Gioia Gange
The attitude is that of a pioneer discoverer of new worlds, and the amazement may resemble that of Christopher Columbus upon landing in the Bay of Bariay. But the world of Coco Chanel is celebrated and simultaneously transformed in Matthieu Blazy’s creative line. However, the New Indies on the other side of the Atlantic are not the French designer’s geographic and market reference. The maison’s new direction revisits the colonial world resumed in the show’s celebratory closing with Awar Odhiang.
The camellia takes on the appearance of a South African Protea, and the slingbacks revolutionize the canon of Coco’s most famous shoe. The men’s belt, far removed from the imagery of the famous chain, seems to be a reference from Boy Chapel’s wardrobe and opens the show. The cuffs, redesigned as tribal-inspired jewelry, accompany a collection where the double CC is barely whispered to the rhythm of Jenni B.
But there is also a moment, suspended between memory and the future, when fashion ceases to be clothing and returns to being a language. It is there that the conversation—silent and endless—opens between Gabrielle Chanel and Matthieu Blazy, the House’s new Artistic Director of Fashion Activities. A dialogue that has no place or date, but pulsates in Chanel’s eternal present, where love is the origin of all modernity.
“Chanel is a question of love,” says Blazy. “The birth of modernity in fashion comes from a love story. It is an idea of freedom.” A freedom conquered and worn, as Gabrielle herself said: “There is a time to work and a time to love. There is no time for anything else.” This is perhaps the heart of the Chanel universe: a sublime paradox in which discipline and desire, rigor and tenderness, masculine and feminine intertwine to the point of blurring. It all begins with a men’s shirt, a sartorial tradition reinterpreted by a woman who dared to dress with freedom. Gabrielle Chanel borrowed pieces from her beloved Boy Capel, transforming masculine habit into a gesture of emancipation. Today, that same shirt, crafted with Charvet and weighed down by a Chanel chain, returns as a symbol of a new balance: the weight of history and the lightness of the present. Alongside, men’s jackets become Chanel sculptures, cut and frayed, but with proportions that flatter the body.
Tweed—the quintessential British material—subdues the French desire for lightness. Seduction blends with pragmatism, functionality becomes a poetic act. Chanel was the first to say that true elegance comes from freedom of movement.
Gabrielle Chanel’s soul is enshrined within a cobalt blue lacquer “petite minaudière” adorned with constellations. She will watch over the maison’s new direction from the stars that were so dear to her.
In this “time to work and time to love,” Blazy rediscovers Gabrielle’s dual soul: one that never chooses between the useful and the beautiful, but unites them in a single gesture. According to Chanel, the day is a constantly changing landscape. The Maison’s archetypes—the suit, the 2.55 bag, the camellia—are not relics, but living objects, destined to change over time, to crease, to breathe. Bags fold, tweeds fray, camellias wrinkle. It is the poetry of imperfection, the beauty of lived experience.
Black and white, the Maison’s eternal codes, return as the architecture of everyday life: graphic rigor and silky fluidity. Flowers dissolve into abstract shapes, hand-painted prints become petals, the past is renewed in a language of gestures and matter. Each piece is a fragment of a home that is also body, memory, history. As if the Chanel universe has always been an extension of the woman who inhabits it. The collection opens and closes with a return: that of the universal. There is no longer a distinction between man and woman, between yesterday and tomorrow, between Paris and the world. Masculine forms soften, tweeds multiply, silk linings become personal secrets. The architecture of the suit is revealed, transparent, like a promise of continuity. The jewelry tells the double truth of Chanel—reality and dream—through baroque pearls, glass planets, and enameled chains.
The shoes, with the unmistakable touch of the contrasting toe, invite movement, a projection toward the future. And in all of this, what remains is an idea of freedom—no longer just individual, but collective. There is not just one Chanel woman, but many Chanel women: each master of her own time, each part of a legacy that belongs to no era and to all of them together. Matthieu Blazy does not quote Gabrielle Chanel: he evokes her, he continues her. His gesture is that of someone who rewrites tradition not with nostalgia, but with gratitude. In a world that changes too quickly, Chanel remains the art of resisting time through movement—that of the body, of thought, of love. The conversation between Blazy and Chanel is not a fiction, but a necessity: fashion, like love, exists only when someone responds.
