Chanel’s spring 2026 ready-to-wear debut collection by Matthieu Blazy was surrounded by a glowing solar system.Photography by Rachelle Simoneau/The Globe and Mail
When you’re a brand as disciplined as Chanel, even changing the time of your runway show can be seen to signal a significant shift in direction.
A dress from Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel spring 2026 collection.
For as long as fashion cognoscenti can remember, the 115-year-old French house has staged its fall and spring collections on the morning of the final Tuesday of fashion month – the calendar of presentations that winds its way through New York, London, Milan and Paris. That was not to be the case for designer Matthieu Blazy’s spring 2026 debut as Chanel’s creative director, however. The message leading up to the show on Oct. 6 was clear: move your dinner reservations; Chanel is showing on Monday night.
The audience was happy to oblige. In a season stacked with designer introductions, Blazy’s first collection was, perhaps, the most anticipated. His arrival at Chanel was the subject of speculation for months before it was announced last December.
The 41-year-old French-Belgian creative began his career designing men’s wear for Raf Simons before overseeing Maison Margiela’s Artisanal collection. He worked with Phoebe Philo at Céline; Simons, again, at Calvin Klein; and took charge of Bottega Veneta’s studio in 2021. At Bottega Veneta, his long list of wins included coveted accessories created using the house’s signature woven leather, working the material to look like textiles ranging from denim to flannel, and high-concept show sets.
The collection included silhouettes ranging from boxy and oversized to rounded and sculpted.
The time shift of the Chanel show allowed Blazy to present his own dramatic take on the house’s blockbuster scenography. During the day, the Grand Palais, Chanel’s traditional show venue, is awash with natural light. In the evening, Blazy could fill its soaring greenhouse roof with a glowing solar system instead. A dark, resin-like floor of colourful nebulas and distant galaxies reflected the suspended orbs, and as twilight dimmed outside, the room became a kind of planetarium, enveloping the audience in deep space.
“Chanel is about love. The birth of Modernity in fashion comes from a love story,” noted Blazy in the show program. “This is what I find most beautiful. It has no time or space; this is an idea of freedom. The freedom worn and won by Gabrielle Chanel.”
For the models that floated through Chanel’s Grand Palais universe, that sense of freedom was expressed in styling that prioritized singular pieces coming together in an individualized way. That made the collection both easy and impossible to compare to the Chanels that have come before.
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There was everything a long-time client needs, though often loosened up and remixed. Oversized bags in brown and maroon evoked the shape of Chanel’s classic flap but without any quilting or chain hardware. The texture of the tweed suits was lighter and, occasionally, sheer, with silhouettes ranging from boxy and oversized to rounded and sculpted, the plaids blown-up, shrunk down, beaded and shredded.
Plaid at the Chanel show.
The colour palette was at times graphic black-and-white but, more often, fresh and vibrant, including a look that paired a tomato red maxi skirt with a cropped blue stripe dress shirt. The shirts, created in collaboration with another French luxury stalwart, Charvet, were the sleeper hits. While they link Blazy’s collection to house founder Gabrielle Chanel and her love of adopting the clothing of the men in her life for herself, they accomplish it with more ease than ever before.
Newly installed creative directors were once rewarded for being reverential to the history of the houses they’d been charged with, while incrementally nudging customers toward an evolution seasoned with their own ideas. Today, the army of critics that dominates social media expects instant revolution and calibrates its opinions using an impossible matrix of pop culture, politics and algorithmic trends that are constantly in flux. Blazy, miraculously, met all of these often incongruous expectations.
A look from the fashion house’s spring 2026 collection.
The show’s first look included a version of the 2.55 handbag, but its prim shape was scrunched and splayed open to reveal its burgundy leather lining. At the showroom the next day, it became clear that the inner structure of the bag allows its owner to form it into as imperfect a shape as they like. It’s Blazy’s homage to Gabrielle Chanel’s belief that clothing is meant to be (and even look) worn, and one of many ways he connected Chanel’s past, present and the surprises he has in store for its future.
The Globe and Mail Style Magazine travelled to Paris as a guest of Chanel. The company did not review or approve this article prior to publication.
