In his sophomore Haute Couture collection for the House, Matthieu Blazy, as Artistic Director of Fashion Activities, embraces narrative and the stories of the women who wear Chanel. At once a fairy tale and an adventure of the everyday, suspended between fiction and function, it is a collection of tales that explores the symbiosis between making and wearing clothes.
From Jack and the Beanstalk to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, via the rigour of cut and construction on the body, old and new ways of thinking, seeing, and making are embraced. Yet all remains firmly rooted in Chanel and the supreme skills of the Haute Couture tailleur, flou and galon [braid] ateliers, and the artisans of fabric-making, embroidery, pleating, hat-making, goldsmithing, and shoemaking at le19M.
Once more, delineated and defined, a Chanel suit is constructed from guipure that echoes the idea of magic beans, interspersed with transparencies of light silk mousseline. It opens the show. The model clasps a copy of Les Fées, contes des contes [Fairies, Tales of Tales], directly from the shelf of Gabrielle Chanel’s apartment library. The inner life of storybooks is transferred to the clothes themselves; a vine might creep up the heel of a shoe, a small minaudière might appear as a sleeping bear, and a series of buttons might transform from duckling to swan. But it is the garments’ inner world that contains their full expression: a painted-silk lining for private pleasure, or, at times, an interior monologue for the wearer. The radical intimacy of Haute Couture between maker and wearer, between the garment and the body, and the mind.
Stitched into interiors, slid into pockets and suspended from the famous weighting chain, memo notes, charms and bric-a-brac accumulate, artefacts of the everyday for the wearer to choose. The thieving magpie becomes talismanic in this process, as the accumulation cascades from the inner to the outer world. Altering necklines, hemlines, fabrics and accessories, a cumulative crescendo is reached through weaving, embroidery, layering and appliqué. An elevation of everyday objects alongside noble materials, and the adaptation of make-do-and-mend to the very heights of Haute Couture.
Inside the Chanel show salon, overgrown by poisoned vines and toxic flowers, histories entwine. With a focus on the tailleur’s supreme cutting skills and their flow in the flou, Gabrielle Chanel’s unique physicality and construction on the body are evoked and echoed in the slashing of clothes, bisecting them to free the form, not just for the salon but for motion and action; these are clothes to live in rather than merely be in. Here, the purposely imperfect is embraced once more, and another chapter in the story of Chanel Haute Couture is written.
“Haute Couture at Chanel is not just a fairy tale; in essence it is for women, their realities and their adventures of the everyday.”
Matthieu Blazy
