A biannual celebration of the most exquisite, intricate and exacting clothing man is capable of creating, the Spring 2026 Haute Couture Week was a bigger one than most. Over at Dior and Chanel, recently installed creative directors Jonathan Anderson and Matthieu Blazy, respectively, made their couture debuts for their new brands, while for Valentino, this season was rather more poignant, coming just a week after the death of its eponymous founder, Valentino Garavani.

For every brand, of course, Haute Couture Week was also about impressing their most important clients, biggest spenders and onlookers around the globe with their artistry and craftsmanship. So which gowns will every starlet be fighting over for this year’s Oscars? Here are the most spectacular looks from the Spring 2026 Haute Couture collections.

Dior

Jonathan Anderson is undoubtedly the hardest working designed in fashion right now. In fact, in the past fortnight alone he’s shown a 63-look men’s collection, 63-look couture collection and unveiled the AW26 campaign for his eponymous brand JW Anderson. Which is about the level of creative output most designers would be expected to produce in a year. So for this, Anderson’s first foray into the rarified world of couture, where did he turn for inspiration? Perhaps incongruously, to former Dior creative director John Galliano.

Writing on Instagram ahead of this week’s show, Anderson explained that, ahead of his debut womenswear collection for Dior last year, he invited Galliano for a private viewing. Galliano had arrived at the studio with two bunches of cyclamen tied in black ribbons; they were, said Anderson, “The most beautiful flowers I had ever seen so I took this as a starting point so that everyone could receive the same posy of flowers I had received.”

On the runway, this translated literally to silk shoulder embellishments and statement headpieces, and more subtly into micro embroideries and the petal-like swoop of sculptural skirts and bodices. Also on display throughout was Anderson’s almost encyclopaedic knowledge and fascination with the creative world. Jewellery was informed by the 18th century oval miniatures of Rosalba Carriera and John Smart, shoe silhouettes referenced Roger Vivier’s archival designs for Dior, made modern with trompe-l’oiel scale prints and feather-like yarns, while Anderson worked with ceramic artist Magdalene Odundo to turn his floral vision into wearable works of art. An avid collector himself, if Anderson’s intent is to create collectible pieces that transcend the idea of mere fashion, consider it mission accomplished.

Valentino

Writing in a letter that accompanied his show notes, Valentino creative director Alessandro Michele said, “What we do today takes place within a history not of our making, in a house long inhabited, rich with traces and gestures… For me, Valentino has been a mythological figure, a founding presence, an abiding reference that remains both origin and measure. A myth does not belong to the past: it establishes a language, discloses a world, makes habitable a space rich with meaning.”

The Valentino Spring 2026 Couture collection had, of course, been designed long before the passing of the house’s founder earlier this month, but Michele was at pains to make clear that Garavani’s fingerprints remain on every stitch of clothing it produces. Now, of course, that founder’s vision is refracted through the eccentric lens of Michele and, this season, the result is ‘Specula Mundi’: a collection taking its inspiration from the kaiserpanorama. The obscure early form of optical entertainment gave 19th century audiences access to far off lands and unreachable places – not, then, so entirely different from the idea of a haute couture runway show.

The collection itself riffed on this notion of the exotic as seen through the medium of cinema across a series of opulent gowns. A metallic headdress heavy with fringing and feathers called to mind the traditional depiction of Cleopatra, vibrant fuchsia plumes and ruffled skirts hinted at the archetypal showgirl, while flowing robe-style garments referenced variously the ecclesiastical and divine. As ever with Michele’s shows, however, this is a simplification of a collection that really defies definition; just as with those early kaiserpanorama audiences, it’s an experience best seen for yourself.

Schiaparelli

In his (mercifully) straight talking show notes for Schiaparelli’s Spring 2026 couture show, creative director Daniel Roseberry was brave enough to say the quiet part out loud: “So many people ask me what the point is of couture. It’s certainly not to create clothing for daily life.” Nowhere is this more true than at Schiaparelli, long the most conceptual of the couture houses and certainly not one churning out clothes made for your daily commute, even in its ready-to-wear collections.

Instead, Roseberry says, "Couture allows me to connect with the hopeful adolescent I once was, the one who decided to not go into medicine or finance or law, but to chase that singular fantasy that fashion can still provide.” For Spring 2026, that fantasy began not with some obscure historical tome or niche literary reference but with one of the world’s best known and most revered artworks: the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. “I stopped thinking for the first time in years of how something should look, but instead about how I feel when creating it,” said Roseberry of a spontaneous trip to the chapel. “That was it. The entire emotional heartbeat of this season became not what does it look like, but how do we feel when we make it?”

So how does one feel looking at Roseberry’s latest creations? In awe, for starters. The technical skill on display is simply dazzling. Hand-cut lace fashioned into 3D sculptural embellishment; feathers frozen in resin and encrusted in crystals; organza, that softest and lightest of fabrics, reinvented with the hardness and danger of spikes. As ever at Schiaparelli, an element of the surreal abounded, giving models an animalistic edge through tails, wings and horns, taking the collection from the merely pretty to the far more interesting and complex. So no, these are not clothes made for the everyday, they are not even clothes than 99.9 per cent of the world will have the opportunity to wear. But, as with all masterpieces, is it not enough to be happy they exist and admire them from afar?

Viktor&Rolf

Named ‘Diamond Kite’, for Spring 2026 designers Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren played with the push and pull of freedom and restriction. On the one hand, a densely black colour palette and highly modest, long-sleeved, high-necked silhouettes and, on the other, childlike oversized bows, pastel-hued organza pleating and, to close the show, a model elevated in a colourful recreation of the album cover for Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside – an image that has long provided inspiration for Viktor & Rolf.

“We go back to black so often because it’s the best colour for silhouettes,” explained the designers. In the case of this collection, it also served a dual purpose: being both a firmly commercial base sure to appeal to a clientele searching for quite luxury with couture-level craftsmanship, while also acting as blank slate on which the designers’ could let their playful, creative sides run free. A refreshing reminder that couture doesn’t always have to mean overly complicated.

Tamara Ralph

“This collection is quite special to me, as it illustrates how far I have come creatively as a designer over the past three years since debuting my namesake brand,” said Tamara Ralph after her Spring 2026 couture show. “I relished in bringing to life this season's unique inspiration — rooted in the narrative of 'La Lumière Dorée' — in such a way that both honours and continues to encapsulate my defined and enduring design codes, while perpetually and thoughtfully driving the brand forward.”

Translating as ‘the golden light’, this was a collection that was all about celebration the sheer beauty and elegance inherent in couture. Blending Asian clothing traditions with Western savoir faire, and drawing on inherited notions of the feminine, the structure of corsetry played against the fluidity of draped silks, intricate embellishment offered a counterpart to the clean softness of chiffon, and exaggerated silhouettes were offset by a fresh palette of creams and pastels. An accomplished and sophisticated outing from a designer truly going from strength to strength.

Ashi Studio

Founded in 2007 by Mohammed Ashi and specialising solely in bridal and couture, Ashi Studio may be one of the lesser known names at Couture Week – but it is also arguably one of the most interesting. Case in point, its Spring 2026 collection, 'The Beginnings'. Taking as its starting point the love, devotion and longing that, inevitably for us all, eventually become loss, and couching them in the aesthetics of Victorian mourning rituals, what may in the hands of another designer have become a dark affair of heavy black fabrics and an abundance of lace in Ashi’s hands becomes earthier and more ephemeral.

A palette that runs the gamut from cream to chestnut recalls a lock of hair worn in a locket close to the body, echoed in leather fringing and sweeping trompe-l’oiel spirals, while distressed organza skirts, shredded silk hems and rigid, almost sarcophagi-like silhouettes reference the decay humans work so hard to hide from sight. Yet, while the subject matter is undeniably dark, taken as a whole, there is a lightness of touch and an undeniable adherence to beauty that bring levity and glamour to the collection. Simply sublime.

Read more: The most dazzling High Jewellery collections of 2026