Models present creations by designer Matthieu Blazy as part of his Spring/Summer 2026 collection show for Chanel during Paris Fashion Week. Photo: Reuters
The Paris shows came to an end with fashion’s version of the big bang.
In a Grand Palais hung with zeppelin-size versions of the solar system – sun, Earth and stars, designer Matthieu Blazy unveiled his first collection for Chanel.
It turned out he wasn’t just remaking the world of Coco Chanel. He was remaking the universe.
In taking Chanel down to a molecular level and recombining all those well-known brand building blocks, Blazy didn’t always create beauty. He did something more interesting. He brought Chanel back to life.
Out with that old boucle suit, the one that long ago entered the realm of cliche. Out with the double C’s!
There was tweed but tougher menswear tweed, in strong-shoulder jackets cropped at the waist and slouchy trousers.
Also knit tweed and blown-up tweed that sort of resembled a motherboard and open-weave tweed so light and airy it was only notionally tweed.
Skirts hit below the knee (Coco famously hated knees), wrapping around at the hips to attach by two buttons at one side so a leg popped out with each step.
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The 1920s-era dropped waist turned out to be trompe l’oeil, suspended from a ribbed white cotton yoke, like a riff on visible underwear.
There was a little black dress – knit and slinky – and there were black and white looks, echoing the brand’s perfume packaging.
But they were less striking than the men’s shirts, made with Charvet (where, Blazy said in a preview, Coco had shopped) and Chanel-ified by a little chain at the hem, like the chain Coco added to her jacket hems to help them hang straight.
Left untucked over sweeping, tiered ball skirts made from crisp cotton, they were cool.
Indeed, one slithery white art deco gown and a duo of bias cut slips aside, most of the evening looks were shirts-n-skirts. Relax.
There were camellias, or at least camellia-adjacent blooms, rendered spiky and worn as giant corsages, or sometimes a hat.
A beaded knit ensemble that seemed made of crunched-up pearls. The old spectator pump reimagined as a soft, slipperlike heel that seemed to have been dipped, just at the toes, in paint.
Wire was added to the 2.55 bag so it could be twisted up like an heirloom, misshapen by use.
Some of the proportions were off, especially in the blown-up tweed jackets, which could look large and lumpy no matter how light they actually were.
But these were clothes you could wear, not just clothes for maximum smartphone impact.
Clothes that seemed to consider the woman inside. Clothes with space to move. With pockets! And there were so many to choose from.
Like Jonathan Anderson, who made his debut at Christian Dior earlier in the week, Michael Rider, who showed his first Celine in July and Dario Vitale, who debuted his Versace in Milan, Blazy seems to be revelling in the legacy he inherited, rather than quailing under its weight.
And like them, he is of the school that says try a lot of stuff, put it all out there and see what sticks.
And it is what connects Blazy to Karl Lagerfeld, the man who brought Chanel into the modern era by knocking it off its pedestal when he took over in 1983, making Chanel miniskirts and Chanel moto jackets, Chanel basketballs and Chanel jeans.
Not to mention introducing the enormous show sets that positioned the brand as a part of pop culture (Lagerfeld once set off a rocket in the Grand Palais; he would have appreciated Blazy’s galaxy).
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One of the problems of Blazy’s immediate predecessor, Virginie Viard, who took over after Lagerfeld’s death in 2019, was that she relied too heavily on continuity.
What Lagerfeld understood – and what Blazy has absorbed – is that good taste needs to be cut with a healthy dose of irreverence to stop it from being too bourgeois.
Lagerfeld did it by introducing an element of kitsch. Blazy is adding experimentation.
That is, after all, how Chanel herself started more than 100 years ago when she built her business on breaking rules.
At the end of the show, model Awar Odhiang walked around in a big circle, clapping her hands before throwing her arms skyward toward Saturn, or Jupiter.
In her huge ball skirt, a carnival explosion of colour encrusted with blooms, and simple white silk blouse split open at the back, she looked like she was having the best time. – ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
