PARIS (AP) — Inside the Grand Palais in Paris Tuesday, Chanel’s starry salon was swallowed by a garden gone wrong: giant beanstalks climbing to the ceiling and huge flowers blooming a little too brightly to be safe.
Tilda Swinton, Michelle Yeoh and Catherine Deneuve were among the crowd, the kind the Parisian stalwart summons and few others can. The show looked enchanted and faintly poisoned at the same time, which turned out to be the point.
This was designer Matthieu Blazy reaching for the storybook.
The idea came from a small leather-bound book of fairy tales he found on a shelf in house-founder Gabrielle Chanel’s old apartment.
Blazy arrived from Bottega Veneta and is still early at Chanel, the house Karl Lagerfeld ran for 36 years until his death in 2019, and then his longtime deputy Virginie Viard led until 2024.
This is only his second couture outing, and already the place feels lighter.
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“I started to wonder, was Gabrielle Chanel’s life a fairy tale?” Blazy said.
Blazy had decided her rise from a convent orphanage to the top of fashion was its own Jack and the Beanstalk: a nobody who climbs, dares and comes back down with the gold.
So the clothes told tales.
The opening look was a sheer Chanel suit, its grid of embroidery shaped like tiny bean shoots. Vines crept up dresses and curled around the heels of shoes. Butterflies and blossoms turned up where you least expected them.
Little evening bags took the shape of sleeping bears and fat chickens; heels were sculpted into butterflies and golden eggs. There were sly nods to Goldilocks, Puss in Boots and the Ugly Duckling, though Blazy was too clever to spell any of it out.
Most of the magic hid inside. Jackets concealed painted linings and mock to-do lists stitched in sheer silk — couture’s grandest craft spent on a shopping list.
Edges were left deliberately frayed, a nod to Coco Chanel’s habit of attacking her own clothes with pins as she fitted them.
“Haute Couture at Chanel is not just a fairy tale; in essence it is for women, their realities and their adventures of the everyday,” Blazy said.
That was the real point.
Blazy kept cutting away anything too grand, and what was left were clothes a woman could actually live in: a sharply cut coat, a red sequined shift, an evening look pared all the way back to a black tunic and trousers.
It is the oldest Chanel trick — walk into a room in something plain and make everyone else look as if they tried too hard — and Blazy has quietly made it feel new.
He cast women of every age, which made the argument without a word.
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After the customary wedding gown came the finale: a bare black off-the-shoulder dress, less bride than warning shot.
Chanel, famously, never married.
It should be said that it had turned out as if summoned by the fairy tale itself.
Swinton and Pedro Pascal, Yeoh and Lupita Nyong’o, Deneuve and Vanessa Paradis, the boxer Imane Khelif and the skater Surya Bonaly were among them.
They came for the spectacle. Blazy sent them home thinking about their to-do lists.
