To say Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel debut was freighted with expectation would be an understatement. Only the fourth designer in the maison’s 115‑year history, the Bottega Veneta alum inherits one of fashion’s greatest legacies. Yesterday evening, past the Grand Palais’s tighter‑than‑airport security—three ticket checks and a passport inspection—the spring 2026 mise‑en‑scène revealed his reply to long‑serving creative director Karl Lagerfeld’s infamous Chanel rocket: an entire Chanel solar system. Ambient astronomical music—from Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” to Isao Tomita’s electronic rendition of Gustav Holst’s The Planets—set the mood as guests in their bouclé best posed for selfies beneath suspended spheres that recalled images captured by spacecraft: the rings of Saturn, the atmospheric bands of Jupiter, and the blue marble of Earth. Chanel star Inès de La Fressange took her seat just as the house lights dimmed and fairy‑light stars twinkled above, heralding Blazy’s celestial reveal.
The opening look was very Coco before Chanel: not the brand’s now‑canonical tweed skirt suit, but a tweed pantsuit pairing a camellia-button cropped jacket and wide‑leg trousers—a style Gabrielle Chanel herself wore in the 1920s to challenge traditional gender norms. High‑vamp, two‑tone pumps and a crushed 2.55 threaded with metal to give it an intensely preloved shape showcased Blazy’s deep knowledge of, and irreverence toward, house codes. It was a clever gesture that playfully reworked the founder’s signature 1950s design innovations promoting comfort and freedom—the black cap‑toe to protect light-colored slingback pumps and the hands‑free chain‑strap for quilted bags—once revolutionary and now symbols of bourgeois conventionality. Pencil skirts, when they appeared, came loosely wrapped, as though Mademoiselle had taken a pair of her great love Boy Capel’s trousers, twisted them around her waist, and added a touch of leather‑woven chain‑strap trim.
Unlike other designers taking their first bow this season, Blazy offered no red‑carpet previews. The only hint of his vision came in a cryptic, David Bailey‑lensed Instagram post: a classic collared shirt with pearl buttons peeking from a garment bag, its placket label and Chanel embroidery rendered in the cursive script the founder favored early in her career. The black‑and‑white image teased the house’s first brand collaboration, with Charvet, the historic French shirtmaker. A tribute to the button‑downs Chanel often borrowed from Capel, the project inevitably also recalls Lagerfeld, who owned more than 1,000 high‑collared shirts and once said the white shirt was the piece he most wished he had invented. In white, blue‑and‑white stripe, and pale pink, the collection’s cotton poplin button‑downs were cut boxy and short or oversize, and paired with cascading ball skirts. For Blazy, reinventing Chanel begins here: with scrunched sleeves and untucked tails marrying casual ease and evening drama.
