Chanel rides the cross-town line as Matthieu Blazy declares his new thesis via his debut Metiers d'Art collection: the Chanel woman is every woman you pass on the platform
Who is the Chanel woman now? IIt’s the question Matthieu Blazy has everyone asking – himself included – and his answer, affirmed again last night in New York, is everyone. Or rather, every woman you’ve ever passed on a subway platform, every archetype with somewhere to be and a story unfolding in motion.
If Blazy’s debut asked us to look to the heavens, his first Métiers d’Art collection brings us back underground, to a city that Coco herself adored, and to a cross-section of humanity as democratic as New York’s own MTA. The choice of venue, a decommissioned Bowery subway station, was more than a gesture toward urban grit. It was Chanel as a living organism, pulsing with the same chaotic, cross-town energy as New York itself. In the 1930s, Gabrielle Chanel spent time here en route to Hollywood, slipping downtown to observe how real women – artists, workers, flappers, socialites – wore her clothes their own way. She was energised by the sincerity of it, by the way her codes could be reshuffled and reclaimed.
On the runway, with Blazy's steerage, this became a kind of cinematic street-casting. A student in “jeans” made of meticulously embroidered Lesage silk zipped by, followed by a ’70s journalist in a slouched coat, a power-suited ’80s executive, a new-school flapper glimmering with Lemarié feathers, and a society doyenne swathed in an opera cape. There was even something of a Coco stand-in – the woman in the bias-cut 1930s slip, embroidered by Montex with shimmering Art Deco fish. Even garment linings are meticulously decorated in honour of the Big Apple: deco birds, skyline silhouettes, Coco walking her dog down a Manhattan block.
If his SS26 collection dissolved the idea of a singular Chanel woman, Métiers d’Art cements the shift. This is not Chanel for the few, nor the logo-faithful uniform of old. This is Chanel as a constellation of characters (or as the show notes put it, a joyful cavalcade of personalities').
Chanel for the people? In New York, at least, it felt possible. See the full collection below.
