The history of the Maison is,
Refreshed from within the garments
Paris Fashion Week Autumn/Winter 2026–27, MOOD’s roundup
The work of inheriting a Maison carries the responsibility of showing—through a single garment—what from the past should be kept and what should be changed.
Knowing the founder’s words alone is not enough. Simply extracting famous forms from the archive is not enough either. You must understand why that form came to be, then redesign it for today’s body and life.
The designer’s skill shows in the precision of that judgment.
Paris Fashion Week for Autumn/Winter 2026–27, held March 2 to 10, 2026.
This season, MOOD would like to consider the present state of the work of “inheritance” through six Maisons: CHANEL, Dior, CELINE, LOEWE, Saint Laurent, and Yohji Yamamoto.
A Maison where new makers take on its history.
A Maison that has begun to build a new language after several seasons.
And a brand whose founder himself keeps updating the questions while facing his own work of the past.
Even when they stand in the same Paris, each has a different moment in time.
That is why this season cannot be measured by only a single yardstick—whether it was topical or “something new.”
What should be asked is: what has been changed, and what became possible through that change?
And can its clothing hold appeal for those who know a brand’s history—and for those encountering it for the first time?
From those three questions, MOOD reads this season’s Paris.
CHANEL
Matyèu Breesy inherits structure, not symbols
To understand Matyèu Breesy’s CHANEL, you need to return to the fact that he is a designer who has, all along, changed “clothes you already know” into something else through materials.
After Maison Martin Margiela and Céline, in 2021 he became Creative Director at Bottega Veneta.
In 2022 fall/winter, the first runway for the same Maison, a look that at first glance seems like a plain white tank top and jeans was in fact made of leather.
You create an intentional mismatch between everyday wear that everyone knows and the actual materials. The moment you learn that fact, the viewer will look at the garment itself again.
This “change perception” approach continues even at CHANEL.
After its debut for spring/summer 2026, what Breezy put at the center this season was the suit—one that symbolizes the Maison.
Materials incorporating rib knit, tweed, and synthetic fibers and silicone. And even with tweed work shirts and bomber jackets, CHANEL’s vocabulary is expanding across different types of clothing.
What matters is not the fact that it uses tweed.
By moving the materials that have traditionally assumed the formality of a jacket into a work shirt, it broadens the very moments in which you wear CHANEL.
That is how Breezy carries on.
Not by preserving an icon, but by breaking down the relationship between the materials and structure that made that icon possible—and connecting it to another kind of garment.
However, you must not confuse the complexity of processing itself with the value of design.
Even after removing the explanation that it uses special materials, does a reason for choosing that piece still remain? Is the craftsmanship truly expanding silhouettes, comfort, and the occasions to wear them?
Perhaps it is when Breezy CHANEL can withstand this question that it grows stronger.
Going forward, if new relationships—such as work shirts, bomber jackets, and suits—are accumulated across seasons, it will not be a one-time interpretation of an archive; it will become CHANEL’s new wardrobe.
Inheritance is not about preserving the forms of the past. From past forms, you create new ways of using them—ones that did not yet exist.
Dior
Jonathan Anderson edits history into one world
In Jonathan Anderson’s Dior, the scope to be inherited is even broader.
Having led LOEWE from 2013 to 2025, he is behind a vast creative structure spanning haute couture, men’s, and women’s at Dior.
This work calls not only for the quality of each collection, but also the editorial ability to make them stand as a single Maison.
In the 2026 spring/summer collection—its first foray into women’s wear—the curves of the blazer jacket are extracted in fragments and connected to miniskirts and denim.
And this season, to that historic outline, flowers and lace have been added.
A three-dimensional flower that covers the jacket’s waist area, ruffles reminiscent of petals, a jacket layered with lace—an entire world is created in response to its setting, Tuileries Garden, from water-lily pumps to a frog-shaped minaudière.
Here, what MOOD draws attention to is not the motif of the flower itself.
It is decoration that inserts itself into the silhouette of the garment.
If you gather volume at the waist, the way your body looks changes. By layering ruffles over the hem, the space a skirt occupies is transformed.
They are trying to translate the idea of “creating the body’s contours” found throughout Dior’s history—not through superficial quotation, but into today’s forms.
At the same time, easily understood motifs also carry a certain precariousness.
The combination of a frog-shaped bag and a park communicates meaning at a glance. However, the clarity of the explanation and the complexity of the clothes that you want to revisit again and again are not the same.
So this season, MOOD sees greater potential not in the iconography itself, but in the moment when flowers and lace slip into the structure of the garments.
What will become important going forward is that Dior’s history is not told only through the “bars.”
In the vast archives, there are eras, techniques, and ways of perceiving the body that have yet to be addressed.
How Anderson brings those elements to the surface, translating them into couture, everyday wear, and into bags and shoes—with each medium taking on a different density.
Only through that accumulation does his Dior begin to take shape as a single world.
CELINE
The room for the wearer that Michael Rider leaves behind
In Michael Rider’s CELINE, the question of inheritance feels even closer to everyday life.
What is being asked is how much room remains for the wearer’s own judgment within a finished garment.
Rider gained experience at Balenciaga in the Nicolas Ghesquière era, and at Céline during the Phoebe Philo era, before further building his understanding at Ralph Lauren.
But if you summarize its history as “a return to the Phoebe era,” you risk losing sight of the sensibility toward the wardrobe that he developed afterward.
This season centers on coats and suits close to the body, refined shoulders, and shorter flared pants.
Then, knits tied on top of the jacket, layered collars, and large scarves are added.
What is interesting is that “refining” and “disrupting” are carried out at the same time.
A jacket defines the body’s contours, and then by tying knits and scarves over it, the wearer adds an entirely new line.
The clothing itself is complete. Yet it is not too complete.
It is precisely this sense of space that could become the appeal of Rider’s CELINE.
However, there is also a contradiction.
If a brand perfectly presents even how to wear it “in one’s own way,” that freedom will eventually become a new uniform.
What we will want to see next, then, is whether even a single piece separate from show styling retains the power to accommodate the wearer’s ingenuity.
And it is still too early to conclude that this season is simply a return to “slimmer” silhouettes.
What matters is not whether something is slim or wide; it is that proportions of clothing and the body are once again being examined in fine detail—including shoulder width, garment length, hem width, and even the amount of shoe that shows.
The same is true when looking at vintage.
Old clothing isn’t attractive merely because it is old.
What relationship do past proportions create within today’s body and wardrobe?
Rider’s CELINE returns, once again, to the difficult questions that still lie behind what should be obvious in the act of dressing.
LOEWE
Free “craft” from “handwork”
In LOEWE by Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, inheritance begins with the way the work is made.
The two founded Proenza Schouler in 2002 and moved to LOEWE in 2025.
Interest in materials has long been strong; even in the Proenza Schouler era, they explored the relationship between surface and structure, such as combining metal foil with pleats.
For LOEWE’s first collection, it presented leather jackets using heat bonding and 3D-printed materials with a texture like velvet.
This season, it expands further into techniques such as leather with fringe and embroidery, shearling shaped through trimming, and Storm boots made with injection molding.
What MOOD finds interesting here is that the meaning of the word “craft” shifts slightly.
If craft were measured only by the time spent on it by hand, judgments involved in pattern design, material processing, and shaping techniques would be overlooked.
If sewing, carving, and shaping ultimately lead to a single form, then different kinds of techniques exist there.
For LOEWE, which traces its origins to a leather workshop in Madrid in 1846, continually asking what leather can do is also a natural point of contact with history.
That said, material experimentation must not end with mere surprise.
Beyond the sheer novelty of first impressions—how it settles on the body. Whether its appeal lasts even when worn repeatedly. And whether the shapes are born precisely from those techniques.
In the coming seasons, the question will be what, among so many experiments, manages to endure as a form worthy of being called “two people’s LOEWE.”
Luxury is not only a declaration that one possesses advanced techniques.
That technology enables the creation of an allure within a single piece that would be difficult to achieve by other means.
Saint Laurent
Anthony Vacarello—change within repetition
It is precisely because this season brings together a new lineup of house teams that Anthony Vacarello’s Saint Laurent is so intriguing.
About 10 years since taking office in 2016.
He is no longer at a stage where he needs to explain who he is.
What is at stake is whether, using an already established language, it is possible to create clothing unlike before.
2026 marks 60 years since Yves Saint Laurent presented a tuxedo for women in 1966.
Looking back at recent Vácarlelo, in spring/summer 2025 there appeared suits paired with shirts and ties; in spring/summer 2026, nylon dresses with a large sense of volume; and in this season, dark-colored pant suits worn directly against the body without a shirt in between.
This season’s characteristic lies in the relationship between the shoulder and the bodice.
While the sloped shoulders that evoke men’s tailoring define the exterior, the bodice without lining retains a sense of fluidity.
They are refined, yet not motionless.
This small contradiction gives Saint Laurent’s suits, which have endured for so long, a new kind of tension.
Repeating the same form is not necessarily stagnation.
Because there is a comparable past, even fine adjustments—such as the positions where shoulders, waist, bodice, and skin are revealed—take on meaning.
For a designer of a long tenure, perhaps what is needed is not inventing something completely different every season, but accurately choosing what to keep unchanged and what to change.
And when MOOD looks at Saint Laurent’s past works, it also wants to hold this perspective.
It does not end with “it’s valuable because it’s smoking.”
Which jacket is it in terms of the era—what kind of view of the body does it hold?
Reading that difference garment by garment is the way to engage with the long-running history of a maison.
Yohji Yamamoto
The person you inherit from is yourself.
Yamamoto Yoji’s work carries a different sense of time than the five so far.
For him, who has continued to present his work in Paris since 1981, one of the things he inherits is his own past.
In a collection themed on spring/summer weddings in 1999, when you remove one dress, another dress appears from within—integrating the very transformation of the garment into the show.
And this season, alongside cutting inspired by the kimono and Hokusai’s imagery, it confronts again the question of where to support the fabric—and where to make it fall.
Tying the fabric at a higher position on the shoulder.
Letting it fall low behind.
Crossing the shawl.
Just like that, the sense of volume that exists around the body changes dramatically.
If you simply call this season “a return to Japan,” you miss the structural intrigue of this construction.
Hokusai is a quotation you can see.
But the decisions about where to support the fabric and in which direction to let it fall are design decisions for the garment itself.
MOOD is drawn more strongly to the latter.
While Rider’s CELINE shapes lines close to the body, Yamamoto creates an amount of fabric in a space set away from it.
Both exist in the same Paris of 2026.
So it is unrealistic to reduce the future of fashion to a single silhouette—“next will be slim” or “next will be oversized.”
What matters is which garment gives the body which new options.
When speaking of Yohji Yamamoto, I do not want to rely only on convenient words like black, asymmetry, and oversized.
If you lift the fabric, where does the weight shift to?
If you change where it is tied, which lines will be created?
It is precisely within that specificity that the questions that have continued for over 40 years reside.
To inherit history is,
Expanding the range of options.
When you line up six collections, it becomes clear that “newness” in this season’s Paris did not exist in a single place.
Breiggy opens up CHANEL suits from the material outward, while Anderson connects Dior’s historical contours to the decorative motifs of today.
Líder adjusts the distance between garment and body, and Maccollough and Hernández explored LOEWE’s form from within the production process itself.
Vácarlelo updates a suit it has refined over the long term through changes in details, while Yōji Yamamoto questions the very support points of fabric in order to rethink how the body appears.
Materials, cutting, processing, proportions, and how one wears them.
The places that changed are different, each one.
So there is no need to summarize this season in a single phrase like “return to origins” or “return to craft.”
On the contrary, MOOD believes that leaving room for that difference is the role of criticism.
And even if a new designer cites the archive, the value of those past pieces does not automatically rise.
Whether current shows generate interest in the past is one issue—while the value in the secondary distribution market is another.
Era, production background, materials, condition, size, actual transactions.
Only after confirming them one by one does the archive take on concrete meaning within today’s market.
That is also why MOOD moves back and forth between new pieces and vintage.
By looking at current garments, one can see the judgments hidden in past garments.
By knowing past garments, one can measure what a new piece preserves and what it changes.
To respect the archive is not to unconditionally praise what is old.
Seeing the conditions under which that garment was born—and its actual construction—with precision.
And through this season’s Paris, the contours of MOOD’s idea of “excellent inheritance” also come into view.
It is not about recreating the past well.
Using what has been handed down, and making possible choices that did not exist before.
Opening the suit to become a different category of clothing.
Shifting the body’s outline through decoration.
Leaving room in a finished garment to receive the wearer’s movements.
From new processing, to create forms that have never existed before.
And it continues to increase the ways the body can be presented.
The history of the maison is not preserved only within the archives.
In the line of the shoulder.
In the choice of materials.
At the points where the fabric is fastened.
By the knots the wearer adds.
History is updated each time within the garments themselves.
MOOD wants to witness that small—but decisive—difference.
There is a reason to speak about today’s fashion while handling the clothes of the past.
