Matthieu Blazy, the new vision of Chanel. (Credit: Dina Lixenberg taken from the Instagram account @matthieublazy)
If Virginie Viard was the guardian of the Chanel temple, succeeding Karl Lagerfeld after serving as his right hand, Matthieu Blazy is establishing a new cult.
At the Grand Palais, in true Chanel tradition, under an installation of floating planets hinting at new omens and alignments, the Franco-Belgian designer unveiled one of the most eagerly anticipated collections of the Paris spring-summer 2026 fashion week.
The line is undeniably Chanel, but with a twist. Far from the strict reverence for house codes interpreted by his predecessors, Blazy, appointed artistic director on Dec. 12, 2024, went all in under the signs of playfulness, joy, relaxation, and freedom.
A 2007 graduate of Brussels’ La Cambre school, already signaling a conceptual and liberal style, Blazy began his career in menswear at Raf Simons. He then joined the artisanal collections team at Maison Martin Margiela, where he was discovered by fashion journalist Suzy Menkes.
After stints at Celine under Phoebe Philo and Calvin Klein, he took the creative lead at Bottega Veneta starting in 2021, where his futurism and penchant for space themes (also seen in the Grand Palais set), as well as his trompe-l’oeil effects, earned him the nickname “Magician of Milan” in the press. His ability to find renewal in tradition didn’t escape Chanel owners Alain and Gérard Wertheimer, who bet on him after the suspense following Virginie Viard’s departure.
No more sign of the famously stiff Chanel style. The suits remain, sometimes with a masculine spirit (and for the record, Coco Chanel loved borrowing jackets from her great love Boy Capel), sometimes deconstructed, mismatched, but always attuned to a new generation of buyers who, in any case, only ever took the famous tweed jacket with trim and small pockets from their mothers’ closets to wear it with worn-out jeans.
The Chanel suit was intended to be timeless. Blazy just made it suddenly au courant with a new way to wear it. The “Chanel Look” beloved by Anna Wintour and the traditional bourgeoisie, its “distinction” highlighted by Roland Barthes, is thrown out and brought back in with a shake-up of high-slit skirts, open knits, loose and fluid cuts, oh-so-low waistlines, and wild raised flowers ruffling the symmetrical camellia emblem of the house.
With Blazy, Chanel keeps its seriousness only in the refinement of materials and cuts. Otherwise, all it took was Ethiopian model Awar Odhiang’s smile, her infectious joy in the final dance wearing a stunning long skirt in swirling multicolored feathers, to remember that at Chanel, nobody used to smile.
The audience, with Nicole Kidman and her daughters, Penelope Cruz, Tilda Swinton and Pedro Almodóvar in the front row, recognized it instantly: A lengthy standing ovation greeted the exhilarating freshness that swept through the vast hall — a breeze that could only come from a new wind. Chanel breathes!
Chanel will no longer be the main supplier for dreary ceremonies and Lebanese condolences. Chanel is entering real life, and under Blazy’s wing, it looks set to stay there for quite a while.
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