Paris
Fashion Week AW26

The Palace of Versailles dates its celebrated fashion gala to 28 November 1973. Held at the Royal Opera to support restoration of the palace, the event brought French and American designers together and became known as the Battle of Versailles.

The palace’s account credits Gérald Van der Kemp and Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild with organising the fundraising reception. Its history should not be confused with the dates of the regular fashion-week schedule.

In the years after 1973, Paris formalized a recurring ready-to-wear schedule sitting alongside its older couture calendar. Oversight ultimately consolidated under the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, the umbrella body descended from the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne (1868), which today sets official dates for all three Paris calendars — couture, ready-to-wear and menswear — and enforces membership criteria for participating houses.

Unlike the couture calendar’s small, invitation-only circle of ateliers, Paris’s ready-to-wear week is citywide and industrial in scale: each season now features a little over 100 official collections shown across venues throughout Paris, alongside hundreds more off-schedule presentations and showroom appointments during the same window.

The Fall/Winter 2026 women’s calendar ran 2–10 March 2026 and was closely watched for the second outings of two new creative directors — Jonathan Anderson’s second womenswear collection for Dior and Matthieu Blazy’s second for Chanel — both houses continuing to define the direction set at their couture debuts earlier in the year.