The year 2025 will be remembered as the year when fashion was shaken by an earthquake. It’s difficult to relive a period in which so many brands changed, almost simultaneously, their creative director, as designers are called today. Gucci, Loewe, Dior, Chanel, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, Jil Sander, Fendi, Balmain — the list is huge and isn’t even consolidated yet. At Versace, for example, newcomer Dario Vitale was fired just over two months after the first show.
It is quite natural that, on this set in upheaval, a mental competition takes place: after all, who did the best? The objective answer will come from the ballot boxes on the shelves, starting at the end of January, when the collections arrive in stores and credit cards translate applause into sales. But, if the election adopts spiritual criteria, the winner has already been designated: Matthieu Blazy.
The new Chanel designer’s first show in October had already generated enormous enthusiasm when it ended with model Awar Odhiang clapping and raising her arms in laughter, against a backdrop of colorful planets, wrapped in a flower-studded carnival skirt and a minimalist white silk blouse. More than just a look, it was a reminder that fashion should be less posh and more fun.
And then, for his second collection, Blazy descended from the cosmos to the earth, showing at the beginning of December in an abandoned subway station in New York. The models came and went like people going to work, answering the payphone, reading the newspaper. There was a Superman sweater, references to Spider-Man, the tiger from the cornflake box, fashion editor Diana Vreeland reincarnated in a black look with a red sarong, a bag imitating a Central Park squirrel. And he rolled up into a wig that gave a nod to Andy Warhol.
Blazy brings the Chanel woman back to the street. She no longer dresses like an imaginary Chanel, with bows, camellias, chains and quilted fabrics repeated endlessly. She returns to dressing like Chanel, as founder Gabrielle dreamed of, when she revolutionized fashion a century ago, by liberating the female body and eliminating excess.
The New York collection is Métiers d’Art, the house’s annual manifesto to defend the ancestral know-how of the French workshops that it saves from disappearance: embroidery, feathers, flowers, jewelry, buttons, tweeds, leathers. The choice of the American city was personal and strategic. Coco Chanel had already fallen in love with her in 1931, when she saw women of modest means in the street dressing “à la Chanel” (for her, the greatest possible compliment). Matthieu Blazy lived in the city early in his career, when he worked for Calvin Klein, and says he fell in love with the metro because there “is no hierarchy.” And when the brand decided to use the deactivated station, it still did not know that the future mayor, Zohran Mamdani, would be elected by promising to make the city more accessible, precisely by campaigning in the metro.
On the catwalk, Blazy brought together this friction between luxury and real life. It gives way to silk trompe-l’oeil jeans, technical knits inspired by American sportswear and leather jackets. The eighty silhouettes spoke to women around the world, but above all gave a nod to American women, still the biggest consumers of ready-to-wear at the house, which achieved a turnover of more than 18 billion dollars in 2024.
There is nothing particularly innovative about organizing a parade in the metro. “Sometimes the enemy of modernity tries to be modern,” Blazy wrote in the promotional material. And that is perhaps the strength of this collection: where everyone was trying to reinvent the cake, it was good old Chanel who managed, once again, to update the ingredients with the simplest gesture that so many people persist in forgetting. Creating clothes that women, so different from each other, really want to wear.
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