Matthieu Blazy asked himself a question before designing his latest haute couture collection for Chanel: ‘How can we juxtapose fairy tales and the adventure of the everyday?’ The answer, unveiled on a July evening in Paris, was a collection that moved between the fantastical and the familiar with a fluency that felt both new and utterly Chanel. The setting — the Grand Palais’s nave transformed into a dreamscape of mirrored surfaces and trailing vines — announced that this was not a conventional couture presentation.
The commercial implications of this collection extend beyond the atelier. Blazy’s approach — making Chanel’s codes feel personal rather than prescribed — is precisely the kind of creative direction that resonates with the younger luxury consumers the house needs to cultivate. If the fairy tale of Chanel’s revival under Blazy has a moral, it is this: enchantment and everyday life are not opposites. In the hands of a gifted designer, they are the same thing.
What anchored the fantasy was the everyday counterpoint: flat ballerina slippers in patent leather, clutches shaped like everyday objects — a folded newspaper, a half-read letter — that appeared in the hands of models as if picked up on the way out the door. These touches grounded the collection in a reality that couture often escapes. Blazy is reminding his audience that even the most extraordinary clothing is meant to be lived in, worn, carried through the door and into the world.
Blazy’s Chanel woman, in this telling, is neither a princess nor a pragmatist. She is both at once. The collection opened with a series of tailored jackets in chalky pastels — pink, lilac, powder blue — cut with the precise shoulders that Gabrielle Chanel established as a house signature but rendered in double-faced cashmere treated to feel almost liquid. The familiar cardigan jacket was there, but it had been elongated, softened, rethought through the lens of a designer who understands that tradition must be translated, not merely repeated.
The fairy-tale element emerged in the evening wear: gowns inorganza that seemed to float several centimeters above the body, their hems scattered with three-dimensional petals that caught the light like dew. One dress in particular — a column of palest celadon silk covered in hand-embroidered silver thread that traced the shape of climbing roses — drew audible admiration from the front row. Blazy’s skill lies in making this degree of craftsmanship look effortless, as though the dress had grown rather than been constructed.
