Showmanship returned to Chanel on Monday. At Paris Fashion Week, its new designer Matthieu Blazy opened the season’s most anticipated debut beneath colossal celestial bodies — Saturn with its rings, a full solar system suspended above a jet-black and a mirror-bright runway — staking a claim for theatre from the first second.
Reflections doubled the cosmos underfoot as a front-row constellation of stars, including Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard and Tilda Swinton, looked up. By night’s end, the room rose in a standing ovation. As Vogue’s doyenne Anna Wintour has said, “fashion needs its showmen.” Chanel had one again.
Founded in 1910, Chanel reshaped women’s wardrobes by replacing corseted silhouettes with ease — jersey, trousers — and later codified a global idea of Parisian chic through the little black dress, pearls and the tweed suit.
Under Karl Lagerfeld in the 1980s, it became the model for how a heritage house can be both historic and relentlessly modern, its runway spectacles influencing the industry far beyond Paris. That legacy made Blazy’s debut more than a change of designer, but a test of how a century-old, multi-billion dollar institution continues to speak to the world.
The show 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.
Yet Chanel’s moment felt singular for stakes and scale. By dialing down glitter, dialing up line, restoring theater and keeping the codes legible, Blazy positioned Chanel not as a museum of symbols but as a platform for them.
The opener functioned as a manifesto: an androgynous, slouchy pantsuit featuring low-slung trousers and an asymmetric jacket with structured shoulders. The looks split from the playbook of subdued designer Virginie Viard who parted ways with Chanel last year. They also shifted from late-period Karl Lagerfeld - one step closer to Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel.
The styles were not a reinvention of tweed, but rather menswear rethought through the founder’s origin story, when Coco wore the clothes of her lover the “Boy” Capel. A hand anchored in a pocket made the point explicit: the freedom Chanel once placed in women’s hands - giving them trousers and pockets on them — restated.
The spring 2026 collection, months in the making, read as an imagined conversation between Blazy and Chanel herself: thoughtfulness braided with showmanship.
Ribbons — rumoured to be a sticking point between designer and atelier - were largely gone. Sparkle was sparse, a calculated risk in markets that prize high shine. In their place came silhouette-first solutions and masses of feathers, with the camellia held as steady leitmotif.
Associated Press