Chanel shows couture out of fairy tales: feathered collars and slit tweed
A vine creeps up a heel, a clutch pretends to be a sleeping bear, and a row of buttons turns from duckling into swan. Matthieu Blazy’s second couture collection.
Chanel creative director Matthieu Blazy took the world of fairy tales as his starting point, and out of it came his second couture collection for the Paris house.
The references were scattered across the show: green vines embroidered on a sheer skirt and jacket, white feathered wings on the back of a dress, a look assembled from appliqués of embroidered swans. In places it read as “Jack and the Beanstalk”, elsewhere simply as the general feeling of a picture book.
“The interior life of books is transposed onto the clothes themselves: a vine may creep up the heel of a shoe, a small minaudière may turn out to be a sleeping bear, and a row of buttons may change from duckling into swan,” Blazy wrote in his show notes.
Catherine Deneuve, Tilda Swinton, Alexa Demie and Pedro Pascal sat in the front row, fanning themselves as models walked through a set of giant flowers, in hats resembling birds’ nests and tweed skirts with dramatic slits.
Blazy, whose work has reignited interest in the house, went on making generous use of embroidered flowers and feathers: dresses with vast feathered collars and hems in red and turquoise. Jackets carried intricate beadwork at the neckline, a device repeated on boat-neck dresses and sheer looks.