Paris
Fashion Week

Paris Fashion Week in its modern, unified form dates to a single event: a fundraising gala held at the Palace of Versailles in October 1973, organised to help finance the palace’s restoration. The evening staged a head-to-head format — five French haute couture houses against five American ready-to-wear designers — in front of an audience that included European royalty and Hollywood stars.

The event was co-organised with input from Eleanor Lambert, the American publicist who three decades earlier had created New York’s own Fashion Week. Its success in showcasing American ready-to-wear alongside French couture is widely credited with accelerating Paris’s shift toward a structured, citywide ready-to-wear calendar rather than couture-only showings.

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.

The Spring/Summer 2027 calendar runs 29 September–7 October 2026, closing the four-city womenswear season with the largest official schedule of the four. The lineup is published by the FHCM ahead of the season; this index does not list houses before they appear on the federation’s calendar.