Paris
Fashion Week

The word "couture" is not a marketing term in France — it is a legal designation. The Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture was founded in 1868 to set the criteria a fashion house must meet to describe its work as haute couture, part of a broader effort by the Parisian trade to distinguish hand-made, made-to-measure garments from industrial dressmaking.

A significant update to those rules came in 1945, in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the syndicate began requiring member houses to present a minimum of 35 original looks each season, spanning both daywear and eveningwear, to retain their status.

The Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture eventually became one arm of a broader body, the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode (FHCM), which now sets the official calendar not only for couture but also for Paris’s ready-to-wear and menswear weeks. Membership is tiered: a small number of permanent haute couture houses hold full status, while other labels are invited each season as correspondent or guest members without the same binding obligations.

Because couture garments are made to measure for individual clients rather than produced at scale, the couture calendar is deliberately smaller and more exclusive than Paris’s ready-to-wear week — fewer houses show, but each collection typically represents hundreds of hours of atelier work per garment.

The Autumn/Winter 2026 couture calendar, published by the FHCM, ran 6–9 July 2026. The July edition traditionally follows the January couture season and precedes the autumn ready-to-wear shows, giving houses such as Schiaparelli, Chanel, Balenciaga and Jean Paul Gaultier a dedicated platform for their most elaborate, made-to-measure work of the year, distinct from the larger-scale collections shown at Paris Fashion Week proper.