There are days when New York virtually crushes you. It’s raining sheets, site visitors is backed up for blocks, the trains are all working late. Then one thing magic occurs and also you fall in love with town yet again. At this time that magic was Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel Metiers d’artwork present.
Expectations have been excessive for Blazy’s second Chanel outing. His first, introduced precisely two months in the past in Paris, was universally embraced because the debut of the yr, no small feat contemplating there have been greater than a dozen others. However Blazy met and surpassed all that anticipation with a group immediately that may safely be summed up as head-spinningly nice.
It was Could 2006 when Karl Lagerfeld staged Chanel’s first vacation spot present on a mezzanine perched above Grand Central Terminal’s Nice Corridor, setting a template that the home would repeat for practically 20 years, together with with the late designer’s remaining Metiers d’artwork present in December 2018 at The Met’s Temple of Dendur. This present performed out within the decommissioned Bowery station of the J and Z strains, which had been spiffed up for the event with audio system that piped in prepare sounds, old-school pay telephones, and three rows of benches customized constructed over one set of tracks. For sure, only a few of the Chanel-clad visitors took the subway to get there.
After, sure, a slightly lengthy wait, the lights dimmed and an precise MTA prepare pulled into the station, an actual wow second. The doorways opened and 80-odd fashions spilled out, crisscrossing the platform in what the designer described as an environment of completely happy chaos. “I used to be within the New York subway as a result of I feel it’s the one and solely metropolis of the world the place each strata of society are utilizing it,” stated Blazy, who spent years right here whereas working for Calvin Klein, “and I feel it’s a spot that has no hierarchy.”
Every mannequin was a New York archetype: The scholar in denims that weren’t actually denims however silk made utilizing a method by Lesage, one of many masterful ateliers in Chanel’s 19M hub, would go zooming by, after which a society doyenne in a billowing black opera cape would come from the opposite path. Blazy described a “journalist from the ’70s” and an “’80s businesswoman who’s going to rule the world.” A would-be Coco wore a fringed flapper costume, and a taxicab yellow animal spot skirt go well with was made in her picture. Elsewhere, there was a nod to Tonight or By no means, the film she costumed, woven into the tweed of a coat, and what may’ve been a callback to Blazy’s personal profession within the type of an outsized flannel that wasn’t a flannel in any respect however bouclé. And have been these retrievers on a shimmering night go well with? “As a result of you may have two equipment in New York,” he stated: “a canine and a espresso cup.”
The gathering’s buzzy vitality got here from its real-life variety and from the richness of the handwork, be it within the type of Lesage’s beads or Lemarié’s feathers. At whiplash velocity, Blazy has changed the acquainted logo-strewn double-C regalia of previous with one thing that—whereas nonetheless recognizable and bien sur fascinating, too—appears and feels much less uniform. Chanel for the individuals? That has a pleasant ring to it, and we will all dream. I don’t assume I used to be the one one to depart with a contact excessive. In the meantime, precisely two months from now, the irrepressible Blazy will launch his subsequent assortment for the home: high fashion.
