Chanel Fall Winter 2025-26 Haute Couture “In the Silence of the Fields”. Story by Eleonora de Gray, Editor-in-Chief of RUNWAY MAGAZINE. Photo Courtesy: Chanel. Video: Runway Magazine.
There is no spectacle here. No golden staircases or digital illusions. No attempt to dazzle or distract. For Fall-Winter 2025/26, Chanel has gone pastoral — not as a fashion trend but as an intellectual return. A retreat from noise. A withdrawal, even, from fashion’s current obsession with spectacle-for-spectacle’s sake.
Under the direction of Chanel’s Creation Studio, the collection is staged in the Salon d’Honneur of the Grand Palais, reimagined by Willo Perron as a discreet echo of the Haute Couture salons at 31, rue Cambon. It is a setting that breathes. No longer the coded performance of couture, but rather a pause — a breath of open air where fashion can think again.
A Return Without Nostalgia
What Chanel proposes this season is not nostalgia. It is memory recontextualized. The English countryside and Scottish moors, which once served Gabrielle Chanel as a counterpoint to the corseted absurdities of her time, are revisited not for romantic flair but for their sense of clarity. The palette — ecru, ivory, brown, green, and black — is neutral without being neutralized. It whispers the tones of bark, wool, ash, and soil. Earth, not earthiness.
Tweed — the material so often reduced to cliché under the Chanel banner — here is treated with rare respect. Its knitted illusion redefines it: as mohair in plum and green, as bouclé mimicking sheepskin, as feather-adorned pseudo-fur. It is a study in texture without overstatement, humility with structure. The jackets mimic jumpers; the coats echo blankets. Proportions are borrowed from menswear not for irony but for freedom. No female silhouette is ‘corrected’; nothing here apologizes for being grounded.
Symbols, Subtle and Stubborn
And yet, this is not minimalism. Chanel has never been minimalist. Wheat, that stubborn, golden symbol of abundance, appears again — not as vintage tribute, but as quiet resistance. It punctuates necklines, buttons, chiffon flounces. It dares to exist in a fashion world that seems to have forgotten that garments once carried meaning, not just margin. Even the chevron motifs seem more like etchings on the land — furrows, echoes of cultivation rather than decorative conceit.
The jewel buttons, heavy with symbolism, and floral embroidery, almost folkloric in their meticulous detail, bring the collection into its final movement — not climax, but resolution. Gold and silver lace, lamé in sunset orange, and embroidery catching the light close the story not with a bang, but with sunlight through branches. A dress becomes a final glint of late autumn before winter closes in.
The Silence That Frees
Ultimately, this collection is not about clothing, but freedom. Chanel reminds us, in the most restrained of ways, that fashion was once a liberating act. Gabrielle Chanel stripped away constraint, not to be provocative but to let women breathe. This is a collection built on that same breath. No artifice. No noise. No command to look, just an invitation to see.
In a season when many maisons scramble to scream louder than their competitors, Chanel has done something quietly radical. It has folded back into itself, into its heritage and into nature, not to relive the past — but to clear space for the future. This is not couture that begs to be captured. It is couture that asks to be felt.
See All Looks Chanel Fall Winter 2025-26 Haute Couture
