Blazy’s Chanel Couture Was a Slam Dunk!

PARIS — Matthieu Blazy’s sublime haute couture debut at Chanel had its unlikely roots in Japanese anime. The designer was struck to his soul by a haiku he came across. Bird on a mushroom. / I saw the beauty at once. / Then gone, flown away. “It was so poetic,” he mused during a preview. “Considering what’s happening around us every day, I thought maybe what couture can offer is a kind of parenthesis, like a dream, even if we manage a 20-minute escape and just throw poetry on the table. That was the idea: very simple, this bird on a mushroom.”

Birds, mushrooms, beauty and transience were, in one way or another, the collection’s key elements. Mushrooms were the most immediately evident in the set that filled the Grand Palais. It was a psychedelic Wonderland with looming magic mycelia ringed by pink weeping willows. From macro to microcosm, many of the shoes by Massaro featured fanciful mushroom heels on which a minuscule bird had perched, another poetic touch.

Chanel Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2026 (Launchmetrics.com/Spotlight)

Birds were everything to Blazy in his collection. The only visual references featured on the moodboard in his studio were glossy portraits of avian pin-ups. Nature at its freest, its most celebratory. He thought birds made a beautiful symbol for women. “A woman can go from sometimes very simple to deciding to be very extravagant.” There were humble pigeon feathers in Blazy’s collection, but there was also a graphic bird of paradise cocoon. The ravens from Van Gogh’s last painting flocked across a yellow silk background. And the bride, the ravishing Indian model Bhavitha Mandava, was dressed in a suit of dove feathers made of mother of pearl. She had a nest of white raffia for a headdress.

Blazy’s first look clarified a challenge he’s set himself. “If we take out the codes — the tweeds, the trims, can it still look Chanel?” He offered a classic skirt suit in pale, sheer mousseline, with pearls added to the classic chains to weight the hem and the equally classic accessories of two-tone slingbacks (he called them the “anti-pump”) and a 2.55 bag, also cut from mousseline and suspended on sheer “chains” in a transparent extension of the look. “Because the slingback and the 2.55 are almost elements you don’t question anymore, like you don’t question a street or a building or a pair of scissors. It’s almost like the pedestal of Chanel. You have those, you have the allure.”

But balancing all this classicism was the simple audacity of the sheerness. Modesty was maintained by the lingerie, emphasising the exquisite physicality of the look. Blazy’s reminder that couture is made on and for a woman’s body was scarcely necessary. But while he was wondering how best to further amplify that woman’s story, he came up with the idea of “a lexicon of symbols,” initials, hearts, personalising flourishes. He asked Stephanie, the woman who would be wearing the first look what she’d prefer and she said she’d love to have a heart over her heart, and a love letter from her husband in her bag. It was his words that were embroidered on the letter barely visible in that bag on Tuesday. “So the women bring their own story to this place,” Blazy added. More glorious mousselines followed (flamingo pink lingerie layered under vermilion!), embroidered with birds and mushrooms by Lesage artisans at their peak, accompanied by the transparent bags with their mementoes, even a tiny mousseline No. 5 bottle. Everyone who buys the look will get one.

“Can couture really bring this kind of emotion as well?” Blazy wondered. “It’s made to measure, but not just only on the body. It’s more symbolic. We didn’t just cast 18-year-old girls. We really looked all around the world for women that had a maturity. I didn’t want the women to look like someone we would know. I’m more interested in the one we don’t know, because then suddenly they’re intriguing.” Stephanie, half-Italian, half-Guadeloupean, came from Pennsylvania to meet Matthieu. It was kismet.

And what all sorts of women from all sorts of places reminded Blazy of was that couture for Gabrielle Chanel’s clients was a way to dress morning, noon and night. “Ready-to-wear didn’t exist, couture didn’t mean embellishment, Chanel was doing suits that didn’t have embroideries, and still they were couture. And I wanted to bring this back.” Hence, a versatile daywear element. There were suits cut from a black crepe (every look in the collection has its own buttons, the crepe trouser suit has parakeets) that Chanel herself used. Blazy had it remade. “I like the idea that a woman can wear couture to work and it doesn’t have to scream what it is.” One of his favourite pieces? A simple black dress cut from the same crepe, with the same principle of couture that doesn’t scream. “But you have to imagine what’s happening inside. It’s a fucking computer with the complexity of the lining and the pockets.” He’s laughing because he’s in love with the idea.

But there were also the fabulous arty illusions of haute couture, like another Blazy favourite that made him think of a Jackson Pollock painting, with raffia stitched into yarn. (It also looked like feathers.) Again, that was all about Chanel’s predilection for introducing simple fabrics — cotton, canvas, raffia, muslin, jersey — to luxury. She wasn’t a fan of preciousness, but she’d have clearly loved a transformation like Blazy’s black raffia coat. “With Lesage, we wove a new tweed from a different kind of shadowed raffia. I wanted to see if we could bring colour into black. And we did develop shades of black that almost became colours. Yeah, I love that coat. One of the most interesting things about couture is the stuff that you don’t see. That’s what makes it good, too.” Which made me wonder where one of my favourites would sit with him. It was a jacket, skirt and shirt whipped up from what might have been crosshatched tulle netting. Were the pockets really anchored by tiny little budgies swinging on their perches?

Blazy claimed that when he started designing his first couture collection, he was going for grandeur. Big, impressive volumes. An understandable impulse. But he saw the light and stripped out a lot. He removed a lot of the jewellery as well. What was left was linear and long, until it started moving. “Everything looks sexy because when it moves, it goes right above the knee. It’s animated, it’s not designed. The body is the tool.” The complete ne plus ultra of this notion is Blazy’s tank top and trompe-l’œil “jeans” combination, which he activated so brilliantly at Bottega Veneta (and before that, at Margiela). At Chanel, he said he was offering it in couture almost as a blank canvas. A space to watch?

I could go on all night digging into the details of Blazy’s triumph. Better leave the last word to the man himself. “Let’s say it like this, I’m a cook. I do all the ingredients, and when everything is ready, I put it on the plate and that’s when you hope that suddenly the magic will happen. Are they eating well? Are they laughing at the table? Is there a candle? There is everything you can control, but there is also everything you can’t. How are the models going to be? Is there one model who’s going to look someone in the eyes and suddenly there is a connection which will twist the show? So that’s what makes a show a moment that needs to be lived, because it can fail as well.” But not today.

Oh, one last thing. After the triumphant finale of Blazy’s ready-to-wear show in October, when model Awar Odhiang twirled with him to “Rhythm is a Dancer,” the song topped Spotify’s charts the following week. He sent his last couture look out to another of his personal bests, Joan Baez’s honeyed croon of “Diamonds and Rust.” I think it also deserves a Spotify topslot. But don’t you dare blame the mushrooms.