Chanel SS27 turns Gabrielle Chanel's layered life into Blazy's freest show

Matthieu Blazy showed Chanel's Spring/Summer 2027 collection at the Grand Palais on 5 October, one year into his tenure and titled La Conversation, Part Three: Different Faces of the Same Coin. The show opened and ended with the house founder's own 2.55 quilted handbag.

Model Dyanira Hurbuscher carried that archival 2.55 bag, retrieved from Chanel's Patrimoine archives, to open and close the show. Around her, Blazy drew on Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel's own style over a lifetime, from pioneering jersey to the richer glamour of her later years.

The runway itself was lined with an enormous flock of glowing, lantern-like birds in migration, suspended over a floor painted to reflect them like a shimmering riverbed. Blazy's settled metaphor was the bird taking flight. 'Each step she took led to her being free, like a bird,' he said.

A house in the middle of a renaissance

Chanel remains luxury's most disciplined holdout, still refusing to sell its clothes and bags online while leading the industry in social reach. That restraint has not slowed the renaissance under Blazy: Bloomberg reports a 16 per cent rise in sales in the first half of 2026.

Blazy is Belgian, and his vision for Chanel has always concerned transformation, in the house and in the wearer. Last season he described a collection through the caterpillar becoming a butterfly, closing with a rainbow parade in glimmering tweed and chainmail, hair pastel or metallic.

'Chanel is function, Chanel is fiction. Chanel is sensible, Chanel is seductive. Chanel is day, Chanel is night,' he said then, promising 'a canvas for women to be unapologetically who they are.' This season extends that canvas to a single woman's whole biography.

Among guests, Blazy's earlier Chanel work was everywhere, most of all the red, white and blue tweed jacket from his New York Métiers d'art 2026 show, perhaps the most-worn garment of the evening. One year in, his pieces are already returning to the room.

What the collection contains

The collection's course is a life in construction: opening looks showed jersey underwear beneath, then deconstructed Edwardian corsets, a nod to the ones Gabrielle Chanel once wore and abandoned, then the tweed tailoring that made her name. Jackets appeared stripped to expose boning, or left raw at the edges.

Blazy called those stripped garments 'the ghostly remnants of fashion lives past.' He deconstructed masculine formal wear into raw-edged gilets, tailored trousers and pencil-skirt suits, while 1930s-style evening gowns came bias-cut, sequined or beaded with the weightless ease of a T-shirt.

The collection notes put the idea plainly: 'the young Gabrielle becomes the various Chanel women she will be.' Historical detail survives as shadow boning, peplum flourishes, ruffled collars and curved bodices, though Blazy insists 'this is not a historical collection; it's a collection about Gabrielle Chanel's layered stories.'

Technically, the final chapter is the debut of smocked tweed, engineered as a stretch performance garment that adapts to the body like a second skin while keeping the look of traditional suiting. Lightweight flou layered silk transparencies to mimic clouds shifting from morning to nightfall.

Accessories run through the decades: new watch-chain flap bags, cloud-printed leather goods and a birdcage minaudiere join the archival 2.55. We have long covered that bag, from our list of the best Chanel bags of all time to our guide to Classic Flap alternatives.

Words and music behind the show

'Throughout their lives, women become multiple selves, different faces of the same coin. It's like a game of exquisite corpse, where one identity leads to another,' Blazy said. 'This collection is about the women within a woman.' He described the clothes as 'a layered history of selves within a layered history of the clothing she wore.'

Nicole Kidman read passages from Virginia Woolf's Orlando over the show, a tale of metamorphosis across time and place. Then the music turned: Lesley Gore's You Don't Own Me gave way to an energetic remix of Britney Spears's Gimme More.

The transition brought the front row to its feet. Nicole Kidman, Ayo Edebiri, Pedro Pascal, Kristen Wiig, Dua Lipa and Alexa Demie all broke into dance. Avian motifs of swifts and swallows returned through the embroidery, hardware and jewelry to carry the freedom theme.