Six months into his tenure at Chanel, designer Matthieu Blazy presented his second ready-to-wear collection at Paris Fashion Week on Monday. The show featured brightly coloured cranes rising from a holographic floor, a deliberate signal that construction at the heritage house is ongoing. For Parisians accustomed to the real cranes above Notre-Dame cathedral, the set may have felt less dreamy than intended.
The audience inside the Grand Palais suggested the foundations are solid: Margot Robbie, Oprah Winfrey, Jennie, Kylie Minogue, Lily-Rose Depp, Teyana Taylor and Olivia Dean all attended. Blazy took his cue from a quote by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel: “We need dresses that crawl and dresses that fly.” The collection was structured around that tension — plain against spectacular, function against fantasy — with a discipline his sprawling debut last October sometimes lacked.
Black knit zip-ups, tweed blousons and boxy overshirts arrived with little more than four gold buttons to signal they belonged to Chanel. Blazy’s point was architectural: the suit, he said, is “the first brick” — and everything else rises from it. He stripped the suit to a knit shirt jacket or pressed-tweed blouson before rebuilding it in silicone-woven fabric and metallic mesh, echoing Chanel’s own practice of making the poor precious.
Waistlines were pulled dramatically low — belts slung to mid-thigh, pleated skirts starting where blazers ended. References were retro flapper filtered through a modern lens: drop-waisted twinsets, patchwork dresses with floral embroidery, and vivid patterned knits with a Twenties pulse. A furry coat in bold geometric colour could have been worn in a chic part of London's Camden.
The final stretch answered concerns about the ultra-low waistlines with force. Sequined plaid suits arrived in dazzling colour, beaded coats glinted with star-chart embroidery, and metallic mesh was woven to mimic tweed motifs. Several models wore pastel-tinted hair to match their looks. Trailing ribbons, layered ruffles and insect-wing detailing turned the runway into spectacle. Blazy cast wide — teens through to women in their fifties — and let the show breathe with a runway circuit that took models nearly five minutes. He framed it all with seven pared-back black and cream looks, as if to say the Chanel you know isn’t going anywhere.
