PARIS (AP) — Showmanship returned to Chanel on Monday.
At Paris Trend Week, its new designer Matthieu Blazy opened the season’s most anticipated debut beneath colossal celestial our bodies — Saturn with its rings, a full photo voltaic system suspended above a jet-black and a mirror-bright runway — staking a declare for theater from the primary second.
Reflections mirrored the cosmos beneath the runway, whereas a entrance row constellation — Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Tilda Swinton, joined by Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos — gazed upward.
By evening’s finish, the room rose in a standing ovation. As Vogue’s doyenne Anna Wintour has stated, “fashion needs its showmen.”
Chanel had one once more.
Heritage home
Based in 1910, Chanel reshaped girls’s wardrobes by changing corseted silhouettes with ease — jersey, trousers — and later codified a world concept of Parisian stylish by means of the little black gown, pearls and the tweed go well with. Below Karl Lagerfeld within the Nineteen Eighties, it turned the mannequin for the way a heritage home may be each historic and relentlessly trendy, its runway spectacles influencing the business far past Paris. That legacy made Blazy’s debut greater than a change of designer, however a take a look at of how a century-old, multi-billion greenback establishment continues to talk to the world.
The present capped a season dense with debuts: Pierpaolo Piccioli at Balenciaga, Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez at Loewe and Dario Vitale at Versace.
But Chanel’s second felt singular for stakes and scale. By dialing down glitter, dialing up line, restoring theater and holding the codes legible, Blazy positioned Chanel not as a museum of symbols however as a platform for them.
Opening assertion of androgyny
The opener functioned as a manifesto: an androgynous, slouchy pantsuit that includes low-slung trousers and an uneven jacket with structured shoulders. The appears to be like cut up from the playbook of subdued designer Virginie Viard who parted methods with Chanel final yr. Additionally they shifted from late-period Karl Lagerfeld — one step nearer to Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel.
The types weren’t a reinvention of tweed, however fairly menswear rethought by means of the founder’s origin story, when Coco wore the garments of her lover the “Boy” Capel.
A hand anchored in a pocket made the purpose specific: the liberty Chanel as soon as positioned in girls’s arms — giving them trousers and pockets on them — restated. The spring 2026 assortment, months within the making, learn as an imagined dialog between Blazy and Chanel herself: thoughtfulness braided with showmanship.
Codes, humor and the Lagerfeld lens
Ribbons — rumored to be a sticking level between designer and atelier — have been largely gone. Sparkle was sparse, a calculated danger in markets that prize excessive shine.
Of their place got here silhouette-first options and much of feathers, with the camellia held as regular leitmotif. Nevertheless far the road moved, the codes stayed legible — every look unmistakably Chanel. Tweed arrived interconnected fairly than narrowly Parisienne — multicultural in palette and weave, intercontinental if not interplanetary.
Then got here the enjoyable wigs — what one critic termed the “funny little hats” — feathered, sly and deliberately mild. They channeled Lagerfeld’s provocation about how he revitalized the once-dusty heritage home when he joined the helm in 1983.
“Chanel is an establishment, and you must deal with an establishment like a (prostitute) — and you then get one thing out of her,” he stated.
Whereas Viard’s Chanel was usually faulted for sobriety and restraint; Blazy, like Lagerfeld, offers in irony. At Bottega Veneta he staged frogs on heels, bunny-lapel coats and trompe-l’œil leather-based denims. Right here, plumage, proportion and wigs delivered the wink with out tipping into theatrical costume.
Equipment set a brand new tempo: large hats, metallic luggage, tiers of pearls, chunky gold chains and assertion earrings — daring on paper, disciplined on the physique. Purses — the opposite purpose Blazy was chosen — spanned crisp chain-strap updates and playful clutches, together with a notable ovoid formed like an egg.
The finale carried the argument in movement: a silky short-sleeve shirt paired with a multicolored feathered skirt with an extended prepare. Shade moved throughout the plumage and the black ground threw again its reflection.
“It was such a surprise. … It’s exciting to be here for a new era,” filmmaker Sofia Coppola told The Associated Press. “There are things you recognize from the house codes, and a fresh new look at it.”
