Dear Shaded Viewers,
I’ve been watching Matthieu Blazy since his graduation collection at La Cambre, and I was impressed then. You could already see the intelligence and the hand, and an imagination that never shouts. Since then I’ve followed every step: menswear with Raf Simons, then Maison Margiela, where he designed the Artisanal collection. Then Céline under Phoebe Philo, and Calvin Klein with Raf again. For years he did brilliant work behind the scenes. At Bottega Veneta he finally stepped out front, and his leather “denim” and knitted leather were pure magic. One year into Chanel, I can say it without hesitation: he was the best choice.
It’s hard to believe it has only been a year, because the change has been seismic. Before his debut, he and his assistant Marie-Valentine weighed two options. One was a safe first step. The other was to do the show as if it were their last, and then start again. He chose the second. The surprise is that he didn’t start again. He has built on that debut ever since, and you can feel his confidence growing.
He now sees Gabrielle Chanel’s life as an odyssey, and this collection follows it from her past to the house’s future. It shows the many sides of one woman, and so of every woman. The key came from Gabrielle’s own words about her younger self: “The child I once was is with me today … no one else is closer to me than she is.”
So the show opens with everything that young Gabrielle threw away: her Edwardian dress, taken apart. The jacket and the galon braid are still there, but everything is opened up and unlaced. The lines are kept, so the jackets still look fitted. You can tie them in front to pull in the waist, or at the back for a little bustle. Gabrielle wanted to move through life as lightly as a bird about to take off. She kept taking things away, and in doing so she made fashion lighter.
That is why birds are everywhere. They float under the glass roof of the Grand Palais. The floor beneath them, which looks like jungle, is really an aerial view of a bird sanctuary near Matthieu’s hideaway in Calabria. Swallows and swifts fly across the accessories. Emma Balfour carried a tiny gold birdcage with the birds perched outside it, free at last. Two exquisite looks were inspired by Degas’s Little Dancer at the Musée d’Orsay. Gabrielle adored Degas, and she used plain, unembroidered tulle, which at the time you saw only in the ballet at the Opéra Garnier. Matthieu is convinced she looked closely at that little girl.
There’s real exuberance here, and he plays with Gabrielle’s love of dressing up, a side of her that often gets overlooked. In French, after all, a suit is a “costume.” There are crisp navy linen shirts from his Charvet collaboration. There are motifs from Édouard Vuillard, a painter Gabrielle loved, who was close to her friend Misia Sert, and Matthieu has long been obsessed with him too. It’s one more sign that the house and the designer were meant to find each other.
Then come tweed jackets worn on bare skin, like a perfume, with short skirts: sensual, but still bourgeois. Four poetic evening looks follow the course of a day. There’s pearly morning, then blue sky with billowing clouds, then a starry evening and inky midnight.
What thrills me most is his research into materials. He asked Chanel’s factories to knit the unknittable, and they built him a machine that knits sequins, so there’s no embroidery and the sparkle stretches. Then there’s his smocked tweed. Gabrielle tried it once in 1960 and dropped it at once because it was too radical. Matthieu’s team started with organdy, moved to a jacquard, then made it elastic. The result is fully smocked and stretches: sporty, high-performance Chanel, the house’s future in a fabric.
His new discovery, Dyanira Hurbuscher, opened the show carrying Gabrielle’s own 1955 handbag. She closed it in black smocked tweed with that bag remade. She had travelled through the whole Chanel story and come out transformed, as Matthieu himself has been transformed by Chanel. So have the women and men emptying the racks everywhere.
He ended, as he always does, with a pop hit, this time Britney’s “Gimme More.” That’s exactly how I felt. If I could take one thing home, it would be the “rain and shine” bag: a puffy little cloud raining pearls, set on its own lightning bolt. Pure joy.
Bravo, Matthieu.
With thanks to Tim Blanks, whose conversation with Matthieu brought out some lovely details.
