Matthieu Blazy’s vision for Chanel has concerned acts of transformation – and not simply of the house itself, which is currently undergoing a renaissance, one year into his tenure (according to Bloomberg, there has been a 16 per cent rise in sales in the first half of 2026, down to the fervid response to Blazy’s collections). This much was evident stepping into the Grand Palais showspace yesterday evening, where the Belgian designer’s previous creations for Chanel were ubiquitous among guests, not least the red, white and blue tweed jacket which featured as part of his New York Métiers d’art 2026 show, perhaps the most-worn garment of the evening.
But Blazy is also concerned with the transformative power of clothing; how a woman might dress for the ‘multiple selves’ she might inhabit over a given day, or lifetime. Last season, he evoked the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly to describe a collection which was designed capture the innate contradictions of the house. ‘Chanel is function, Chanel is fiction. Chanel is sensible, Chanel is seductive. Chanel is day, Chanel is night,’ said Blazy at the time, ending the show with a rainbow-like parade of models emerging from the figurative chrysalis in glimmering tweed and chainmail tailoring, their hair pastel-coloured or coated with a metallic sheen.
‘It represents the freedom to choose between the caterpillar and the butterfly whenever you want,’ he said at the time. ‘I wish to create a canvas for women to be unapologetically who they are and who they want to be.’
This season, under an enormous flock of glowing birds which had been erected over the Grand Palais runway, Blazy looked towards the personal style transformation of house founder Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel over her lifetime – from her beginnings in pioneering jersey to create her liberated, un-corseted line to the richer expressions of glamour which would define her later life. ‘[A] layered history of selves within a layered history of the clothing she wore,’ described Blazy, who chose to begin and end the show with Gabrielle Chanel’s own 2.55 quilted handbag, retrieved from the house’s Patrimoine archives and carried by model Dyanira Hurbuscher, who opened and closed the show.
As such, the collection drew on facets of Gabrielle Chanel’s own life and style: ‘in the collection, the young Gabrielle becomes the various Chanel women she will be,’ read the collection notes. So there were nods to the jersey underwear which would begin her fashion journey, peeking out from the opening looks; deconstructed Edwardian corsets, referencing those which she once wore and abandoned; and the tweed tailoring for which she would become best-known. Through it all, a feeling of a life in construction: jackets appeared stripped of their outer layer to reveal ‘boning’ beneath, or were left raw along their edges. Blazy called them ‘the ghostly remnants of fashion lives past’.
But through evoking Gabrielle Chanel’s story, Blazy was seeking to capture more universal experience: that of constructing an identity through the clothes we wear, one which changes as we move through our lives, but often bears traces of our past selves. ‘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,’ he said. ‘[This collection is] about the women within a woman.’
Of this collection of metaphors – continuing into the show’s soundtrack, which saw Nicole Kidman read passages from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a tale of personal metamorphosis across time and place – the one which Blazy settled on was the bird taking flight. ‘This is not a historical collection; it’s a collection about Gabrielle Chanel’s layered stories,’ he said. ‘Ultimately, Chanel took off, and each step she took led to her being free, like a bird.’
Stay tuned to wallpaper.com for more from Paris Fashion Week S/S 2027.