Recollection for the becoming: Chanel Spring/Summer 2027
Leading the runway, the evening prior, and stepping into the astonishing Grand Palais the following morning, the Chanel Spring/Summer 2027 collection revealed another layer of itself up close…
““What’s life?” we ask, leaning on the farmyard gate.
“Life! Life! Life!” cries the bird.”
Matthieu Blazy’s first Spring/Summer collection since becoming Artistic Director of Fashion Activities looked beyond one fixed image of Gabrielle Chanel, and instead explored the many versions of the woman she became throughout her life. Very evidently through the collection you will see that Chanel was never, nor has ever been linear.
Blazy described the collection as “the women within a woman.” Chanel was a culture shifter in women's fashion and never froze in 1920 or 1955 to be boxed in a cage of the world telling her she should could, or couldn’t be something. That idea became even more apparent as we stepped back into the collection where Blazy reinterpreted the different chapters of Gabrielle’s life through his own lens, allowing the past to inform something that still feels very much in motion.
Though silhouettes look structured and heavy, they are made with light fabrics that allow for ease | Photo Credit: Amaya Rose Wood
As women, we carry what came before us even as we continue moving forward, and as you step through the collection, corsetry is translated into detailed tailoring, while masculine formalwear softens into the feminine silhouette. A pink skirt suit revealed a structured, corset-like layer beneath it, while tweed jackets appeared with raw edges, intricate trims, patterned layers and unexpected ornamentation, allowing something familiar to become something new. Elsewhere, a pale blue textured dress fell away from the body with a sense of lightness, while fringed and fluid pieces seemed to move with the woman wearing them. Each was reinterpreted by Blazy without losing the visual language that has long defined Chanel.
“The child I once was is with me today. I accomplished her plans. I satisfied her tastes. It is from her that I acquired my exacting standards, and she is the one I have managed to please. No one is closer to me than she is. She owes me everything, and I owe her what I was able to contribute to my era.”
The birds revealed themselves differently in the daylight of the Palais as they swayed above the collection like birds in flight, the motif carried through every layer, from the sky above to the smallest details of the clothes, appearing in buttons, jewelry and embroidery before arriving at the birdcage minaudière, its birds already escaping.
The same model, Dyanira Hurbuscher, opened and closed the prior evening's runway carrying Gabrielle Chanel’s originally owned 2.55 bag from the Patrimoine archives. While everything around it shifted through different eras, silhouettes and expressions of femininity it represented how women could continue evolving without ever becoming disconnected from themselves because it all flows together into one.
Chanel understood this so well, and Blazy was able to revisit this narrative as he designed. Seeing the collection up close felt less like a recollection of Gabrielle Chanel and more like a conversation with the different ways of being she had stepped into throughout her life, asking what it means to keep becoming without losing the thread that connects you to where you began. It became this quiet thread running through the collection, connecting the woman Gabrielle was to the woman she would become, and eventually to the women she designed for. The clothes seemed to understand this too, as what began with jersey underwear eventually returned in another form through the new smocked tweed suit. Decades apart, they arrived at something remarkably similar: swiftness, movement and the freedom to move within what you wear. Even the ‘flou’ seemed to hold time within it as the swift and the swallow appeared throughout the collection, in buttons, jewelry and embroidery, eventually arriving in the birdcage minaudière, its birds already escaping. Blazy described it simply: “Ultimately, Chanel took off, and each step she took led to her being free, like a bird.”
Photo Credit: Amaya Rose Wood
It brought me back to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, where she looks out onto an ordinary summer morning, observing the plum blossom, the bee and a starling searching through the remnants of everyday life before turning to the bird with a much larger question: “What’s life?” we ask, leaning on the farmyard gate.
“Life! Life! Life!” cries the bird.
That is what Blazy understood in returning to these different chapters of Chanel. He was not trying to recreate one version of Gabrielle, but to let each one speak to the next, allowing corsetry to become tailoring, menswear to become something distinctly feminine, and the lightness of the earliest garments to find its way into something entirely new. The collection was not asking which woman was the real Chanel, but showing that they were all her and how we can step into that understanding wearing Chanel too. To be a woman in our own time is to move through different versions of ourselves without needing to disown the ones that came before, honoring the woman we were, the woman we are, and the woman still waiting somewhere ahead of us. Becoming is learning how to let them exist together, as while the woman changes, the continuous everchanging, evolving, and recollecting thread remains. Life. Life. Life.
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Leading the runway, the evening prior, and stepping into the astonishing Grand Palais the following morning, the Chanel Spring/Summer 2027 collection revealed another layer of itself up close…