at €0.25 and are set to climb toward €10 by 2030, alongside an advertising ban that reaches influencers.
ResaleGucci refurbishes and resells its own vintage, Balenciaga, Valentino and Burberry work through partners, and Rolex guarantees a watch it did not sell you. Only one of those is a claim of authority over the resale market rather than a slice of it.
The Digital Product Passport must stay readable through resale and end-of-life. That is a line in an environmental regulation and it is also, accidentally, an attack on the one thing the resale platforms own.
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