Matthieu Blazy’s toxic, storybook takeover of the Chanel Haute Couture runway
Skip the sugar-sweet princess fantasy. Chanel’s latest couture collection brings a beautiful, messy imperfection to the house codes, using duckling buttons and magic beans.
When a designer mentions a fairy tale, you usually brace yourself for a parade of predictable, sugar-sweet princess gowns. But for his sophomore couture collection at Chanel, Matthieu Blazy did something much weirder. He found an old copy of Les Fées, Contes des Contes in Gabrielle Chanel’s apartment library and used it to turn the show salon into a messy, overgrown thicket of poisoned vines and toxic flowers.
This wasn’t about looking pretty as you might expect. The runway was about the tension between fantasy and function. Blazy wanted to see if the legendary le19M artisans could make clothes that read like a book, and he started that story by vandalising the house codes. The very first look threw out the traditional tweed suit, replacing it with a guipure lace meant to look like magic beans, paired with sheer silk mousseline. The model walked down the runway holding the actual antique book from Coco’s shelves.
The cleverness was in the small, blink-and-you-miss-it details. Vines climbed up the heels of shoes and a tiny evening bag was shaped like a sleeping bear. Most charmingly, a row of jacket buttons slowly transformed from ducklings into swans as they went down the torso. But Blazy’s best move was focusing on what he called “radical intimacy”, making parts of the clothes that were strictly for the person wearing them. He lined jackets with secret painted silks and stuffed pockets with memo notes, lucky charms, and random bric-a-brac that clinked against Chanel’s famous hemline weighting chains. It looked like high-fashion hoarding in the best possible way.
Instead of the perfection usually demanded by haute couture, the ateliers embraced a raw, “make-do-and-mend” energy. There were layers of heavy weaving, dense embroidery, and deliberately frayed edges that felt beautifully imperfect. Blazy also hacked directly into the tailoring, slashing and bisecting garments on the body so the models could actually move, walk, and breathe. It was a direct nod to Gabrielle Chanel’s original ethos of active sportswear. By mixing everyday junk with noble materials and goldsmithing, Blazy proved that even inside a toxic forest, Chanel is at its best when it’s built for the realities of real life.
Credits:
Images courtesy of Chanel
Words: Roisin Teeling @roisinteeling
Chanel.com
