What’s Couture For? Chanel and Dior’s New Designers Make Their Case

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The bride wore an oversized pyjama shirt — a moment in Matthieu Blazy’s couture debut that crystalised what makes his Chanel so cool and compelling for many, while leaving others unconvinced.

In this week’s edition: debut couture outings at Chanel and Dior, LVMH’s results dash luxury rebound hopes.

Chanel’s Absolute Lightness

Blazy is known for transforming apparently ordinary garments into something extraordinary, whether its through mother-of-pearl dove feathers — in the case of the shirt worn by this season’s couture bride — or else trompe-l’œil embroidery or unexpected, ultra-luxe materials. He’s fascinated by clothes that seem like they’re “almost nothing” and then still manage to tell a story on the runway.

For haute couture, Blazy and his team took the opportunity to revisit his signatures while pushing them to new heights of lightness and refinement. Birds were the inspiration — a metaphor for women, he said. Wispy sleeves trailed like blackbird wings. A transparent Chanel suit was held down by tiny pearls. An embroidered love letter was about to float out of a see-through Flap bag. Here again was his favourite white tank top, tucked into see-through, trompe-l’œil jeans.

It was a collection clients could relate to: radically different from previous seasons, but recognisably Chanel — and well suited to showing off a sculpted pilates physique.

The clothes were all cut on the body, with personalised embroideries inspired by conversation with the models. Heaviness tends to plague haute couture, with collections weighed down by beads, sequins and corsetry in addition to the ambient pomp and tradition. Blazy sidestepped that trap with the focus on lightness and transparency.

Tim Blanks called the collection a “slam dunk.”

Fashion historian Alexandre Samson called it a “masterpiece,” reminding me how faithful its absence of extravagant volumes was to the original couture of Gabrielle Chanel. “You could pull her dresses through a ring,” he said.

This view wasn’t unanimous: many on the internet felt the show lacked evident “wow”-factor or emotional impact. A fellow attendee sensed a “worrying lack of freshness.”

For me, it was a convincing start. This was Blazy’s first time ever designing haute couture, and I got the sense he is gently interrogating the form — its de-facto opulence, with dresses that cost more than the average home, its audience’s expectation for theatrical gestures — without rushing into a radical overhaul.

Still, it’s true that Blazy favours a tight palette of silhouettes. Even if he transforms those shapes each season through various craft techniques, his organisation may need to make sure new ideas are coming into his ecosystem at a faster pace now that he is staging six shows per year (compared to two at Bottega Veneta).

Dior’s Concept and Commerce

Couture, what is it good for? Do these clothes exist to push the limits of what fashion can be, to provide fodder for social media spectacle, or to please the clients who spend literal fortunes each season? It’s one of fashion’s most tired debates, but still far from being resolved.

Those questions were clearly top-of-mind for Dior’s new designer Jonathan Anderson as he staged his couture debut this week.

The Business of Fashion‘s Imran Amed had the exclusive: about how Anderson is balancing couture’s functions as a laboratory for innovation, preserving craft expertise and anchoring Dior’s product pyramid at the very top. Not to mention as a platform for image-making, theatricality and self-expression.

Anderson’s relentless curatorial sensibility was on display as he brought in references to art — sculptural gowns echoed the ceramics of Magdalene Odundo — and archeology, as jewellery incorporated found objects like meteorites, fossils and ancient Roman cameos.

Having a point of view on nature, particularly flowers, is essential for a designer at Dior, and rather than simply focusing on natural motifs through prints or embroidery, Anderson experimented with a sort of biological logic throughout the collection, which trickled into volumes and construction. Hollow gowns hovered like seed pods, hems ruched like sea cabbage and fringes trailed on the floor like roots. One pattern came from zooming in on the iridescent bacteria on butterfly wings, Anderson said.

The collection was beautiful, but some silhouettes were quite challenging — with exaggerated uneven hems and protruding volumes in the front. Making the world’s wealthiest clients feel “pretty” didn’t seem like Anderson’s central concern.

That’s not to say the designer isn’t thinking about how couture can translate to sales. Dozens of looks (likely the more commercial ones) were excluded from the runway but shown privately to clients in a nearby villa after the show. Anderson is also thinking about how Dior could incorporate couture-level bags and jewellery to fill in its product pyramid—eventually narrowing the gap between the current top end of its bag offer (around $12,000) and six-figure couture gowns.

LVMH’s Gloomy Outlook

Dior’s owner Bernard Arnault seemed happy with the show — telling investors some guests were moved to tears by the collection during his speech at LVMH’s annual results.

“Dior is benefitting from its creative renewal,” Arnault said. “[Anderson’s] products are in high demand since the start of the year. We should never be too optimistic but it’s off to a good start.”

LVMH’s overall sales rose 1 percent in the holiday quarter, beating estimates slightly as its jewellery division and Sephora both accelerated. Fashion and leather sales were down 3 percent, however, as the division struggled to annualise tough comps from last year’s post-election bump in the US.

Shares in the company fell 8 percent following the announcement. Shares in Kering and Hermès also slipped as LVMH’s gloomy outlook dashed hopes that a luxury rebound may be imminent.

“2026 will not be easy,” Arnault said. “I am optimistic mid-term, but short-term it’s very hard to make a serious forecast. Change is accelerating across several countries, and it’s very hard to measure how all of these geopolitical changes will impact our companies.”

One comment about Louis Vuitton’s strategy caught my attention: “There won’t be a Vuitton hotel. Vuitton is focusing, not diversifying,” Arnault said in response to a question about whether and when the brand would open its first hotel (reported in several outlets as part of its plans for a mega-store being constructed on the Champs-Elysées).

LVMH had previously never commented on the reports. But I had heard the plans were already scaled back years ago — a full-on hotel division like Bulgari’s seemed less likely than something smaller, analogous to the Dior Suites for top-spending clients on Avenue Montaigne. That could still happen, even if LVMH isn’t calling it a “hotel.”

But the more general principle of “focusing, not diversifying” felt like a significant shift in tone. After opening several airport lounges, cafés and chocolate shops in recent years — not to mention its first line of colour cosmetics in 2025 — it sounds like Louis Vuitton is being asked to put some non-core initiatives on hold until its handbag business improves.