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 Spring/Summer 2026 couture calendar, published by the FHCM, ran 26–29 January 2026 with 35 runway shows and 32 presentations. The season carried particular weight for two of the industry’s largest houses: it marked Jonathan Anderson’s first couture collection since being named creative director of Dior, and Matthieu Blazy’s first couture collection since taking over at Chanel — both closely watched successions in a season that reset expectations for two of the calendar’s most-covered ateliers.