Gabriela Hearst Explores Function and Fiction at Paris Fashion Week

The penultimate day of Paris Fashion Week turned on a single, sharp idea: that getting dressed is both an act of utility and an act of imagination. Critic Angelo Flaccavento, writing in Business of Fashion, framed his Day Eight dispatch around exactly that tension, tracking it through collections from Gabriela Hearst, Chanel, and more.

For Hearst's Autumn/Winter 2026 outing, the organising concept was the dialogue, not the dichotomy, between caterpillar and butterfly. "Dresses that crawl and dresses that fly, complete with plenty of iridescence" was how Flaccavento put it, and the result, in his telling, was a visual feast. The collection refused to treat utility and theatricality as opposing forces, insisting instead that both inhabit the same garment, sometimes at the same time. That is, arguably, the more honest account of how clothing actually works: function as foundation, fiction as finish.

Not every passage landed without complication. One section of the show prompted Flaccavento to note a recall of heavier days at Bottega Veneta, which itself echoed what he described as the Brassaï-inspired dresses of a seminal Celine collection made under Phoebe Philo. It was a pointed aside, the kind that reminds you fashion's visual memory is long, and that iridescence alone does not guarantee originality.

The broader Day Eight theme held across houses. Chanel was also part of the conversation, though the specifics of that showing are drawn from the full dispatch. What linked them, per Flaccavento's framing, was the same friction: clothes that want to function and clothes that want to seduce, and the most interesting work happening precisely where those two impulses refuse to separate cleanly.

"Function and fiction: that's what the act of dressing is all about, after all," Flaccavento wrote. It reads like a provocation, but it is more accurate than it first sounds. Hearst, at least, seemed to take it seriously.