Paris Fashion Week closed out the spring/summer 2027 season this week, the final stop on a month-long circuit that also passed through New York, London and Milan. Across roughly 68 runway shows and 34 presentations, the mood swung between historical reverence at the biggest houses and open uncertainty about who will be designing some of them a year from now.
The scale of the week underlines how much weight still rides on Paris even as the luxury sector has spent much of the past two years managing slower sales in China and a cautious American shopper. Two new creative directors delivered their first collections for storied houses, several labels that had sat out a season returned to the official calendar, and the two biggest open questions hanging over the week were less about hemlines than about who will still be in the job come spring.
At Chanel, Matthieu Blazy used his second full show for the house, staged inside the Grand Palais, to hold what amounted to a conversation with its late founder. Reviewing the collection, The National described the task facing any designer at a heritage house in blunt terms.
"Being a creative director at a heritage house means, sooner or later, talking to ghosts."
The National, on Matthieu Blazy's Chanel show
The tweed jacket, Chanel's most quoted garment, came back cropped, piped and sleeveless, the latter closed with card-suit buttons, alongside a new stretch tweed woven from re-embroidered organza and silk. Sheer ivory knit slips were pinned with feather corsages, and the show opened and closed with an original 2.55 bag pulled from the house archive.
At Dior, Jonathan Anderson built his latest collection around lightness, treating air itself as a material through lace, silk mousseline and organza. Tailoring softened into fluid shapes, pleating multiplied, and the designer returned to a motif from last season: tutu skirts with a Marie Antoinette undertone, this time in asymmetric florals. The accessories leaned playful, including a Cannage bag with a biker-jacket silhouette and a silver minaudière shaped like a walnut.
A Gilded, Possibly Final Bow at Saint Laurent
Anthony Vaccarello marked ten years as Saint Laurent's creative director with a show steeped in the house's own history, referencing Yves Saint Laurent's entirely gilded 1991 Rive Gauche finale. Models walked in metallic trenches, gilt brocades and metal-thread lace, in a palette of absinthe, amber and cognac; no handbags appeared on the runway at all.
Speculation that the show marked Vaccarello's exit intensified once the collection's show notes surfaced, containing a single cryptic line.
"What departs sometimes leaves more light than what remains."
Saint Laurent spring/summer 2027 show notes
Neither Saint Laurent nor parent company Kering has confirmed a departure, and Vaccarello has not addressed the rumors publicly. At Hermès, meanwhile, artistic director Nadège Vanhée drew on the long, rectangular blades of ceiling fans for swooping pleats on a black leather blazer and a chocolate-suede skirt lined in yellow silk, layering perforated suede jackets and open, fishnet-style knits over statement underwear.
Debuts, Comebacks and a Season Nobody Fully Agrees On
Those debuts belonged to Drew Henry at Courrèges and Kai Nesselrath at Carven, two mid-sized houses betting that a fresh name can translate into fresh sales. Bigger houses that had sat out the previous season, including Maison Margiela, Sacai and Christopher Esber, returned to the official calendar alongside Valentino and Telfar, filling out a schedule that left buyers and editors shuttling between venues from early morning until well past midnight for most of the week.
Critics didn't fully agree on what mattered most. The National picked 14 shows as season-defining, while Monocle's list of favorites ran to just 10; the two overlapped only partially, though both singled out newer names such as Torishéju Dumi and Marie Adam-Leenaerdt as among the more interesting additions to the Paris schedule this season.
Most of what walked this week won't reach stores until next spring, which leaves plenty of time for Kering and Saint Laurent to say, one way or another, whether Friday's gold-dipped finale really was Anthony Vaccarello's last show for the house he has defined for a decade.
