- The show
- Chanel spring/summer 2027 by Matthieu Blazy · Grand Palais, Paris · October 5, 2026 · 83 looks
- The jewelry
- Swallows in flight as earrings, drops and studs at the ear, birds as buttons, camellia and feather brooches
- To wear it now
- One big earring with the hair pulled back; a brooch pinned to a jacket
- In boutiques
- From March 2027, the house says
Chanel’s own notes for the collection mention jewelry once, inside a sentence about birds: “Symbolised by the bird, particularly the swift and the swallow, a sense of freedom takes flight through the clothing, at times alighting in its avian embodiment as buttons, jewellery and embroidery.” The reviews filled in the rest.
In the house’s words
The notes are the third chapter of “La Conversation”, the house’s name for the dialogue between Matthieu Blazy, its artistic director of fashion, and Gabrielle Chanel. They begin with a line of hers and then give his: “Throughout their lives, women become multiple selves, different faces of the same coin. … It’s about the women within a woman. And here, it’s about one woman, Gabrielle, who then became Chanel.”
The collection follows her from her beginnings to her later years: it opens with jersey underwear and closes with the suit, in a new “smocked tweed”. The bags run from a new classic with a watch-chain lock to a birdcage minaudière, a small evening bag, “with its escaped birds, a symbol and signifier, at once playful and profound”. Blazy has the last word: “This is not a historical collection; it’s a collection about Gabrielle Chanel’s layered stories. Ultimately, Chanel took off, and each step she took led to her being free, like a bird.”
The evening
The show was set for 8 pm at the Grand Palais, under a flock of 95 illuminated birds, swifts and swallows hung in midflight, after the migrating birds Blazy watches in Calabria. Nicole Kidman, who won an Oscar playing Virginia Woolf, read from Orlando and To the Lighthouse on the soundtrack. Each of the 83 looks had a different pair of heels, and the same model, Dyanira Hurbuscher, opened and closed the show carrying Gabrielle Chanel’s own 2.55 bag from the house’s archives.
The jewelry, from the ears down
On the ears flew swallows: earrings “whose structure recalls the works of Alexander Calder”, in the words of NSS Magazine, beside bold logo earrings in the spirit of Gabrielle Chanel’s love of costume jewelry. Natural, cultured or imitation pearls (no one said which) came as drops and as small studs, “showers of pearls at the lobes”. Close up, other big earrings have rough surfaces: one square seems to hold crumpled, gold-colored foil under a clear top, and round ones have red or grey-blue centers in irregular frames.
CHANEL on Instagram: The joy of self-expression, Spring Summer 2027
Below the ears, the jewelry moved onto the clothes. A red jacket wears a collar of green and white buttons. Camellia brooches “burst from the necklines” of the looks that recall the 1920s and 1930s, and the first look carried a corsage at the bust made by Lemarié, the house’s feather and flower atelier. On the feet, the last looks came in “strappy sandals, each adorned with a bird”, as Cathy Horyn wrote in The Cut; pearls festooned sheer pumps, and some toe caps were covered in buttons.
How to wear it
- Pin a feather to tweed. The feathered corsage brooches looked their best on a tweed jacket.
- Button up. Blazy turned “even the smallest haberdashery details into decorative flourishes”: mother-of-pearl buttons ran down bib-front tuxedo shirts and spilled from the hems of soft jackets. British Vogue put it first among its tips for wearing pearls this season.
- Pull your hair back. In the close-ups with the big earrings, the hair is slicked back and each earring sits alone at the ear.
- Decide what the pearl should say. “Pearls can feel punk, prim or pour la plage, depending on how you style them.”
Elsewhere in Paris
Chanel “hardly had a monopoly” on pearls, as British Vogue put it: Celine showed bulbous pearl drops, and Valentino piled strings of pearls, colored gems and crystals. At Dior, strings like leis hung from a single ear (what Dior showed, and how to wear one earring), and Saint Laurent’s shoe designer set out to “make the shoes into jewelry” (Saint Laurent’s spring 2027 jewelry).
If you want to try it
For the crumpled square, our Crushed Metal Square Studs are just over an inch long, in silver-tone over a copper base. For a pearl, the Single Cultured Pearl Studs set one freshwater cultured pearl on sterling silver, and the pearls collection has more, cultured and faux.