Matthieu Blazy marked his first year as artistic director at Chanel with a Paris show full of joy, bold colours and personal touches. “It’s a good start,” he said after the presentation. “I am happy with where we are at.”
A year of milestones
Chanel now tops the Lyst index of the world’s hottest brands, which tracks demand and engagement across search and social media. The privately held company announces official financial results only once a year, but figures reported by Bloomberg showed 16% growth in the first half of 2026. In Vanity Fair’s list of the world’s 50 most powerful people, published this month, Blazy is the only fashion designer to make the cut.
Blazy’s Chanel is about joy. Smiley and chatty in person, he enthuses about his team and the women he dresses, presenting a friendly face of Chanel that contrasts with Karl Lagerfeld’s legendary acid tongue and Coco’s controlled brutalist chic. He talks about his job like a child in a candy store, not a tortured artist.
Bold colours and flying birds
The stage set featured a flock of 95 giant white birds suspended from the domed steel and glass ceiling of the Grand Palais in Paris. Blazy got the idea while on holiday in southern Italy with his partner, watching migrating birds fly above the Crati River. One of Chanel’s most famous adverts of the 1990s featured Vanessa Paradis in a birdcage; now, Chanel’s birds fly free.
For the soundtrack, Blazy had asked Nicole Kidman to read a passage “about time, about freedom” from Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, which he had read on that Italian holiday. Fashion was “women’s homemade remedy for the dark times”, he said.
A personal touch
After several years when the decaffeinated aesthetic of quiet luxury dominated fashion, the new Chanel shouts with cereal-aisle colours. A red and white embroidered jacket with a jade and turquoise skirt, plus bag and boots in navy and gold. The iconic two-tone pumps, but in zebra stripes and yellow polka dots instead of the traditional camel and black.
The same model opened and closed the show carrying Gabrielle Chanel’s very own 2.55 handbag. “Gabrielle actually had very few bags in her own life, which is something I find quite beautiful. So this bag is not broken, but it has a wonderful patina,” Blazy said.
On his moodboard were photographs of the founder he had found in the archive: Gabrielle as a child; with Gigot, her beloved great dane; on a boat; riding a horse; in a Harlequin fancy dress costume; smiling in a bold leopard-print coat and matching hat. “It is a side of Chanel that is not known: her funny side, her joyful side. I see women as a juxtaposition of so many selves, and Chanel had this incredible layering within herself.”
The famous soft-shouldered Chanel suit came worn with nothing beneath, “like perfume”. “I like the idea that when you wear it directly on the skin, it makes a fetish of the suit. A little punk Chanel,” he said. A year of fabric innovation was behind the newest versions of the suit, a smocked silk on an elasticated membrane, which “is my answer to what sporty could mean at Chanel”, Blazy said.
