Paris — A year after his highly-rated debut as the new artistic director of Chanel, Matthieu Blazy showed that despite the rave reviews and frenzied shoppers, he hasn’t lost sight of how it all began. On Monday night, the designer presented an ode to the house’s founder, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel through a collection that celebrated — and, importantly, offered clothing for — the many stages of a woman’s life.
Opening the show, model Dyanira Hurbuscher walked in a sheer look — a bra hinting at the boning seen in Edwardian-era corsetry, but completely softened and unrestricted (Gabrielle famously rejected the stiff fashion rules of her time). Hurbuscher carried one of Madam Chanel’s personal 2.55 bags, plucked out of the Patrimoine archives. This piece of fashion history acted as a bookend, appearing again in the collection’s final look — honoring fashion’s matriarch from start to finish.
But last night’s runway wasn’t meant to be a history lesson, Blazy said in show notes, this was about giving women the clothing they need at each chapter: “Throughout their lives, women become multiple selves, different faces of the same coin. It’s like a game of exquisite corpse, where one identity leads to another. It’s about the women within a woman. And here, it’s about one woman, Gabrielle, who then became Chanel.”
The Blazy effect on fashion has helped bid farewell to quiet luxury in favor of something far more joyful.
The Blazy effect on fashion has helped bid farewell to quiet luxury in favor of something far more joyful. Cha Gonzalez for CNN
Quiet luxury be damned
It’s true, a woman may inhabit the same body all her life, but she is far from static, rather always shifting and transforming — adopting new roles or playing different characters within the same skin and bones. In Blazy’s telling, underwear, whimsical tulle skirts, color-clashing patterns and playful (and detachable) clown collars — light, youthful and buoyant in spirit — serve as the beginning of the story, making way for clothes that a woman with a job and responsibilities might need to get through the day while looking great and not at all quiet: pinstripe trousers, soft tailoring, enriched with textural details like the often-present feathery floral brooches, and a couple of takes on a men’s gilet cinched in at the waist. Later, clothing for life’s joyful milestones: silk 1930s-style dresses, sequins and an opulent black billowing gown.
