Matthieu Blazy Puts Enchantment to Work at Chanel

PARIS — The animated short that teased Matthieu Blazy’s second haute couture collection for Chanel opened on a young urchin in a room on Rue Cambon. She drops a magic bean on the floor. It sprouts into a ravenous flowered vine that fills the salon, carries her out the window and high into the air so that le tout Paris is at her feet. The vines, now plural, form a double CC. Blazy called the story “Gabi and the Beanstalk.” And just in case you missed the point, the show invitation arrived with a tiny silver book on a chain. It was titled “Once Upon a Time.” And if you missed all of that, the interior of the Grand Palais looked like the set of "Jumanji" with its tangle of lethal blooms and vines curling round huge vases like the ones Blazy saw in Chanel lookbooks from the 1930s.

Chanel is once again fashion’s fairy tale, and the man responsible deliberately framed and presented his new collection in fairytale terms. He’d originally been planning “something extremely minimal, pure and a little bit Chanel” until he saw a documentary about the origin and transmission of stories, the great primal narratives that lie at the root of human myths and legends. The way, for example, that “David and Goliath” precedes “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Blazy became obsessed with that particular story, wondering how it could be applied to Gabrielle’s own: the urchin who climbs the social ladder and finds enormous success. His inspiration was confirmed when he came across Contes des Fées while he was browsing in Gabrielle’s library. This ancient, tiny and clearly cherished compendium of fairy stories derived from masters such as Charles Perrault and the Grimm Brothers became Blazy’s bible for his collection.

A visit to his studio a few days before showtime revealed a roomful of climbing beans. A board was pinned with big colour blow-ups of the beans in various stages of germination, looking like little alien bodies. “They became the colour card,” said Blazy. “Those rich browns, those strange whites, everything becoming green. That was the starting point. How could we translate it into Gabrielle’s vocabulary? We developed this guipure that looks like beans.” He indicated a lace that did indeed look like strings of bean pods.

But it wasn’t only Jack and his magic bean that Contes des Fées gave up. Blazy reeled off a list of familiar characters: Puss in Boots, Goldilocks, The Ugly Duckling, The Golden Goose. He also began to wonder about Gabrielle’s obsession with wheat. The character of the scarecrow snuck into his subconscious. And all the time he was asking himself how to juxtapose fiction and function. “How can we also juxtapose fairy tales and the adventure of the everyday?”

He showed me a card on which were pinned sequences of buttons. The first told the story of Jack and his beanstalk: the first button was a bean, the second a pod, the third a vine, the fourth Jack climbing, the fifth a castle, the sixth a magic harp, and finally, the golden goose. The stories of Puss’n’Boots, The Ugly Duckling and Goldilocks were similarly rendered in buttons! Fiction and function!

And that was just the beginning. Jackets were lined with beautifully painted illustrations of these same stories and more. I got the sense they’d actually been made by proper book illustrators from all over the world. “They tell the whole story of the book and no one else can see it unless you want to show them,” Blazy said with a kind of impish pride. These linings were so exquisite I wondered if you could turn a jacket inside out. “Margiela did it many times, and you know, Margiela and Gabrielle, they’re quite close, so why not?” was Blazy’s response. “I think they made the same revolution, to attack the wardrobe. Different time, but the revolution is the same. Margiela deconstructed it, she built it up, but I see a lot of similarities.”

Another similarity would be the fascination both designers had for transformations, also the very stuff of many classic fairy tales. In Blazy’s new collection, men’s tailoring was once more transfigured; Julia Nobis in a Chanel take on a three-piece suit, or a tweed blazer with the sleeves slashed off, or a jacket chopped at the waist, mimicking the way Gabrielle would directly cut into clothes on the body. “Fashion is surgery on clothes, no?” Blazy mused. “We took out everything that was grandiloquent, everything that did not express the everyday of Gabrielle Chanel.” Which is probably the first time I’ve heard that word used in the context of a fashion collection. For sure, there was no pomposity in anything Blazy showed, but there was sheer transformative magic in everything from those buttons to the linings, even the charms and talismans (knives, scissors, chairs, flowers, beans, of course) that were almost too tiny for the naked eye once they were embedded in a dense tweed Blazy called a magpie’s nest.

The “magpie-ness” was something that conveyed for him the adventure of the everyday, Gabrielle accumulating bric-a-brac like the magpie in the fairy tale. The bird was celebrated in a black bouclé shift, its neckline dressed by a magpie busily collecting silver charms and chains which trailed down the bodice. There were two pockets, one buttoned with a bird’s nest holding an egg, the other with the same nest holding scissors. The look felt like Blazy’s subtle salute to Chanel herself. He imagined her being amused by it. It was probably my favourite look in the show, so subtly and beautifully did it straddle the fiction/function juxtaposition Blazy talked about.

The collection rewarded the deepest dive imaginable, with as many levels as Silo, because every detail — every button, every bangle, every minaudière, every shoe heel, every piece of lingerie, every head of hair and lick of gilded eyeshadow — told a story. A spiral of white curled around a model’s body like the spiral of the Colonne Vendôme outside the Ritz. That tells the story of Napoleonic triumph. Follow Blazy’s spiral, the growing stalk, and you eventually came across Jack (or Gabi in his telling) reaching for the golden egg. Another story: Natasha Poly and Vittoria Cerretti were giving full Oz Weetabix Scarecrow, their straw hats, jacket and coat studded with tiny ceramic flowers, while Mona Tougaard brought a monochrome sophistication to her straw look.

When he called the three supermodels “the new Trinity,” Blazy may have been harking back to Linda, Christy and Naomi in the Golden Age. (Chanel, at least, might be on the brink of another one.) But then he gave Stephanie Cavalli, the 50-year-old whose career he rocket-fuelled with his first Chanel show, one of the true showstoppers: a seamless sheath of red sequins created in 3D with a galloon neckline of beans on which tiny insects perched. It was named for Dorothy, another Oz habitué, because it was inspired by her red shoes. In fact, Blazy did remarkably well with red throughout. A red suit, another seamless marvel, was patterned after the blanket that Goldilocks was tucked up under in the illustration that lined the jacket. “Couture is not meant to be looked at from afar,” Blazy suggested, almost superfluously. “What I’m interested in is the woman who wears it. She knows.”

Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s avuncular fashion president, estimated more than 300 people would have worked on the collection by the time it was ready to show. But for the purposes of the Chanel fairy tale, there was only one storyteller, and only one word that was appropriate for the extraordinary effect he is having: Enchantment.

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