Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Courtesy of Chanel
Since 2002, Chanel has put on a ready-to-wear show called Métiers d’Art. It’s meant to showcase the exquisite work of its satellite ateliers, among them the embroiderers Lesage and Montex, the milliner Maison Michel, and Lemarié, a maker of feather and flower trimmings. Karl Lagerfeld held the first Métiers show in the house’s couture salon, at the top of the famous staircase with guests seated informally about. Soon after, he took the show on the road. On Tuesday, Matthieu Blazy, Chanel’s new creative director, staged two shows on a Bowery subway platform for 1,100 people.
Blazy, who had an outstanding debut in October, had several things in mind. He said he was thinking about Gabrielle Chanel’s first trip to New York in 1931, when she stopped on her way to Hollywood to design clothes for the movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn. Though sick with the flu, she apparently went downtown and was struck by how many women had adapted her style. “I thought, All right, we have a story,” Blazy recalled. “We have energy, the idea of people in the street. And also the idea of Gabrielle touching the cinema. Why don’t we go into the Metro” — that is, the subway — “with archetypal figures that we know are not real, but we see them from a cinema angle.” The college student in her flannel shirt or quarter-zip fleece. The Brooklyn girl. The corporate leader in her suit. The female dandy in pinstripes. The rich widows in chic black. The New Yorkers who literally wear costumes, like Spider-Man.
From left: Photo: Courtesy of Chanel/Filippo Fior / Gorunway.comPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel/Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com
From top: Photo: Courtesy of Chanel/Filippo Fior / Gorunway.comPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel/Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com
Blazy envisioned them getting off a subway train as their paths intersected, coffee cups or a purse-size dog in hand. He lived in New York for about two years when he worked for Calvin Klein, and he remembers going into the subway at Times Square and seeing people dressed in evening clothes, perhaps heading to the ballet or opera. “I think in Paris the fashion is more blended,” he said. “There’s more uniformity; whereas in New York you have more types.” Dressed in a quarter-zip himself with roomy trousers, Blazy paused. “I don’t want to sell anyone short, but the differences exist.”
He was also interested in the sense of time, expressed in both the hours of the day — the morning commute, for example — and the temporal associations of clothes, often between the work of two designers from different eras. He brought up the late Stephen Sprouse, whose influence is evident in a knitted suit in a zany yellow-red-black squiggle pattern. He noted that Chanel was doing cotton separates very early on; so were American sportswear designers, and he pointed to a pair of full, airy skirts in checked cotton with contrasting floaty tops. Blazy, who also worked at Martin Margiela’s label, said of Chanel, “When you separate the clothes, they all function. Martin was a master at that too. You see the looks from the early ’90s, they seem extreme. But when you decompose the silhouettes …” He smiled. “I think Martin and Gabrielle were very similar.” A lot of costume historians would agree.
From left: Photo: Courtesy of Chanel/Filippo Fior / Gorunway.comPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel
From top: Photo: Courtesy of Chanel/Filippo Fior / Gorunway.comPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel
To help evoke a sense of time during the show, Blazy played an audio clip from The Hours, the movie based on Michael Cunningham’s novel of the same title, which, like its inspiration, Mrs. Dalloway, takes place in a single day. “About Time” was also the theme of the 2020–21 costume show at the Met, to which Cunningham contributed material.
Did Blazy’s subway show work? The answer is no. The problem wasn’t that the setting was unglamorous, though it was, or even that showing luxury clothes there might verge on insensitive. Blazy and the Chanel team made it convincingly clear that they were treating the disused Bowery station as a set. The problem was the expression wasn’t artistic. We were essentially an audience looking at 81 models, or characters, as they crisscrossed a platform. Was there really a strong idea here? As a show, it failed, in my view, to lift off and leave you with a sense of wonder or joy — as Blazy’s October show did.
Let’s consider that debut show. He and the Chanel production team filled the ceiling of the Grand Palais in Paris with huge, illuminated spheres, like planets. They implied a world and that Chanel is a global brand. It was an abstract idea. That’s what Blazy needed to do with the Métiers show. Forget the real subway; it’s too mundane. Instead, it would have been far more effective and surprising if the audience had been sitting in a large empty space and, through the use of choreography and sound and lighting effects, we understood that we were meant to be on a chaotic platform for all the hours of a day. Our imaginations could do the work. Indeed, think of Marc Jacobs’s great show in February 2020, his collaboration with the dancer Karole Armitage, when the models evoked the energy of New York — without a set — and actually flowed into the audience, making us part of the action.
That level of artistry — starting from an abstract concept — would naturally have followed, if not surpassed, the buoyant effect of October.
Blazy’s new collection itself was superb: a continuation of many of his ideas about Chanel, beginning with shelving much of the branding details and patterns that had been turning the style into costume. Whether you can afford Chanel or not, this collection presented many sensibilities — the woman who wants to wear a slim belted coat (the tan suede one in the show was based on the much-photographed couch in Chanel’s apartment) over a simple silk blouse and slacks in a matching tone, or the woman who wants the drama of a plush black coat in Lemarié’s feathers over a siren-red sequined slip dress. It’s the outfit the model Hanne Gaby Odiele, in the role of a society matron with a Mars Attacks! French twist hairdo, wore as she looked down the tracks for her train.
From left: Photo: Courtesy of ChanelPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel
From top: Photo: Courtesy of ChanelPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel
Photo: Courtesy of Chanel
The designer showed a lot of curiosity for interpreting some of Chanel’s looks and fabrics from the late 1920s and ’30s, notably leopard patterns and astrakhan (Lesage achieved the same ridged texture and silkiness with embroidery). He got away from the banal grid patterns of tweed bouclés by creating uneven, horizontal weaves and offered lighter cotton tweeds. And he thoughtfully worked in American references. Among the images on a mood board set up in his temporary space at Spring Studios were those of Andy Warhol’s wig, photo shoots on subways, a scene from the artist Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series, and the oil heiress Millicent Rogers, who adored Indigenous American jewelry. I noticed that a chain necklace seemed to have a touch of turquoise. It looked fresh.
From left: Photo: Courtesy of Chanel/Jonas GustavssonPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel
From top: Photo: Courtesy of Chanel/Jonas GustavssonPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel
What I really love about Blazy’s Chanel is that he keeps breaking assumptions about what Chanel — and luxury — is supposed to be. He showed his version of a red checked “flannel” overshirt worn with a skirt that looks like denim (but isn’t) and a pair of T-strap heels. A dark quarter-zip top paired with a silver embroidered Deco skirt. Khakis were done in silk, though they still retain the drape of chinos. He showed something of the same casual ease with a long sleeveless evening dress, inspired by an early Chanel frock, that he split into a kind of vest, layering it over a white T-shirt and jeans. The result had a vintage flavor but also made me think of Margiela and Miuccia Prada and, of course, Gabrielle.
From left: Photo: Courtesy of Chanel/Filippo Fior / Gorunway.comPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel/Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com
From top: Photo: Courtesy of Chanel/Filippo Fior / Gorunway.comPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel/Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com
I asked Blazy about some online comments, perhaps from clients and influencers, complaining that his clothes don’t look recognizably Chanel. They seem to want what they already know about Chanel, rather than what’s new and possible. “I don’t know,” Blazy began. “I don’t want to sound like — I mean, everyone has a voice. Fashion became part of pop culture. I saw the critics who said, ‘It’s not Chanel.’ Well, I think they know Karl. They might have an idea about Coco. But they certainly aren’t aware Gabrielle Chanel was so revolutionary.”
We spoke for a moment about a look in the debut collection, a plain dark jersey polo sweater with a matching silk wrap skirt edged in dirty white. It’s almost nothing, and it isn’t.
He said, “I heard many on the team say, ‘Yes, but it’s so pre-collection.’” You sometimes wonder if the industry knows how to be truly radical. “Of course, I want a strong message on the runway,” Blazy added. “But the opposite works too.”
The thing is, Blazy is just at the beginning of this story, and already he has opened people’s minds. He shows his first haute couture collection in mid-January.
“You may well do a very graphic, stripped-back Chanel collection at some point,” I said. “You’ve got time.”
“And maybe we will,” he said.