Matthieu Blazy Turned Gabrielle Chanel’s Fairy Tales Into Haute Couture

Paris Haute Couture Week arrived this week with its usual electric charge — the kind that descends on the city every July and January and reminds you, in case you had forgotten, that there is still no place on earth where clothes are treated with this level of seriousness, craft, and reverence. This season, one of the most anticipated shows on the schedule was always going to be Chanel. Matthieu Blazy’s second Haute Couture collection for the house — shown July 7, 2026, inside a salon overgrown with vines and flowers — did not disappoint.

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Blazy titled the collection Gaby and the Beanstalk, and its starting point was a small book discovered in Gabrielle Chanel’s apartment library: Les Fées, Contes des Contes — Fairies, Tales of Tales. “I started to wonder, was Gabrielle Chanel’s life a fairy tale?” Blazy said. “I asked myself if, together with the Haute Couture ateliers, we could make garments that tell stories like a book.” The question animated everything that followed — from Jack and the Beanstalk to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, routed entirely through the supreme skills of Chanel’s tailleur, flou, and galon ateliers, and the artisans of le19M. The result was a collection of breathtaking technical ambition that never once felt like a demonstration. These were clothes with inner lives.

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The show opened with a Chanel suit constructed from guipure that echoed the idea of magic beans, interspersed with transparencies of light silk mousseline — the model carrying a copy of Les Fées directly from the shelf of Gabrielle’s apartment. From there, the collection built its world with a cumulative, almost novelistic logic. A vine crept up the heel of a shoe. A small minaudière appeared as a sleeping bear. A series of buttons transformed, gradually, from duckling to swan. Memo notes, charms, and bric-a-brac were stitched into interiors, slid into pockets, suspended from the famous weighting chain — the thieving magpie made talismanic, the accumulation cascading from the inner world outward. Painted-silk linings offered private pleasure, visible only to the wearer. An interior monologue, literally sewn in.

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What Blazy is doing at Chanel — and this collection makes it clearer than ever — is something quietly radical. He is insisting that Haute Couture is not about spectacle but about symbiosis: between the maker and the wearer, between the garment and the body, between fiction and the very real adventure of a woman’s daily life. Gabrielle Chanel once said, “I created my life because my life did not please me.” Blazy is designing for women who understand exactly what she meant — and who want their clothes to understand it too. “Haute Couture at Chanel is not just a fairy tale,” he said. “In essence it is for women, their realities and their adventures of the everyday.” In Paris this week, that philosophy produced some of the most extraordinary clothes shown anywhere in the world. The story is just getting started.

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THE HAUTE READ

Matthieu Blazy’s second Haute Couture collection for Chanel — shown July 7 in Paris — drew from a fairy tale book found in Gabrielle Chanel’s personal library to produce some of the most technically extraordinary and emotionally resonant couture of his tenure.

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