Show featured pink denim and suit printed with headlines from Gabrielle Chanel’s time at resort
Chanel’s honeymoon period with the new designer Matthieu Blazy is showing no signs of cooling. Blazy’s fifth catwalk show – on the Biarritz beachfront where the young milliner Gabrielle Chanel opened a couture house in 1915 – was an irresistibly seductive love letter to the enduring allure of the double-C logo.
The day before the show, sales assistants at the Biarritz boutique were holding up Chanel beach towels on the shop floor to create extra changing room space for shoppers impatient to buy jeans at €3,100 (£2,690) a pair. Blazy’s jeans are becoming a totem of the new Chanel, which, in aesthetic, although certainly not in price, marries high taste with an inclusive, democratic point of view.
In a casino ballroom with a beachfront view over surfers riding the Bay of Biscay waves on to golden sands, Chanel skirt suits came in pink denim, or in tissue-fine silks worn over sporty tank tops.
There were models in their 50s and 60s, while Kaya, six months’ pregnant, wore her suit jacket open over her bump and swung a pair of tiny two-tone shoes, a show-day gift from Blazy, from her handbag.
