This season’s haute couture fashion week was one of the most anticipated in recent years, and while the schedule is delivering plenty of visual drama, most of the conversations so far keep circling back to just two shows. Why did they steal the spotlight and what do they tell us about where couture is heading next? Let’s break it down.

At the very heart of French fashion, the week marked two major couture debuts: Jonathan Anderson at Dior and Matthieu Blazy at Chanel. While both had already given us a first taste of what “the new” Dior and Chanel will be like through ready-to-wear collections, couture felt like the real test, keeping both designers under the industry’s microscope.

There is a lot Anderson and Blazy have in common. Both are among the most influential creative directors working today — brilliant visionaries with an outstanding track record. Both were brought in to shake up heritage houses in need of new energy. And despite all that, haute couture was new territory for both of them — something they ventured to rethink.

Speaking to The Business of Fashion, Anderson admitted that he once struggled to connect with couture altogether — the glamour and hierarchy of it felt outdated. But once he pulled out his first couture dress, skepticism turned into addiction. Looking back on the craft-focused work he has done over the past decade also helped Anderson to look at couture from a different angle — seeing it as a fragile ecosystem kept alive by very few houses, yet vital to preserving techniques that could easily disappear if no one practices them. His goal, however, isn’t nostalgia, but reframing the narrative.

At Loewe, he once started with a blank page, but at Dior, the challenge was different: everyone already has an idea of what Dior is. So instead of reinforcing it, Anderson posed a question — to himself and to the audience: what does Dior mean today?

Anderson also looked beyond clothing, treating accessories and jewelry as part of the same story. The collection felt like a contemporary cabinet of emotional curiosities.

Cyclamen bouquets, gifted to Anderson’s by John Galliano ahead of the debut, appeared as nods to creative continuity, while the ceramics of Magdalene Odundo inspired fluid shapes. Dior’s structured silhouettes softened, lines became more relaxed, and a new rhythm took shape, while still echoing the house’s foundations.

Blazy, meanwhile, set himself a very different task: stepping away from Chanel’s most familiar codes. Where recent collections leaned heavily on recognisable symbols, he chose to look past tweeds, pearls and camellias to see what really sits at the core of the house.

His first couture collection skipped obvious references, which led some to unfairly label it boring, while in fact Blazy reminds us that haute couture is Chanel’s starting point. When Gabrielle Chanel opened her workshop, ready-to-wear didn’t even exist — she was dressing women for everyday life, not just special occasions.

That thinking shaped Blazy’s approach to couture: light, wearable yet intricate and made to live beyond the red carpet. Anything that felt visually or conceptually heavy was deliberately left out. “We had made some huge, gorgeous dresses,” he told WWD. “It’s not that they didn’t work, but the message wasn’t clear. We were losing sight of the essence of the house, which is clothes that women actually wear.”

Put side by side, the two debuts tell a similar story. Anderson approaches couture as a living craft that has its place in today’s world. Blazy peels Chanel back to its core to understand it better and reconnect it with real life. Different routes, same outcome: couture that feels purposeful and very much alive.