PARIS (AP) — Inside the Grand Palais in Paris Tuesday, Chanel’s starry salon was swallowed by a garden gone wrong: giant beanstalks climbing to the ceiling and huge flowers blooming a little too brightly to be safe. Tilda Swinton, Michelle Yeoh and Catherine Deneuve were among the crowd, the kind the Parisian stalwart summons and few others can. The show looked enchanted and faintly poisoned at the same time, which turned out to be the point.This was designer Matthieu Blazy reaching for the storybook. The idea came from a small leather-bound book of fairy tales he found on a shelf in house-founder Gabrielle Chanel’s old apartment.Blazy arrived from Bottega Veneta and is still early at Chanel, the house Karl Lagerfeld ran for 36 years until his death in 2019, and then his longtime deputy Virginie Viard led until 2024. This is only his second couture outing, and already the place feels lighter.“I started to wonder, was Gabrielle Chanel’s life a fairy tale?” Blazy said.
Coco’s fairy storyBlazy had decided her rise from a convent orphanage to the top of fashion was its own Jack and the Beanstalk: a nobody who climbs, dares and comes back down with the gold.So the clothes told tales. The opening look was a sheer Chanel suit, its grid of embroidery shaped like tiny bean shoots. Vines crept up dresses and curled around the heels of shoes. Butterflies and blossoms turned up where you least expected them. Little evening bags took the shape of sleeping bears and fat chickens; heels were sculpted into butterflies and golden eggs. There were sly nods to Goldilocks, Puss in Boots and the Ugly Duckling, though Blazy was too clever to spell any of it out.
