Matthieu Blazy’s first Chanel high fashion present was a style fairytale

This morning in Paris, skies had been a moody gray, and rain confirmed no signal of abating. Strolling throughout Pont Alexandre III in the direction of the Grand Palais – the place Matthieu Blazy would current his first high fashion assortment for Chanel – vacationer boats drifted previous, empty of passengers, and the Eiffel Tower grumpily hid its summit behind a haze of fog.

Inside, it was a special story. There, below the Grand Palais’s huge vaulted glass ceiling, Blazy had conjured a fairytale realm: considered one of candy-pink timber and large colored mushrooms, which sprouted gleefully round a round runway. Half Disney-esque fantasy (a teaser video confirmed cartoon birds and squirrels leaping round the home’s atelier), half Munchkinland, such was the brilliance of the scene that even the glowering skies above appeared to momentarily glow with sunshine.

It set the stage for one more historic day. Yesterday, Jonathan Anderson confirmed his first couture assortment for Dior on the Musée Rodin; right now, it was Blazy’s flip to indicate his prowess within the medium. The French-Belgian designer stated that for this debut, he was pushed by the impulse to strip every thing again, asking: ‘What makes Chanel, Chanel? What’s the essence and essentialism of the home? How do you naked its soul?’

He settled on the communion between maker and wearer, one thing which can be on the coronary heart of high fashion (when bought, a garment is made by hand by the couture atelier to the precise contours of a consumer’s physique). To symbolise this, he requested every mannequin within the present to pick out one thing private to be woven into their look. Some selected significant dates or guiding phrases; others fortunate symbols, initials, or strains from poetry (embroidery was executed by Lesage, one of many home’s métiers d’artwork).

However to strip issues again additionally meant reintroducing levity to Chanel, a home of such measurement and affect that steering a contemporary course is usually a problem, and traditions weigh closely. So Blazy sought bodily lightness: the opening look was a Chanel skirt go well with, not in its signature tweed however in featherweight silk mousseline, so light-weight it nearly floated off the physique. The material was additionally used to assemble a pair of trompe l’oeil ‘denim’ denims and a white vest, in addition to variations of the two.55 purse (they too appeared to drift on their chain-link handles).

Tactility and motion, hallmarks of his first two runway exhibits (the primary in Paris; the second in New York), continued to come back to the fore right here. Blazy envisioned the high fashion atelier like a sweet field. There was tweed which sprouted with plumes of feathers (Blazy stated he sees the chook as the final word image of freedom); bouncing trails of streamers from the hems of skirts (they recalled his earlier work at Bottega Veneta); and a mess of embroidery, from blooming flowers to toadstools (extra summary had been vibrant collages of raw-edge organza). Up shut, the work was actually extraordinary.

It culminated with the high fashion bride, although Blazy did away with laborious trains and veils. As an alternative, mannequin Bhavitha Mandava – a home muse, and the primary Indian mannequin to open a Chanel present final December in New York – wore an outsized, collared shirt and a knee-length skirt, adorned with hundreds of petal-like mother-of-pearl paillettes (on the again, for those who seemed carefully, glimmered a crystal-and-pearl chook). Taking her lap across the runway, she flashed a gleeful smile to attendees. By the point a mash-up of Bittersweet Symphony and Wonderwall soundtracked the finale, it was inconceivable to not share her pleasure.