Matthieu Blazy takes a psychedelic trip to the essence of Chanel Haute Couture
Staged within a hallucinatory naturescape, Matthieu Blazy’s debut haute couture collection for Chanel strips the house back to its lightest expression. Anders Christian Madsen reports…
Were we taking a trip to the forest or were we tripping in the forest? Prior to Chanel showtime, that was the question in a Grand Palais decked out with giant mushrooms and pink foliage like some psychedelic den. They say shrooms can provide clarity of mind and purity of feeling. If so, the Chanel high was on point. For his first haute couture collection, Matthieu Blazy went on a (more or less) psychedelic journey to the essence of Chanel. The first looks distilled the sensibility of the house to a core feeling expressed in super-light translucent slip dresses overlaid with matching shirts with minimal surface decoration as a memory of the Chanel suit. Stripped of the bouclé, braids, and buttons many associate with Chanel—and instead embracing its history’s perhaps lesser-known fluidity—the looks’ elegant purity still felt unmistakably on brand.
These are clothes that are as much about the wearer as the designer. It’s the clothes worn that give them a true story; their own story and an emotional resonance, giving women a canvas to tell their own story.
Matthieu Blazy
The languished motif continued to course through the collection, materializing in expressions that did feel pretty trippy, like translucent trousers that looked like they had once been jeans or an optical-illusion faux tweed suit that evoked the fabric’s woolliness through—no doubt painstaking—fuzzy embroidery. As the show progressed, Blazy’s distilled silhouettes steadily amplified in volume and technique, flexing the haute couture ateliers’ muscle. Gradually, surfaces grew increasingly feathery until his trippy forest became inhabited by birdlike women swaying down the circular pink runway in abstract takes on plumage. Here, Blazy exercised a formal language that felt more personal to him: complex and crafty textures, bouncy embellishments, gushing hemlines, and fading colors.
“These are clothes that are as much about the wearer as the designer. It’s the clothes worn that give them a true story; their own story and an emotional resonance, giving women a canvas to tell their own story,” Blazy said. You could reframe that as the age-old question of whether you’re wearing the clothes or the clothes are wearing you. When it comes to a house with codes as strong as Chanel’s, the most interesting experiments lie in testing just how much you can distill the codes without losing the identity. In that process, the wearer naturally becomes more visible. If Blazy wanted to unite the Chanel woman with the woman in Chanel, he could mark his first haute couture mission accomplished.
Following Schiaparelli and Dior, this was the third haute couture collection in two days to heavily reference the wonders of nature. Considering the global climate—the political one, that is—that in itself has felt like a bit of a hallucinatory head trip. Perhaps our nature-centric haute couture escapism is an expression of the same essentialism Blazy mentioned in his show notes. When the manmade world we’ve created turns chaotic, nature—the uncultured—somehow feels safer than civilization. As for that head trip, it was helped along by an eclectic soundtrack that jumped from Moby’s Porcelain to Nelly Furtado’s All Good Things and a finale mash-up of The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony and Oasis’ Wonderwall.
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