‘I just wanted to have fun’: Matthieu Blazy makes a joyful Chanel debut

The invitation for Matthieu Blazy’s debut runway show for Chanel was a necklace: on it, a tiny silver charm shaped like a house and engraved with Chanel’s double-C emblem. When you peered through its front window, the time and address of the show were there in minuscule letters – barely visible to the naked eye.

Chanel itself is a house, but a big one. Its revenue in 2024 was close to 19 billion dollars, and that in itself was a drop from the year prior due to market conditions (the value of the company is several billion dollars more). Known far beyond the closed circle of fashion, you might not own a Chanel jacket or a 2.55 handbag, but you have likely worn its perfume or make-up – you might have even taken its name for a child or a pet.

Matthieu Blazy shows his debut collection for Chanel

Chanel is also the house of Karl Lagerfeld – a towering figure who himself transcended fashion to become a household name – and before that, Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel. Stripping away what Janet Flanner in a 1931 issue of the New Yorker called the ‘gussets, garters, corsets, whalebones, plackets, false hair, and brassières’ of turn-of-the-century women’s dress, the French couturier would liberate the body and stage a fashion revolution.

Add to this the weight of the strident online discourse which has surrounded the other debuts this fashion month – a brief scroll on any major fashion magazine’s Instagram comments will give you an insight – and you would be forgiven for thinking that Blazy’s task was near-insurmountable (last week, at Jonathan Anderson’s debut womenswear collection for Dior, an Adam Curtis-directed short film preceding the show intercut footage from the house’s previous runway shows with clips from horror films – a symbol of the anxiety taking on such a major brand can evoke).

But Blazy comes to the house with plenty of pedigree. Born in Paris (a plus, particularly for the show’s French contingent), he arrives at Chanel from a critically lauded and commercially successful, if relatively brief, stint at Bottega Veneta, where he utilised the house’s leather atelier to create extraordinary sartorial illusions (a memorable pair of ‘denim’ jeans were actually trompe l’oeil leather). Before that, he worked in the design teams for Raf Simons, Phoebe Philo’s Celine, Calvin Klein and Maison Margiela; at the latter, he reinvigorated the house’s Artisanal line after the eponymous designer’s departure. He became known as something of a behind-the-scenes genius – a designer of intellect and taste. ‘The most famous designer you’ve never heard of,’ New York magazine deemed him in 2014.

But this evening, he took his place on fashion’s main stage: the Grand Palais, the longtime home of Chanel’s runway shows, which for the occasion had been transformed into a gleaming solar system in a gesture that recalled the bombastic presentations of Lagerfeld. Hanging over an oil black floor – its surface evoking the undulating constellations of outer space – the enormous glowing orbs were chosen by Blazy to represent Gabrielle Chanel’s fascination with the night sky. ‘I wanted to do something quite universal, like a dream, something outside of time,’ said Blazy. Far from that tiny metal house: this was his own invitation to dream big.

‘We can go two ways. Either we do a clean, modern, by the codes, by the book Chanel show, and it’s a first step. Or we do this show as if it was our last,’ he told the Business of Fashion in an interview released to coincide with the start of the show. ‘I took the last option. Let’s do a show as if it was the last one.’

Unfolding in three chapters – Un Paradox, Le Jour and ‘L’Universel – Blazy said that the show began with the discovery of Gabrielle Chanel’s love affair with the English polo player Boy Capel, who Blazy called her ‘most significant other’. ‘It begins with a menswear tradition,’ he said of ‘Un Paradox’, honing in on the men’s shirt and trousers – something he imagined being passed between Capel and his lover. Here, the shirt was Charvet in a rare collaboration (though Gabrielle Chanel herself was a client of the Parisian shirtmaker), while tweed tailoring had a loose, masculine line. The opening jacket was based on one of Blazy’s own blazers: ‘I only changed the buttons and added a chain,’ he said post-show.

The latter sections were more expressive: in ‘Le Jour’, he thought about the idea of a garment being passed through generations, like a 2.55 handbag which appeared crushed and worn, or tweed jackets and skirts that had the illusion of coming apart at their seams (‘the worn familiarity of the truly chic, items feel passed down and utilised’). In ‘L’Universel’, Blazy felt most at home: a continuation of the vivid materiality of his time at Bottega Veneta came in sheer dresses that bloomed with appliqué flowers, a tweed two-set rendered in crochet, or Awar Odhiang’s closing gown, which descended into a kaleidoscopic melange of feathers (he said his team had nicknamed it the ‘Piña Colada’ dress). In a memorable moment, the Ethiopia-born Canadian model grinned and twirled at the end of the finale, joining Blazy for his triumphant final bow.

Soundtracked by the buoyant 1992 Eurotrance song ‘Rhythm is a Dancer’, that finale also marked the end – save for a few smaller shows on Tuesday – of a fashion month defined by its numerous debuts. With this final one, it feels like a weight has been lifted: there will be no more anticipation or speculation, no more guessing games or gossip. The designers are in place, and a new chapter of fashion has begun – from there, the hard work begins.

But Blazy can afford to revel in this moment a little longer. After all, how many times do you get to stage your debut runway show for Chanel? ‘I just wanted to have fun,’ he said. ‘Something beautiful and enjoyable – [that’s] what we have to propose in fashion.’