Chanel’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection, beyond being a great triumph for Matthieu Blazy’s debut as the Maison’s creative director, is a practical demonstration of what happens when a designer who has made sartorial intelligence his stylistic signature enters into dialogue with one of the most sacred names in French fashion. The magnificent first show of this new era at Chanel is a transversal conversation across eras, genders, and identities. It is a meeting of two free spirits, Blazy and Gabrielle Chanel, who reflect each other in a shared vision of fashion as a revolutionary act of love, yet also one of perfection and rigor. Blazy does not merely quote Chanel: he challenges her, calls her into question in a conversation structured in three acts—Un Paradoxe, Le Jour, and finally L’Universel. Chanel responds, folding into the creases of a masculine trouser or along the lines of a deconstructed jacket, carrying the boldness of a feminine legacy impossible to codify. The collection opens with an extremely minimalist but perfect gesture: a shirt and trousers borrowed from the male wardrobe, just as Mademoiselle did at the very beginning, at the dawn of her style, even before her name became synonymous with modernity and revolution. However, now it is no longer simply a matter of stealing to belong to something: the choice of these pieces as the opening and symbol of this collection is a priority decision for Blazy. It is not nostalgia, it is transformation. The classicism of a Charvet cut becomes a proud statement, one that demands recognition at all costs.
“Chanel is about love. The birth of Modernity in fashion comes from a love story. This is what I find most beautiful. It has no time or space; this is an idea of freedom. The freedom worn and won by Gabrielle Chanel.”
At the heart of the collection lingers a paradox that is quintessentially Chanel: femininity constructed from the masculine, seduction born of practicality. We recognize one of Chanel’s many enduring symbols, the tailleur that unravels with grace, tweeds that become supple, hems that seem to bear the marks of lives fully lived. It’s an untamed femininity, one that doesn’t dress to please but to exist. Work and love—“no other time”, as Coco once said, are no longer separate moments: they coexist in fluid garments that drape the body without constraining it. The daywear section of the collection is anything but ordinary; it forms the second act of the show, la journée according to Blazy. Chanel may be one of the fashion houses most densely woven with symbols and icons, immediately recognizable in the collective imagination. Blazy knows this well, and he calls them all to the stage, incorporating them into the collection and infusing them with new life. Among them we find the before mentioned tailleur, the classic beige Sling shoes with the black toe, and above all, the 2.55 bag, now reimagined in a crumpled, lived-in version, with tweeds that seem to remember their past but are no longer bound by it. Blazy envisions this narrative, or rather, this conversation, as a continuous dance between memory and invention. Watching these symbols parade before our eyes, at once honored and renewed, we feel part of a shared story, an inheritance deeply intimate.
The third part of the collection, L’Universel, leads us into an elsewhere with no fixed coordinates. Blazy reclaims the universality of Chanel’s fashion language, freeing it from any Parisian nostalgia and removing all boundaries. It’s as if he wants to offer young Gabrielle what she always longed for: not a tribute to the past, but a vision projected forward. His priority is not to please the public, but to honor the mother of the Maison. The codes expand, cross-pollinate, and transform. Materials engage in dialogue: handwoven tweeds coexist with sheer fabrics, baroque jewelry merges with pop accents, and two-tone pointed shoes become tools for movement. Everything in the collection moves toward the future, without ever severing its connection to the past.
“There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is a time for work. And a time for love. That leaves
no other time.”
In this first chapter signed by Blazy, Chanel is not simply inherited, it is questioned and rewritten. It’s a passing of the torch that doesn’t celebrate an icon, but reignites it and makes us dream. Because the strength of a Maison lies not only in its ability to preserve its symbols, but in the courage to put them back into circulation, to make them alive, dynamic, imperfect. Blazy does this with respect, but without fear. And so, Chanel becomes once again what it has always been: an open, revolutionary, profoundly human language.
