Any mention of Chanel this season isn’t complete without acknowledging the pandemonium in the house’s Paris stores. The in crowd is agog with desire; there are reports of editors, executives, and models waiting hours to make their purchases, of women buying multiple pairs of shoes, if only one Matthieu Blazy-designed bag. It’s apparently an unspoken limit, though, of course, as many ‘pillar’ bags as one likes are also on offer. In my 20 years of attending the Paris shows, no other debut collection has so turned on fashion’s insiders.
Into that commotion Blazy sent out his sophomore main season ready-to-wear for the French house tonight, though it’s technically his fourth show, following an October debut, a December Metiers d’Art show in New York, and January’s haute couture sensation. The Grand Palais looked like a construction site with cranes lit up in primary colors. “I was interested in the idea of building a dream, a work in progress,” he said.
In fact, Blazy has made swift work of reorienting Chanel. Even as he looks to Coco’s decades of innovation—“the way she took clothes from the working class, changed the context, and said ‘this is luxury, too’”—he’s determined to strip away anything old-fashioned about the house she founded in 1910. It means that one minute he was quoting her belted drop-waist designs from the 1920s, and the next he was sending out blouson jackets as contemporary and ‘now’ as anything that’s come down a Chanel runway in years.
Explaining himself backstage, Blazy quoted an observation Chanel made to the French newspaper Le Figaro in the 1950s. “We need dresses that crawl and dresses that fly, because the butterfly doesn’t go to the market and the caterpillar doesn’t go to the ball.” It gave him the set-up for a show that began with the simplest of black skirt suits in a ribbed merino wool and silk blend with gold buttons, and crescendoed in a series of iridescent looks made from printed chainmail and trompe l’oeil tweeds; function and fiction side-by-side. In between, he made a close study of those belted drop-waist looks which elongated the torso, producing a flapperish, unstructured, and yes, caterpillar-ish answer to Jonathan Anderson’s abbreviated Bar jackets at Dior.
Beyond silhouettes, this collection was a showcase for the remarkable feats Chanel’s ateliers are able to achieve at the level of the fabric: a sleeveless top and skirt set with mother of pearl paillettes knitted into the design, skirt suits with “action painting” stitching, a shimmering lurex velvet slipdress alive with embroideries, the caterpillar at last transformed into a butterfly. The sweeping views of the Grand Palais, while enormously impressive, didn’t always do justice to these clothes and their exquisitries. They are best observed in extreme close-up, where you can turn over a hem to see a jacket’s complementary lining, or appreciate a slip dress’s near weightlessness.
Blazy takes his new job very seriously, but he wears the responsibility remarkably lightly. Those embroidered slip dresses seemed almost to evanesce. And he gave the last word to Coco. She’s credited with the innovation of the little black dress; this one was cut in fluid, unpretentious jersey, as simple as can be from the front but with an exposed low back punctuated by a camellia suspended between the shoulder blades. “That’s what Chanel is for me,” he said, “this quiet revolution, but boom.”
