Dear Shaded Viewers,
I reported on Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel debut at the time of the show — the celestial spectacle that transformed the Grand Palais into a mirror of the cosmos. But this morning, watching Loïc Prigent’s The Chanel Planet, I felt the urge to write again. His camera, with its inimitable blend of humor and devotion, reignited the sense of wonder that had first filled the air that night. Through Prigent’s lens, what once seemed cosmic became suddenly human again, pulsing with the nervous ecstasy of creation.
The film reminded me that this show was more than a debut — it was a renewal of gravity.
Under Bureau Betak’s canopy of orbiting planets, light moved like breath — expanding, contracting, tangling itself across mirrored floors that reflected infinity back at the audience. The mood was not nostalgic but anticipatory, suspended between stillness and revelation. You could feel it in the pacing: each tableau slow enough to register emotionally, yet charged with the energy of something vast and still forming.
There was silence, then rhythm, then Rhythm Is a Dancer breaking the cosmic stillness — a wink from Blazy that turned suspense into delight.
The show unfolded like the phases of a moon — restrained, cyclical, profoundly choreographed to the orbit of emotion rather than spectacle. Each passage felt deliberate, as if the collection itself were dictating the tempo. When the models crossed paths, the reflections beneath them doubled their presence, like echoes of Chanel muses past and future aligning in real time.
Blazy divided the show into chapters — Le Paradoxe, La Liberté, La Joie — each one shifting tone without breaking flow, keeping the audience in quiet rotation.
It was a set designed not to impress but to hypnotize. Massive planets hung in suspension — matte, glowing, alive. Tweed and silk rippled beneath them like the movement of tides under lunar pull. Tradition was defied but never disowned: the tweed suits came undone into sheer panels, the skirts slit like fractures in time, the accessories sculptural and quietly surreal.
The final look — a blossom of shredded feathers and silk, light as stardust — drifted across the mirrored surface, leaving a residue of wonder.
Having followed Blazy since his La Cambre graduation in 2007, witnessing him now at Chanel feels like watching a circle complete itself — not an ascent, but an orbit. Prigent’s film captured that same truth: greatness not as explosion, but as atmosphere. Chanel, under Blazy’s direction, doesn’t recall the past — it radiates from it.
And as the final lights faded in The Chanel Planet, I felt once again what I had felt at the Grand Palais — that rare, fragile electricity when a designer stops making clothes and starts making time.
Later,
Diane
