Chanel by Matthieu Blazy Spring Summer 2027 - La Conversation – Part Three – Different Faces of the Same Coin.
“Throughout their lives, women become multiple selves, different faces of the same coin. It’s like a game of exquisite corpse, where one identity leads to another. It’s about the women within a woman. And here, it’s about one woman, Gabrielle, who then became Chanel.” Matthieu Blazy
Fashion is malleable and transformative, transmitting from the past to the present and into the future. Fashion identities shift and change, yet in relation to one woman, they are always different and always the same. In this season’s collection, Matthieu Blazy, Artistic Director of Fashion Activities, honours these multiple selves in his ongoing conversation with Gabrielle Chanel.
Spanning from her beginnings to her later years, from the revelation of jersey underwear at the inception of the collection to her postwar work on the suit, worn here as a second skin against bare flesh, as lightly as a perfume. Here, the Chanel fashion continuum proves multi-layered and circular, with the beginning informing the end.
In the collection, the young Gabrielle becomes the various Chanel women she will be. They carry one within the other, a layered history of selves within a layered history of the clothing she wore. This is her personal fashion journey: from the strictures of Edwardian corsetry and tailoring she once assumed and rebelled against, to her reconfigured, revolutionary ideas of suiting, slipped on and lightly sported. Identities are tried on, enhanced, added to, played with, or at times discarded and fought against. They leave traces of their former incarnations behind; lines of shadow boning, the flourish of a peplum, the ruffle of a collar, the curve of a bodice, becoming the ghostly remnants of fashion lives past.
From construction to deconstruction, her revelatory exploration of masculine tailoring returns: men’s formal day and evening wear is cut raw-edged as gilets, worn with trousers, or reconfigured into pencil-skirt suits. The men’s world glides into the women’s with thirties-style formal gowns, sequined and bias-structured, or knitted and beaded, light enough to slip on and wear with the ease of a T-shirt. The paradoxes of femininity are at the heart of each.
“This is not a historical collection; it’s a collection about Gabrielle Chanel’s layered stories. Ultimately, Chanel took off, and each step she took led to her being free, like a bird.” Matthieu Blazy
