One Year In, Chanel’s Matthieu Blazy Trades Quiet Luxury for 95 Birds and Cereal-Aisle Color

A year ago, Matthieu Blazy inherited one of the most scrutinized jobs in Chanel fashion. On Tuesday in Paris, he answered the question of what he’d do with it in the most direct way possible: he let 95 giant white birds loose over the runway, had Nicole Kidman read Virginia Woolf into the soundtrack, and sent Gabrielle Chanel’s own handwork and handbag down the catwalk. “It’s a good start,” he said afterward, with the understatement of a man who just watched his brand take the top spot in the Lyst index of the world’s hottest labels.

The numbers back up the mood. Chanel, which discloses financial results only once a year, has nonetheless had figures leak out via Bloomberg showing 16% growth in the first half of 2026. Vanity Fair recently named Blazy the only fashion designer on its list of the world’s 50 most powerful people. A year into his tenure, the Belgian-born designer isn’t just holding the house steady — he has turned Chanel fashion into the thing everyone, inside the industry and out, can’t stop talking about.

A Different Kind of Chanel Fashion

What’s striking about Blazy’s version of Chanel fashion is the tone. He is smiley, chatty, enthusiastic in interviews — a sharp contrast to Karl Lagerfeld’s famously acid tongue and the controlled, brutalist chic that defined Coco Chanel’s own public persona. Blazy talks about his job the way a kid describes a candy store, not the way a tortured auteur describes a burden. The idea for Tuesday’s set — a flock of suspended birds beneath the Grand Palais’s steel-and-glass dome — came to him on holiday in southern Italy, watching migrating birds cross the Crati River with his partner.

That same holiday reading list produced the show’s soundtrack: Kidman reading a passage “about time, about freedom” from Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.” It’s a pointed inversion, too, of Chanel’s own history — one of the house’s most iconic 1990s adverts featured Vanessa Paradis caged like a bird. In Blazy’s telling, Chanel’s birds now fly free.

The clothes matched the mood. After several seasons in which “quiet luxury” dominated runways with beige-on-beige restraint, Blazy’s collection arrived in what one critic called cereal-aisle color: a red-and-white embroidered jacket paired with a jade-and-turquoise skirt, navy-and-gold bag and boots, and the house’s signature two-tone pumps reimagined in zebra stripes and yellow polka dots.

Coco’s Own Bag, Twice Around the Runway

The most pointed gesture of the show wasn’t a color or a silhouette but an object: Gabrielle Chanel’s personal 2.55 handbag, pulled from the house’s archive and sent down the runway not once but twice, carried by the same model who opened and closed the collection. “Gabrielle actually had very few bags in her own life, which is something I find quite beautiful,” Blazy said. “So this bag is not broken, but it has a wonderful patina.”

That patina was the point. Model Dyanira Hurbuscher opened the show in a look referencing the innovative jersey underwear Chanel designed in her earliest years, visible beneath sheer outerwear, and closed it in a black collarless smocked tweed jacket and pencil skirt nodding to the relaxed postwar skirt suits that made Chanel’s name. In both looks, she carried the founder’s own well-worn bag — old leather against new fabric, bridging nearly a century of the house’s history in a single accessory.

The bags throughout the collection told their own layered story. Nods appeared to nearly every era of Chanel’s handbag output — the maxi flap, the classic flap, the Chanel 19, the shopping tote — all building toward that one battered, irreplaceable original. It’s a very Blazy move: using the archive not as a costume box but as a living family history.

Finding Coco’s Joyful Side

Blazy’s moodboard for the collection reportedly included photographs he dug out of the Chanel archive showing a side of the founder rarely emphasized in fashion mythology: Gabrielle as a child, with her beloved great dane Gigot, on a boat, on horseback, dressed for a costume party in harlequin fancy dress, grinning in a bold leopard-print coat and matching hat. “It is a side of Chanel that is not known: her funny side, her joyful side,” Blazy said. “I see women as a juxtaposition of so many selves, and Chanel had this incredible layering within herself.”

Even the house’s most sacred garment got the loosening-up treatment. The famous soft-shouldered Chanel suit appeared worn with nothing underneath — “like perfume,” in Blazy’s words, a nod to Marilyn Monroe’s old quip about what she wore to bed. It’s a small detail, but it captures the larger shift: a designer willing to let a 20th-century icon breathe, flirt and laugh rather than simply stand guard over her own legend.

One year in, the verdict from the runway seems to be that Blazy has figured out how to honor Chanel fashion’s history without being frozen by it — turning archive pieces, family photos and even a single battered handbag into the backbone of something that feels, against all odds for a 117-year-old house, genuinely new.

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