Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Courtesy of Chanel
Listen to fashion critic-at-large Cathy Horyn read her review.
Matthieu Blazy opened the Chanel show with a black sweater and skirt and closed it with a black jersey gown adorned with a black camellia. A perfect circle. Let’s begin again. Or: Where does the present end and the future begin? In between those two points, Blazy offered a riot of color and ideas. The ribbed knits at the start were the Chanel suit reinvented, a nod to the track fleece or quarter-zip. There was an inspiring number of sporty separates — overshirts, untucked gauze blouses with suits, and a gray cardigan layered under a tweed blouson. There were new proportions, like a drop-waist dress with a belt set loose at the hips based on a style by Gabrielle Chanel in the 1920s. Some tweed outfits that were actually prints on silk viscose for lightness.
Photo: Courtesy of Chanel
And there were punks and impressionists embodied in styles — suits with their tweed surface cut away to expose the silk lining, the chain in the hem broken and left dangling — and the incredibly iridescent hues of dresses in embroidered silk or suits of fine chain mesh (like the stuff of a Victorian purse) printed with luminous tweed patterns. The source was Claude Monet’s paintings of the Thames in London, done between 1899 and 1901. A decade later, Chanel would open her couture house and begin her modern revolution, her mix of rich and poor materials, her mocking of luxury.
From left: Photo: Courtesy of ChanelPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel
From top: Photo: Courtesy of ChanelPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel
Blazy also uses plain or humble materials, like the gauze for shirts. The ribbed-knit “suits,” in black or cream, worn by the models Stephanie Cavalli and Bhavitha Mandava were not so unlike the field sweaters worn by Chanel’s aristocratic English pals. As Blazy said of those looks, which are inspiring, easy for anyone to copy — which he hopes women will do — “You don’t need to add anything, but what I like is that they’re ‘everyday.’ It’s not something you question.”
From left: Photo: Courtesy of ChanelPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel
From top: Photo: Courtesy of ChanelPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel
And the black jersey gown, with its low draped back and exploded camellia flower suspended in the center, worn by Anne Vyalitsyna, is a new version of Chanel’s “little black dress.”
Photo: Courtesy of Chanel
Since his first collection for Chanel in October and then his haute couture show in January, with its almost X-ray versions of the Chanel suit in transparent fabrics, Blazy has surprised the fashion world and beyond with his uncanny feeling for Coco’s story and how it continues to resonate. I can barely look back at the Chanel collections in the years immediately before his hiring. They’re drab, lifeless. They tell us almost nothing. No wonder the Chanel boutiques in Paris have been mobbed this week with people trying to score clothes and accessories from his spring collection. The last time I saw that kind of feeding frenzy was in the early aughts, when Alber Elbaz was turning out washed-silk dresses and grosgrain-edged jersey tops for Lanvin.
But Blazy’s project at Chanel is far bigger in scope. What he’s really done is to remind us that fashion is not only an open book of ideas and dreams but also unpredictable.
The show, on Monday night at the Grand Palais, featured a set of building cranes in vivid colors by the scenographer Richard Peduzzi. After the floating planets in the October show and the magic mushrooms of the couture set, they seemed rather stark. But once the lights in the Grand Palais changed, the cranes made me think of a waterfront in an Asian supercity or perhaps Rotterdam and spoke to the fact Blazy’s Chanel is still under construction.
Blazy said he wanted the fall collection to be a continuation of spring with the welcome addition of tweed blousons, a polo in cashmere backed with silk and other separates. His working theme was a quote from Chanel, found in French newspapers of the 1950s, about how a woman should be a caterpillar by day — that is, comfortable — and a butterfly by night: lovely and hard to pin down.
Photo: Courtesy of Chanel
Many of Blazy’s suits and evening dresses have that latter quality. You can’t tell, exactly, how the iridescence or kinetic movement was achieved. For instance, Blazy and the ateliers created an embroidered tweed pattern. They then printed the same tweed pattern for the silk lining, adding an extra color. (If you look closely, you see it through the outer tweed.) He did that for a black-and-white suit inspired by, as he put it, “a reorganized Jackson Pollock painting” and for a garment in a rough tan gauze backed by an iridescent gold silk.
Photo: Courtesy of Chanel
All the shimmer was no accident. When asked once to name her favorite color, Chanel replied that it wasn’t black, as people might assume. It was iridescence.
Some of the clothes, such as a patchwork shearling coat and suits and jackets done in a compressed or ironed bouclé, looked heavy, especially after the radical lightness of the couture show (a spring collection). In the hand, however, few are heavy.
Most intriguing about this collection is the progress Blazy has made — and will make — in widening our perspective of Chanel and fashion. One of my favorite looks was a long polo-neck dress in pale-blue jersey with a drop-waist and a hem banded in burgundy, like the tip of a Chanel shoe. Blazy told me he almost struck the look from the lineup, wondering if it was too commercial. He went outside to have a cigarette and a think. The model came with him. He said, “She was smoking with me, leaning against the wall, and I thought, She looks fabulous. It works in the real world.”
Photo: Courtesy of Chanel
Blazy’s thinking, his sense of freedom, puts him on a different trajectory from other designers. But don’t expect him to idle like a butterfly.
He told me, “The story of Chanel is so solid, and at the same time there are so many satellite stories that are unknown. So I need to continue to dig and explore. But what I’m really looking for — for example, in three or four years — is to do a collection that has nothing to do with all this and to bring it somewhere else. What if Chanel were not Chanel?”
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