Inside the Grand Palais, Chanel’s starry salon was swallowed by a garden gone wrong, giant beanstalks climbing to the ceiling and huge flowers blooming a little too brightly to be safe. The show looked enchanted and faintly poisoned at the same time, which turned out to be the point. Tilda Swinton, Michelle Yeoh, and Catherine Deneuve were among the crowd, the kind the Parisian stalwart summons and few others can.
The Idea
Backstage after the show, Blazy clutched an old leather-bound tome of fairy tales he found in the Paris apartment of Gabrielle Chanel, saying he asked himself: “Is Gabrielle’s life a fairy tale as well?” Her rise from a convent orphanage to the top of fashion became the collection’s governing metaphor, his own Jack and the Beanstalk: a nobody who climbs, dares, and comes back down with the gold.
The Clothes
The opening look was a sheer Chanel suit, its grid of embroidery shaped like tiny bean shoots, with vines creeping up dresses and curling around the heels of shoes. Spidery flowers climbed up a lilac linen shift dress with a pleated skirt, while insect-shaped buttons nestled on a glistening black jacket speckled with poison ivy green. Little evening bags took the shape of sleeping bears and fat chickens. Heels were sculpted into butterflies and golden eggs. There were references to Goldilocks, Puss in Boots, and the Ugly Duckling, though, as every review noted, Blazy was too precise a designer to spell any of it out directly.
Throughout, he kept cutting away anything too grand. What was left were clothes a woman could actually live in, a sharply cut coat, a red sequined shift, an evening look pared all the way back to a black tunic and trousers. Blazy described the philosophy plainly: “Chanel couture is not about the big ‘wow.’ Chanel couture is about the details. If people think that couture is a big painting, I think maybe at Chanel, it’s more like a miniature, something that feels precious, but that you can also put in your pocket.”
The Verdict
Chanel president Bruno Pavlovsky said that Blazy has reinjected a much-needed dose of whimsy and purpose into haute couture, adding: “It’s been a long time since I’ve found haute couture this exciting.” For only his second couture collection for the house, Blazy has delivered something that feels both entirely new and completely Chanel, which is, when you think about it, exactly the trick the house has been pulling since 1910.
