Chanel Fall-Winter 2026-2027 Couture bags arrived as characters in a story rather than accessories on a runway. On July 7, inside a Grand Palais swallowed by giant beanstalks and flowers blooming a shade too brightly to be safe, Matthieu Blazy staged his second haute couture collection for the house — “Gaby and the Beanstalk” — and hung its entire plot from the models’ wrists. A silver hen with a golden egg on its chain. A bear asleep in cast gold. A magic bean in green enamel. Each minaudière is a page from the fairytale book Blazy found on a shelf in Gabrielle Chanel’s own apartment, and together they form the most collectible chapter of the season.
The setting: a poisoned garden at the Grand Palais
The starting point was a small leather-bound volume — Les Fées, Contes des Contes — discovered in Gabrielle Chanel’s personal library. Blazy asked himself whether her life, the climb from a convent orphanage to the top of fashion, was itself a Jack and the Beanstalk story: a nobody who climbs, dares, and comes back down with the gold. The show salon answered in scenography — vines overgrowing the space, oversized blossoms, an enchanted garden with something faintly toxic underneath.
The storytelling began before anyone reached the Grand Palais. The show invitation arrived as a miniature silver book on a chain, hinged like a locket and finished with a black ribbon. Opened, its hammered-metal pages reveal the engraved show details on one side and, on the other, a single bean sprouting a curling vine and leaf — the entire collection compressed into an object the size of a matchbox. Guests were, quite literally, handed the book before the story was told.
“I started to wonder, was Gabrielle Chanel’s life a fairy tale? I found a small book in her library, Les Fées, Contes des Contes, and asked myself if, together with the Haute Couture ateliers, we could make garments that tell stories like a book.”
Matthieu Blazy
The opening look, a sheer guipure suit whose embroidery grid sprouted like bean shoots, came with the key prop: the model clasped the actual copy of Les Fées, taken directly from the shelf of Gabrielle’s apartment. And in place of the traditional bridal finale, Blazy closed with a black off-the-shoulder dress — a nod to the founder, who famously never married. Her line opened the show notes: “I created my life because my life did not please me.”
Then came the bags. Blazy was too clever to spell the references out, so consider this the decoder.
The hen minaudière and the golden egg
The prize at the top of the beanstalk is the hen that lays golden eggs, and Blazy made her literal. Three versions walked. A hen sculpted in silver-tone metal, every feather engraved, with a green cabochon eye and a coral-toned beak. A deep red enamelled sister with gold accents. And a third in glossy copper-orange lacquer with a gold beak, swinging from a gold chain strung with leaf charms against a navy tweed look. The silver hen is the collection’s thesis piece, because the story continues down its chain: silver feather charms scatter along the links, and at the very end hangs a single hammered golden egg, with a silver egg dropping from the red version.
The egg itself became the collection’s recurring Easter egg — Dazed counted at least twenty hidden across the show, appearing as sculpted shoe heels, shoulder ornaments, bag-charm drops, even golden-egg nail art. Once you spot the first one, you keep finding them until the finale.
Sleeping bear clutches, straight out of Goldilocks
The bears arrived mid-nap. Chanel cast the sleeping bear minaudière in two finishes: polished silver-tone, curled nose-to-paw with its fur rendered strand by strand, and a gold-tone version studded with tiny turquoise cabochons, carried on a chain threaded with turquoise-dotted beads. The reference is Goldilocks and the Three Bears — but the object itself belongs to the tradition of Chanel’s figurative minaudières, the menagerie that already includes squirrels, fish, and last season’s New York apple and peanut.
Magic bean bags with vine chains
Beans built this collection — Blazy’s team literally planted them for the mood board — so naturally they became bags. A green metallic bean minaudière hangs from a gold chain twisted like a young vine, with sculpted gold leaves climbing the links.
A second bean comes lacquered in red and white enamel, its silver chain coiled into corkscrew tendrils and finished with a green leaf and a tiny red ladybird charm.
The third is the bean after the climb: cast entirely in polished gold, hammered like an ancient nugget and topped with a gold leaf at the clasp, carried against a coral-red sequinned coat.
The book clutch from Gabrielle’s library
The quietest bag on the runway may be the smartest: a clutch shaped as a worn, leather-bound book — the storybook itself, turned into the object that carries the story. Held flat in the palm like a novel on the way to a reading chair, it mirrors the Les Fées volume that opened the show and turns the collection’s premise into something you can actually hold. For editors, this is the piece that summarizes the season in a single image.
