Matthieu Blazy’s first year at Chanel does not rest on his quotations of the past, but on what he chose to leave in the wardrobe. A reading of an inheritance through its absences.
On 6 October 2025, the Grand Palais reopens its doors after five years of works. Beneath the restored glass roof, the first silhouette comes forward. The tweed is there, recognizable among a thousand, but it has lost its weight. The jacket almost floats. In the room, no one is fooled: it is indeed a house one knows, and yet it is no longer quite the same.
Matthieu Blazy, forty, Franco-Belgian, arrived from Bottega Veneta, signs that evening his first collection for Chanel. He is the fourth creative director in a hundred and fourteen years of history. The press will remember the nods to the past, the lightened tweed loops, the trompe-l’oeil, the virtuosity of the atelier. Five months later, on 5 March 2026, the pieces reach the boutiques. People queue for hours, and the most coveted models vanish in minutes. The trade at once invents a word: Blazymania.
Much was said of what Blazy took up. Little was looked at in what he refused.
Yet that is where a first year is decided. To inherit a house like Chanel does not consist in choosing among the available signs. It consists in deciding which will stay in the wardrobe. The ostentatious quilting, the gold chain brandished as a declaration, the camellia repeated to exhaustion are so many elements that say Chanel from the first second, and that Blazy kept at a distance. He did not quote. He listened.
The venue itself carried the lesson. The Grand Palais had not been made anew. It had been restored. The glass roof had been cleaned, the structure consolidated, its light returned to the building, with nothing added that had not already existed. The collection answered the architecture that received it. To restore is not to rebuild, and to inherit is not to copy.
What Blazy kept is not a wardrobe, it is a grammar. The nonchalance of a woman who dresses for herself alone. The gesture of removing a jewel rather than adding one. The conviction that comfort is a form of elegance, and not its opposite. Gabrielle Chanel had not invented objects. She had invented a way of carrying oneself. Blazy understood it: one does not inherit a silhouette, one inherits a syntax.
The immediate reading makes of this collection a success of quotation. People saw in it Chanel given back to Chanel. The slow reading sees the opposite. The modernity of a house does not rest on its capacity to repeat itself, but on its courage to fall silent on certain words. The houses that fade are those that quote everything, for fear of forgetting something. The houses that endure know what they can abandon without ceasing to be themselves.
There is, in this choice, something that goes beyond Chanel. Contemporary luxury is saturated with signs. The monogram, the logo, the iconic piece carried over season after season are so many guarantees against risk. Blazy took the opposite risk. He wagered that recognising a house does not pass through the repetition of its emblems, but through fidelity to its first intention. The wager is rare. It is perhaps the only one worth making.
Matthieu Blazy’s first year is not read in what he showed. It is read in what he had the freedom not to take up again.
To inherit is to choose what one will not take up again.
