Dear Shaded Viewers,
Under Manhattan’s skin, Chanel staged a love letter to velocity: a Métiers d’Art procession slipping from the ribcage of a real Bowery platform as a silver train sighed open and the city’s heartbeat synced to tweed, plexi, and lacquered light. The show read like a New York minute stretched into cinema—models stepping out of the cars as if caught mid-commute, each look a character, each detail a close-up on craft.
The house took over a decommissioned pocket of Bowery station, reached through an inconspicuous door on 168 Bowery, then down into a bleacher-lined platform where the PA chimed Stand clear of the closing doors!—a cue that doubled as overture. A real train rolled in; doors parted; the runway became transit itself, collapsing backstage and cityscape into one continuous shot.
For his first Métiers d’Art, Matthieu Blazy traded grand halls for steel and tile, letting artisanship spark against urban grit—tweed suits glimpsed with “I ♥ NY” winks, capes that seemed to draft air, and paillettes that caught the fluorescence like subway poetry. The concept framed Chanel not as museum relic but as citizen—plural, fast, and un-precious—echoing Blazy’s own nod to the subway as the city’s vortex, the place that connects everything.
This collection’s triumph was kinetic: embroideries read as track maps, jewelry as rivets and tunnel stars, pleats that opened and closed like doors between stops. Métiers d’Art is the maison’s yearly ode to its ateliers; here the work felt breathed-in, not placed—technique engineered for movement, so the finish glittered in motion rather than freezing into tableau.
New York loves a front row, and it got a constellation—from A$AP Rocky to Kristen Stewart, Lupita Nyong’o, Tilda Swinton and more—mirroring the show’s many “personalities” rather than a single Chanel archetype. The audience split across two presentations—afternoon and evening—underscored the city’s shift changes, the same story told under different light.
If Lagerfeld’s 2018 Met tableau was Chanel’s postcard to the city, Blazy’s subway is the city writing back—inked in brake dust and brilliance, generous to its characters, and edited for speed. Chanel, underground, didn’t go dark; it went electric, proving that heritage shines hardest when it catches the train and refuses to miss its stop.
Later,
Diane
