CHANEL – BLAZY BRINGS THE MAISON TO THE WORLD’S MOST LIVELY METRO

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Chanel never chooses a location by chance, and Matthieu Blazy demonstrates this with almost provocative ease: for the 2026 Métiers d’art collection, he takes New York and brings it precisely to where its rawest identity pulsates, to an abandoned subway station, one of those non-places that harbor more stories than any runway could ever contain. The city isn’t a backdrop: it enters the clothes, the silhouettes, the rhythm of the walk , as if the house had decided to measure itself against the very speed of the contemporary world.

It’s curious to note how Chanel, a brand that by definition reinterprets elegance through subtraction, has always found a kind of natural counterpoint in New York. Gabrielle arrived in 1931, immediately grasping the industrial dimension of the image, and recognizing in her imitators not an affront, but a foretaste of the future: copying as a vehicle of power , not subtraction. Lagerfeld, in 2018, left a seal at the Met that seemed to close a circle. Blazy, on the other hand, closes nothing: he opens a door .

In that station suspended between past and present, the orderly rows of wooden seats hosted Teyana Taylor, Jessie Buckley, A$AP Rocky, Margaret Qualley, Tilda Swinton, and Ayo Edebiri. An almost surreal cast for the setting, as if the subway—the city’s most democratic artery—had suddenly decided to absorb a flash of haute couture without losing its essence.

The collection explores this tension: archive and street, memory and everyday gesture . The iconic sequined “I New York” is an ironic caress to the city and a jab at the nostalgia of Lagerfeld’s 2014 graffiti. Animal prints, including a psychedelic giraffe seemingly lifted from a midnight urban dream, engage with the massive return of reinterpreted leopard-print furs. And then there’s Alex Consani’s androgynous pinstripe suit, which walks like a creature born at the exact point where Chanel meets Manhattan: elegance and insolence , a pair that always works.

Blazy observes people, capturing those gestures we normally overlook: the coat draped over the bag, the sweater tied at the waist, the transparent raincoat that seems an involuntary homage to Lagerfeld’s iconic boots . She doesn’t copy the street: she translates it into the language of Chanel. And the surprising thing is that everything—from feathers to denim, from sequins to outerwear—seems to belong on that track, as if it had always been there, waiting for someone to notice it.

The result is an exercise in modernity that doesn’t ask for permission, because it doesn’t need it. The subway platform doesn’t become a catwalk; it’s the catwalk that decides to engage with a real, living place, where fashion doesn’t act but reacts. Chanel doesn’t evoke New York: it passes through it.

And as the city glides by beneath the neon lights, one truth becomes clear: it’s not Chanel stepping onto the subway. It’s New York that, for a moment, rises to the maison’s level.

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