Elie Saab put down the crystals and threw a ball instead
For autumn 2026, the house swapped its usual wall-to-wall crystal for colour-shifting silks and velvet corsets
Just a casual Wednesday? Elie Saab doesn’t know how. The designer completely shut down fashion’s dressed-down era at Paris Haute Couture Week. Staged on Wednesday, 8 July 2026, the AW26/27 show answered the industry’s cozy obsession with a sultry, ultra-glam masked ball.
He called it The Ball of Untamed Dreams and pointed to Truman Capote’s 1966 Black and White Ball and the Old Hollywood of Elizabeth Taylor as reference points. The mask, in his telling, is not about hiding. He has described it as a way for a woman to show a different side of herself for one evening.
A sweep of sheer opaline organza strewn with pearls was cut to hover like a Magritte cloud, a magenta silk fishtail gown twisted itself into a Dalí rose, and several fabrics shifted colour as they moved, lilac turning silver, deep blue warming to blush. Corseted velvet gowns and cinched New Look waists carried the ballroom register, a minidress under an enormous bow supplied the comic relief, and sculpted headpieces and masks finished the more theatrical looks.
Saab put tuxedos on the runway for both women and men, with embellished jackets and capes extending a couture menswear offer the house is growing. On top of that, a designer famous for gowns paved edge to edge in crystal let fabric, sculptural pleating and colour do the work this season.
The ball also came with a five-year plan. Elie Saab Jr., the founder’s son and the company’s chief executive, used the season to lay out a strategy he calls Vision 2030, built on growing ready-to-wear and retail. He says the privately held house has grown around 30 per cent a year for five years, that its New York flagship doubled sales last quarter, and that new stores are opening in Riyadh this week, Miami this month and Delhi by the end of the year, the brand’s first in India.
The finale belonged, as it always does at Saab, to a bride, this one in layers of champagne, crystal and light gold.
Credits:
Images courtesy of Elie Saab
Words: Roisin Teeling @roisinteeling
ElieSaab.com
