There are days when New York almost crushes you. It’s raining sheets, traffic is backed up for blocks, the trains are all running late. Then something magic happens and you fall in love with the city all over again. Today that magic was Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel Metiers d’art show.
Expectations were high for Blazy’s second Chanel outing. His first, presented exactly two months ago in Paris, was universally embraced as the debut of the year, no small feat considering there were more than a dozen others. But Blazy met and surpassed all that anticipation with a collection today that can safely be summed up as head-spinningly great.
It was May 2006 when Karl Lagerfeld staged Chanel’s first destination show on a mezzanine perched above Grand Central Terminal’s Great Hall, setting a template that the house would repeat for nearly two decades, including with the late designer’s final Metiers d’art show in December 2018 at The Met’s Temple of Dendur. This show played out in the decommissioned Bowery station of the J and Z lines, which had been spiffed up for the occasion with speakers that piped in train sounds, old-school pay phones, and three rows of benches custom built over one set of tracks. Needless to say, very few of the Chanel-clad guests took the subway to get there.
After, yes, a rather long wait, the lights dimmed and an actual MTA train pulled into the station, a real wow moment. The doors opened and 80-odd models spilled out, crisscrossing the platform in what the designer described as an atmosphere of happy chaos. “I was interested in the New York subway because I think it’s the one and only city of the world where every strata of society are using it,” said Blazy, who spent years here while working for Calvin Klein, “and I think it’s a place that has no hierarchy.”
Each model was a New York archetype: The student in jeans that weren’t really jeans but silk made using a technique by Lesage, one of the masterful ateliers in Chanel’s 19M hub, would go zooming by, and then a society doyenne in a billowing black opera cape would come from the other direction. Blazy described a “journalist from the ’70s” and an “’80s businesswoman who’s going to rule the world.” A would-be Coco wore a fringed flapper dress, and a taxicab yellow animal spot skirt suit was made in her image. Elsewhere, there was a nod to Tonight or Never, the movie she costumed, woven into the tweed of a coat, and what could’ve been a callback to Blazy’s own career in the form of an oversized flannel that wasn’t a flannel at all but bouclé. And were those retrievers on a shimmering evening suit? “Because you have two accessories in New York,” he said: “a dog and a coffee cup.”
The collection’s buzzy vitality came from its real-life diversity and from the richness of the handwork, be it in the form of Lesage’s beads or Lemarié’s feathers. At whiplash speed, Blazy has replaced the familiar logo-strewn double-C regalia of old with something that—while still recognizable and bien sur desirable, too—looks and feels less uniform. Chanel for the people? That has a nice ring to it, and we can all dream. I don’t think I was the only one to leave with a contact high. Meanwhile, exactly two months from now, the irrepressible Blazy will launch his next collection for the house: haute couture.
