After a re-energizing year, Chanel takes flight

By Fiona Sinclair Scott, CNN; Photos by Cha Gonzalez

Paris (CNN) — 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.”

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.

Of course, signature skirt suits and tweed appeared throughout but there was technical innovation here in the form of what the designer is calling “smocked tweed,” a stretchy more malleable iteration of a Chanel classic which he playfully likened to sportswear. Many of these archetypal suits were also worn with nothing underneath — no longer uptight bourgeois armor, but rather designs meant to be worn “lightly as perfume.”

Birds — namely swifts, swallows, cranes and geese — served as a motif, popping up within the invitations, decorating some of the garments, and soaring above our heads during the show. The idea for the set came to Blazy while on holiday in the south of Italy, where he was inspired by an area of Calabria that acts a natural reserve for birds.

Bringing it back his founder he said, “Ultimately, Chanel took off, and each step she took led to her being free, like a bird.” The energy both outside and within the Grand Palais reflected this spirit, with guests including Dua Lipa, Nicole Kidman and Pedro Pascal spotted dancing in their seats to Britney Spears’ “Gimme More.”

Blazy, 42, who cannot resist injecting a mood-boosting millennial banger into his show music, was clearly having fun this season. And why wouldn’t he after such a successful first year? As the finale of models filed backstage, the designer came out to take his bow, light on his feet as he waved to the audience before running back to his team, arms wide open ready for whatever comes next.

Scroll down to see inside the Chanel Spring-Summer 2027, in a series of images by Paris-based photographer Cha Gonzalez.

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