Mathieu Blazy at Chanel: From Monument to Cultural Practice
Mathieu Blazy’s first two collections at Chanel function as a structural repositioning of the Maison itself. Spring–Summer 2026 and Métiers d’Art Pre-Fall 2026 operate together as a cultural framework through which Chanel renegotiates identity, history, and use.
Blazy’s formation explains this approach. Born in Paris in 1984 and trained at La Cambre in Brussels, he was educated to read fashion as a system of meaning. His professional trajectory (Balenciaga, Margiela, Céline, Calvin Klein, and Bottega Veneta) formed a designer more interested in process than performance.
Spring–Summer 2026, staged beneath a cosmic installation at the Grand Palais (restored through Chanel’s patronage), established a thesis. The opening exit, a rigorously tailored, Austrian-inspired suit, embedded a historical reference to Chanel’s interwar relationship with Germany directly into form. This was historiography, not nostalgia.
Chanel Métier’s D’Art Pre Fall 2026, Courtesy Chanel Press Office
The delayed appearance of tweed functioned as a suspension of symbolic reflex. When it emerged, tweed was destabilised, frayed, altered, and rendered active. Chanel appeared not as a fixed icon, but as a grammar capable of producing new meaning.
Métiers d’Art 2026 extended this argument spatially. By staging the collection in a New York subway station, Blazy placed the slow temporality of artisanal production into friction with the accelerated rhythms of the city. The exits read as social portraits rather than ideals: garments designed for movement, work, and use.
Across both collections, Blazy shifts Chanel’s address. The client is no longer an abstraction but a participant. Luxury is reframed as duration, care, and intelligence rather than distance.
Blazy reactivates Chanel as the Maison moves from monument to practice, from image to relationship, and in this shift lies its renewed cultural relevance.
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