Valentino’s Specula Mundi: slowing the gaze

Editor-at-large, Tim Blanks and editor-in-chief, Imran Amed are back from the Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2026 shows where the biggest moments of the week lived up to all the anticipation.

Jonathan Anderson’s debut at Dior reframed couture as a six-month creative lab — a backbone that can feed the entire maison with technique, emotion and ideas. At Chanel, Matthieu Blazy stripped away the obvious codes to put construction, movement and the body first — the kind of couture you only fully understand up close. There was also Valentino’s “panorama” staging and Schiaparelli’s turbocharged push for spectacle — all playing out against a tougher luxury backdrop this year’

“Something that struck me about this season is the energy that everybody was evoking,” Blanks says. “The words people used to describe their feelings — it was Jonathan talking about having a lot of anger he needed to get out, or Mathieu talking about nature, or Alessandro talking about fantasy and fashion, and then Daniel Roseberry talking about turbocharging Schiaparelli.”

Key Insights: 

• Departing from the codes of previous designers, Blanks was struck by how much of Anderson’s own sensibility made it onto the Dior runway, from Magdalene Odundo’s vase forms to historic textiles and witty, collectible accessories. “I felt like there was real synthesis … I think he showed some of the most beautiful things he’s ever shown, and some of the most joyful clothes.” Within 90 minutes of the show, the full collection was installed at Villa Dior for clients to handle and order, underscoring Anderson’s structured, end-to-end planning. As Amed notes, “He’s operational … he thinks about the way it all works together. That’s quite rare in a designer.”

• Mathieu Blazy pared Chanel back to construction and movement, dialling down overt couture signatures to foreground cut and daytime dressing. The result read as a wardrobe built on the body rather than surface effect, with exquisitely fine details – budgies perched on pocket anchors, bird-on-mushroom motifs, slingbacks with tiny avian heels – that reward close looking. The Grand Palais spectacle amplified the tension between intimacy and scale, but as Blanks notes, “it does underscore in a very graphic way that couture is the ultimate private pleasure.”

• Alessandro Michele’s Specula Mundi for Valentino revived the 19th-century Kaiserpanorama to slow the audience’s gaze and amplify detail. Reading from Alessandro’s letter, Blanks highlights: “We continue to work within this space not to fill an absence, but to preserve it. Only by accepting such a void, with no intention to fill it, can Valentino’s legacy remain what it has always been.” Another line reads: “There is no fantasy without beauty, and there is no freedom without beauty and fantasy.”

• A common thread this season is that designers are newly humbled by the expertise of the craft. “Everybody was talking about their ateliers, all these ready-to-wear designers being confronted with what a couture atelier is capable of,” Blanks says. After visiting Valentino, he notes: “There were five separate ateliers working on the clothes… I can’t thread a needle, but I got kind of palpitations walking through – it’s just so incredible, that kind of artistry.” Anderson himself calls Dior’s workrooms a “mini city” of ultra-specialists.

Additional Resources:

• Couture Has Entered a New Era. What Does It Mean? | BoF 
• Blazy’s Chanel Couture Was a Slam Dunk! | BoF 
• Exclusive: How Jonathan Anderson Is ‘Rebooting’ Couture at Dior | BoF 
• The Beating Heart of Haute Couture | BoF 

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