Of all the people I see on the New York City subway every day, Tilda Swinton, Jon Bon Jovi, Meg Ryan, Margaret Qualley, and A$AP Rocky were not on my bingo card for…well, ever.
Alas, Chanel and its new designer, the French Belgian Matthieu Blazy, invited them—us—to descend into a not-so-abandoned subway station in downtown Manhattan with the promise of his much anticipated sophomore show for the label and his first Métiers d’Art proposal for the brand. Inclement weather be damned: Attendees sat on the side of the impressively tidied subway platform to see the show, and later ventured to Webster Hall for an after-party featuring a DJ set by Honey Dijon and double-C-shaped pretzels.
“Chanel did a better job cleaning up the subway than Eric Adams ever did,” read a friend’s text. He’s right: This subway platform, an inactive stop known as the Bowery station, smelled much better than any other in the city, and even featured a very handsome newspaper kiosk attendee (handing out Chanel’s very own La Gazette, created for the occasion) and pretend turnstiles for those VICs (very important clients) who’ve possibly never experienced the MTA. (There was a wall-to-wall selfie mirror too.) The same 500-strong group was treated to a special performance of The Nutcracker on Monday night, plus a cocktail pre-fête at The Frick. Yesterday we were driven to and from the show—to and from the subway—in a float of black cars. The whole thing could have been very “let them eat cake” had it not been so charming and earnestly fun.
This very venue has been a movie set and played host to another fashion show before, for Tom Ford in 2019. Blazy, who lived in the city while working at Calvin Klein, kept it true to form and had his models play the part of classic New Yorkers with a side of whimsy: They jogged to hop on the train, took flirty glances as doors closed, and looked longingly out its windows.
Blazy said backstage that he had been inspired by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s own New York jaunt back in the 1930s, when, docking in the city on her way to Hollywood to design costumes for film, she found that her liberated take on women’s fashion had made an impact stateside. “It [was] a breakthrough for her,” Blazy says. “When she goes back to Europe, she [offers] an even more egalitarian way of dressing women.” With shorter skirts and looser shapes, that is.
“I lived in New York for many years and I took the subway every day,” Blazy explains. He recalls taking the train with a friend when one of the costumed people who work in Times Square was on the same car. “So we took the subway with Spider-Man,” he says. On Tuesday, a tweed skirt suit in the show was indeed inspired by the superhero, and another was Clark Kent cosplay. What Blazy was getting at here is that New York is full of characters, be that masked performers or, say, “a journalist from the ’70s” or “the ’80s businesswoman.” “There is something about the New York subway; it’s very egalitarian,” the designer says. “It erases social class totally; it belongs to all New Yorkers.” He said that he hoped to make that point with his collection, which included voluminous butterfly skirts and embroidered evening frocks, alongside jeans and T-shirts. Chanel for the people? Zohran Mamdani might approve.
Blazy also spoke of the tradition of American sportswear and name-dropped the likes of Stephen Sprouse and Patrick Kelly, unsung designers “who made New York city great.” American aesthetics are en vogue on European runways at Christian Dior, Celine, and now Chanel, all of which have new designers. Blazy is the first one of this cohort to bring the trend back stateside, though Gucci and Louis Vuitton will follow with shows in New York, plus Dior in Los Angeles, this coming May. The US market remains crucial to these luxury giants, and their designers are eager to make the transatlantic journey to sell their new ideas.
Blazy’s idyllic take on New York City, a place that can be difficult and overwhelming even on a good day, elicited a standing ovation. This is a well-liked designer whose truest signature is joy, even more than his known preference for relaxed proportions or his deft eye for materialization and texture, which made his Bottega Veneta a runaway hit. It helps, too, that his team knows how to put together a good crowd: The front row also featured legendary New Yorkers like Martin Scorsese, and Bernie Wagenblast, the original voice behind the MTA’s subway announcements, was in the audience. How could one not smile?
Chanel has hosted one Métiers d’Art show each year since 2002, every year in a different city. (The last time it came to New York was in 2018, when the late Karl Lagerfeld took over the Temple of Dendur at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.) “Métiers d’Art is not the same exercise as the show we did in Paris,” Blazy says. “It needs to demonstrate know-how.” The idea is to celebrate and preserve the work of the métiers, artisanal workshops owned by Chanel known for their specialized featherwork, embroidery, millinery, and more.
Yesterday’s collection was shown twice, first at 3 p.m. and then again at 7 p.m., to accommodate the large crowds. (Unlike New Yorkers during rush hour, press, celebrities, and VICs don’t share the same urgency for crowding on a subway platform.) Blazy said that he liked the second showing better because the clothes were more “lived-in.” There was already a well-balanced mix of pragmatism and exuberance in the simplicity of his jeans and knits, and in those majestic animal-print frocks and even a fully sequined I Heart NY tee, which were only augmented by the realism of some creases and wrinkles. That the models seemed to know their way around the train and platform—and their clothes—only drove the point further across.
This collection blurs the line between couture and ready-to-wear. Consider a pair of “jeans” cut in embroidered chiffon, or a handwoven tweed trench coat featuring a movie poster graphic from last night’s show.
“It’s not because it’s embroidered that it’s better,” Blazy explains. “The embroidery serves a purpose, then suddenly you can tell a story,” he added. “It cannot be just for free, for the sake of having something there.” This may be the most crucial element from Blazy’s take on Chanel and luxury fashion: that ornamentation and opulence should serve a purpose. It’s the way the greats—Gabrielle Chanel, Cristóbal Balenciaga—thought of fashion in the early 20th century: a beautiful solution, but a solution nonetheless.
But Blazy’s biggest achievement so far is to have parted ways with the ghost of Lagerfeld. Chanel had become a house in limbo following his passing, and his memorable thematic collections—say, space travel or a trip to Havana—had left it without a clear path forward. He has now charted a new course by preserving Lagerfeld’s knack for the theatrical while connecting it to Gabrielle’s human journey. Thus far his Chanel reads like a biography of its founder’s life, but Blazy’s signature as an author makes for one hell of a page-turner.
