“I created my life because my life did not please me.”
Gabrielle Chanel’s famous words become the ideal starting point for the new Haute Couture collection by Matthieu Blazy, Artistic Director of Fashion Activities at Chanel. For his second couture outing for the House, Blazy explores the narrative power of clothing, transforming the runway into an open book in which every creation seems to hold a story, a secret, a memory.
Titled “Gaby and the Beanstalk,” the collection draws on the world of fairy tales, beginning with the imagery of Jack and the Beanstalk. Yet the fairy-tale reference is never merely decorative. Instead, it becomes a way to reinterpret the Chanel universe through the language of Haute Couture, balancing fantasy and function, dream and construction, fiction and the reality of the body.
The inspiration began with an intimate discovery: a small book found in Gabrielle Chanel’s library, Les Fées, Contes des Contes. From there came Blazy’s question: could the Haute Couture ateliers create garments that tell stories like the pages of a book? The answer unfolded on the runway through a collection that merged narrative imagination with the highest expression of craft.
The show opened with a Chanel suit constructed in guipure, evoking the idea of magic beans, interrupted by light transparencies of silk mousseline. The model carried a copy of Les Fées, Contes des Contes, as if the inner world of storybooks had been transferred directly onto the clothes. Small, surprising details appeared throughout the collection: a vine climbing up the heel of a shoe, a minaudière shaped like a sleeping bear, buttons transforming from duckling to swan.
Yet the deepest story of the collection lies inside the garments. Painted silk linings, hidden notes, charms and small everyday objects tucked into pockets or suspended from Chanel’s iconic interior chain reveal a more intimate form of couture. Here, one of Blazy’s central themes emerges clearly: the radical relationship between maker and wearer, between garment and body, between material and the private imagination of the woman who inhabits it.
Memo notes, talismans and fragments of daily life accumulate across the collection like treasured relics. The thieving magpie becomes an emblem of this process, drawn to what shines, what is kept, what carries meaning. Interior details move outward, transforming the garments into sentimental and fantastical archives, where the gesture of collecting meets the supreme discipline of couture craftsmanship.
Inside the Chanel show salon, imagined as an environment overtaken by poisonous vines and toxic flowers, the fairy tale takes on a more complex tone. This is not a world of sweetness alone, but of ambiguity, tension and layered beauty. Silhouettes are shaped through sharp cuts, slashes, overlays, embroidery, weaving and appliqué. The body is freed through construction, designed not simply to be admired in a salon, but to move, act and live.
The collection celebrates the expertise of the tailleur, flou and galon ateliers, alongside the exceptional crafts practiced at le19M: fabric-making, embroidery, pleating, millinery, goldsmithing and shoemaking. Each element contributes to a collective narrative in which technical precision coexists with purposeful imperfection, manual skill with imagination, noble materials with the poetry of everyday objects.
With “Gaby and the Beanstalk,” Matthieu Blazy presents a vision of couture that does not escape reality, but transforms it. The fairy tale becomes a way to speak about women, their lives and their daily adventures. Not a distant dream, but a narrative wardrobe designed to inhabit the complexity of the present.
As Blazy himself puts it, Haute Couture at Chanel is not only a fairy tale: at its essence, it is for women, their realities and their everyday adventures.
