Matthieu Blazy Takes Flight at the Grand Palais

Matthieu Blazy has spent a year proving that Chanel can feel light again. On October 5, 2026, at the Grand Palais in Paris, he presented Chanel Spring Summer 2027, titled La Conversation, Part Three, Different Faces of the Same Coin, returning to the glass-roofed hall a year after his debut.

Photo Credit: Copyright CHANEL

The premise is Gabrielle Chanel herself, read as many women in one. “Throughout their lives, women become multiple selves, different faces of the same coin,” Blazy said in the show notes. Across 83 looks, the collection follows her from an Edwardian girlhood to the postwar suit, letting each era leave traces on the next.

Dyanira Hurbuscher opened in a sheer ivory knit slip with a feathered corsage at the bust, carrying Gabrielle Chanel’s own 2.55 bag from the Patrimoine archives. It is lingerie as origin story, a nod to the revelation of jersey underwear that, according to the notes, sits at the inception of the collection.

Photo Credit: Copyright CHANEL

From there, the Edwardian corsetry and tailoring she once rebelled against are taken apart rather than revived. What remains, in the notes’ words, are “lines of shadow boning, the flourish of a peplum, the ruffle of a collar, the curve of a bodice.” A pair of tutu-skirted dancer looks lightened the mood further.

Then comes the borrowed wardrobe. Men’s formal day and evening wear is cut raw-edged into gilets or reworked as pencil-skirt suits. One standout pairs a black cutaway tailcoat with a pleated dress shirt left open over a sheer tank, wide trousers and a single flower brooch. It is cross-dressing with a wink.

Photo Credit: Copyright CHANEL

The men’s world then glides into thirties-style evening gowns, sequined and bias-structured or knitted and beaded, which the notes say slip on “with the ease of a T-shirt.” Blazy also answered critics of his boxy shapes with clingy semisheer knits and a pearl-embroidered corset top worn with black trousers.

The flou is the most startling passage. Layered silk transparencies printed with clouds billow off the body like weather, tracing morning, golden hour and nightfall across a short sequence of looks. One pale sky-blue caped dress, finished with a cascading pearl collar, trailed a train that seemed to carry daylight down the runway.

Photo Credit: Copyright CHANEL

Overhead, 95 illuminated birds hung in midflight above a set inspired by the southern Italian village where Blazy vacations, home to a migratory bird sanctuary, while swifts and swallows alighted as buttons, jewelry and embroidery. “Ultimately, Chanel took off, and each step she took led to her being free, like a bird,” Blazy said.

The final chapter brings the suit full circle in a new ‘smocked tweed’, which the notes call “a performance garment only possible today.” Hurbuscher closed the show as she opened it, now in black tweed with gold buttons over a pale open-knit top, the same archival 2.55 in hand.

Photo Credit: Copyright CHANEL

This is Blazy’s most complete Chanel yet, less a reinvention than a biography told in cloth, and proof that the house’s history can be worn lightly. The smocked tweed suit is the piece to watch.

For more of Haute Living’s Paris Fashion Week coverage, see Loewe Spring Summer 2027 and Alaïa Winter Spring 2027.