Much of the idle chatter this Paris Fashion Week has revolved not around runway shows, nor the usual conjecture about which creative directors are in (or out). People aren’t even talking about last night’s parties, or how little sleep they’ve had.
Instead, the question is: have you been to the Chanel store on Rue Cambon yet? Or, the concession in Le Bon Marché? If you have, what did you buy? (And sometimes: do they still have my size?). Because it was there, on Thursday (5 March 2026), that the first arrivals from Matthieu Blazy’s debut collection, presented last October, began to hit shelves. Such has been the furore, Vogue Business and The New York Times have reported on the phenomenon (in the latter, one interviewee likened the mood on the shop floor to The Hunger Games); by Sunday, pieces were already turning up on the front row.
Chanel A/W 2026: ‘The caterpillar and the butterfly’
So, when it came to Blazy’s sophomore runway show for Chanel, presented at the Grand Palais this evening (9 March), it was likely that the 1000 or so guests were already making their shopping lists (all the more so as a large number of the runway show’s seats were taken up by Very Important Customers – i.e. those who spend the most in store in a given year). And there was certainly plenty to desire here: a fashion pick-and-mix of gleaming metallic court shoes and sock-like two-tone boots; Chanel tweeds recut in the proportions of an oversized lumberjack shirt or in shimmering tinsel-like fabric; alongside the simplest of black jersey dresses, like the one that closed the show (jersey was one of the fabrics that Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel pioneered, favoured for its ease of line and lack of constriction).
There were also squidgy crescent-shaped handbags reminiscent of croissants; dropped-waist dresses and skirts that recalled the liberated dress codes of the 1920s (another silhouette favoured by Coco Chanel for its ease); and a thrilling closing act, where a stream of colour-saturated looks – some in chequered chainmail – were adorned with appliqué flowers, lace and beads. They were worn by models whose hair was pastel-coloured or slicked back and given a gleaming metallic sheen. As one seatmate remarked, wistfully: ‘I want to be that woman’.
It gets to the heart of Blazy’s success at the house so far: an ability to stoke desire not just through a well-designed pump or handbag, but through more heartfelt expressions of joy and awe (he conjured a similar emotional response at Bottega Veneta, where he was creative director prior to Chanel). It was evident from that first runway show, where a grinning Awar Odhiang twirled along the runway in a dress of blooming organza ‘feathers’ to close the show (‘I was floating on top of the moon,’ she told American Vogue of the impromptu finale); or an equally smiley Bhavitha Mandava (now a Chanel ambassador) closing Blazy’s first couture show in a bridal look adorned with hundreds of mother-of-pearl paillettes. The latter show was populated with fantastical Munchkin-Land-like mushrooms and toadstools; the former with a vast simulacrum of the solar system, hanging from the Grand Palais’ vaulted glass ceiling.
This evening, soundtracked by a remix of Lady Gaga’s Just Dance by Michel Gaubert, the show segued between day and night, or, as Blazy described – evoking the words of Coco Chanel herself – the ‘caterpillar and the butterfly’. In seeking this metamorphosis over a given day, what was striking was the collection’s depth: 78 looks, each richly layered and accessorised, spanning the quotidian and the extraordinary (it felt almost impossible that this collection had been created in just a few short months). One could imagine these looks being pulled apart and mixed with an existing wardrobe; equally, there was a seductive appeal to the idea of wearing top-to-toe Chanel.
Blazy said it was an ode to Coco Chanel, who was a master of the multiplicities of women’s lives: her clothing straddled both glamour and function, a dichotomy which continues to run through the heart of the house of Chanel today. ‘Fashion is both caterpillar and butterfly. Be a caterpillar by day and a butterfly by night,’ she once said, in a quote reprinted in the collection notes. ‘There is nothing more comfortable than a caterpillar and nothing more made for love than a butterfly. We need dresses that crawl and dresses that fly. The butterfly doesn’t go to the market, and the caterpillar doesn’t go to the ball.’
‘Chanel is function, Chanel is fiction. Chanel is sensible, Chanel is seductive,’ was Blazy’s own take. ‘Chanel is day, Chanel is night. It represents the freedom to choose between the caterpillar and the butterfly whenever you want. I wish to create a canvas for women to be unapologetically who they are and who they want to be.’
Follow our live coverage of Paris Fashion Week A/W 2026 here.
