The top 10 most-viewed SS26 shows on Vogue Runway

Become a Vogue Business Member to receive unlimited access to Member-only reporting and insights, our Beauty and TikTok Trend Trackers, Member-only newsletters and exclusive event invitations.

Coco Chanel famously said, “Fashion changes, but style endures.” Still, the designer change at Chanel this season sent interest in the Paris house into the stratosphere. Matthieu Blazy’s collection was deeply influenced by what he discovered in the Chanel archives — “it was too much beauty, almost,” he said of the experience — and on the Grand Palais runway, the diversity of the clothes reflected what he found there, as well as, of course, his own keen interest in rich, surprising textiles.

Blazy’s Chanel has been roundly praised as the debut of the season, including on Vogue Runway; not just for the sensitive manner in which he reinterpreted the house’s famous codes, but also for all the ways he lit up our desire receptors. That’s no easy feat, considering the dozen or so other debuts we saw. In fact, the top four collections on our most-viewed shows of the season list came from incoming designers: in addition to Blazy, Dior’s Jonathan Anderson, Gucci’s Demna and Maison Margiela’s Glenn Martens made the cut.

Margiela is the surprise here. Maybe it’s the afterglow of Martens’s electric couture launch in July, or maybe it was the adorable children’s orchestra from suburban Paris he invited to perform, but I like to think that it was the clothes themselves, which were indebted to Martin Margiela’s 1990s experiments with deconstruction and recycling, without looking like straight reproductions. “My ambition has reconnected to the reality of the street a bit,” Martens said during a preview. It was Margiela for the real world.

Of the six remaining entries, Alessandro Michele’s Valentino made the biggest jump, from ninth place to sixth. This tells me that people are responding to his cleaned-up take on the label. “I tried to simplify,” he said, “but it’s my way of being simple.” At his Balenciaga debut, which landed in the 10th spot on our list, Pierpaolo Piccioli blended simplicity, elegance and his own unique brand of joie de vivre. For Vogue chief critic Sarah Mower, it was a winning combination; she summed it up as “beautiful and realistic fashion showing an optimistic way forward.” The really interesting developments happened in spots 11 to 20. We don’t reveal this part of the lineup, but I can say that five more first-time collections are in the mix. That’s good news for brands like Marni and, presumably, Fendi with fresh starts of their own next season.