In a mirrored salon jutting like a promontory into the Biarritz ocean, Matthieu Blazy presented his first ever cruise collection for Chanel, literally framed by the sea. Cruise is important here, not just because this collection sits in Chanel stores longer than just about anything else (although, currently, those boutiques don’t contain very much at all, difficult as it is to keep Blazy’s clothes in stock). But because cruise connects innately to Chanel’s heritage. It was in Biarritz that Gabrielle Chanel made her first haute couture clothes – she’d opened a hat shop in Paris, and stocked casual, ready-made sportswear clothes in a boutique in Deauville, but 111 years ago her made-to-measure operations began here, along with her first collections. And there’s something of the ideology of this place’s leisurely, thrill-seeking clothes to Chanel generally: Chanel’s observation of swimmers and sailors and holidaymakers translated to pieces inflected with the modern ease of those great vacation hubs rather than the stuffy formality of Paris. The former house of Chanel here, down by the beach, is now a bookstore.
Backstage after the show, Blazy said this was the only place he wanted to show his first cruise show, because it was about going back to Gabrielle’s roots – “to her first step into clothes.” The first look was a little black dress, crissed with topstitching, fittingly a throwback to 1926 and the style Vogue dubbed ‘Chanel’s Ford’. There was also a skirt, a lost design from the 1920s curled with the double-C logo at each hip before breaking into pleats, that Blazy had reproduced from sketches. “We call them blasts from the past,” he said. “They are things that are so, so good, you don’t need to do anything.” They’re also remarkably modern, yet a whole sequence of logo-emblazoned styles, curves forming the intersection emblem of Chanel on the sides of jackets, on cuffs or even across the whole front of a dress bodice, were based on Chanel designs from 1929. “The whole clothes are the logo,” Blazy said of those designs. “It’s amazing.”
This show was amazing too, amazing in its lifting of Chanel iconographies from over a century ago, which, as Blazy said, needed nothing done to them to make them relevant. That tennis skirt, in a lawn green with a sleeveless black-banded white shell top, had an off-the-cuff ease that characterised this entire show. This was a collection with a sense of vacation, ideas seemingly dashed off fast and easy, although they are nothing of the sort. Dresses were composed of layers of flowing carré silk like scarves, knotted and dripping into handkerchief hems – and that aforementioned ‘frame’ of the ocean waves had meaning, with cuddly textiles resembling tufted towels, or the sun-bleached Basque striped canvases used for beach huts, or models wearing knit caps and tricot tunics like Hoyningen-Huene bathers, albeit with slightly less chic rubber waders. A lace dress wriggled like coral over the body, and a sequence of newspaper patterns in trench coats and evening dresses reminded anyone British of Mirror-wrapped fish and chips on deserted seaside promenades. The final sequinned dresses, embroidered by Lesage in blazing azure and a koi orange with frills of fins, were supposed to look like mermaids dredged from the ocean. They even had bedraggled hair, as if they’d just hauled themselves out of the brine to walk on land.
Some people disparage cruise collections as commercial fodder, as somehow lesser than main biannual collections. Blazy had no such qualms: this collection was as rich and multi-layered as anything else he’s created. That’s because it was, of course, another chance to get his message across – and as a collection, it felt like this was about building, expanding and exploring the world Blazy has begun to build. Each season, there are riffs that he returns to – elaborate full skirts worn with sloppy sweaters, suits and dresses of intricate macramé (this time tangled with gilded flotsam), and reiterations of the tweed suit. Blazy’s external chain weighted hems once more, a carryover from his very first collection, and second ever look: but this time, the suits were executed in more carré silk, coats billowing like sea swell. Blasts from the past these were not.
At a remarkable clip, Blazy has nailed his Chanel – not just what it should look like, which is, as evidenced, highly appealing, part of a grand house tradition yet also distinct. But, more complex, how it should feel, physically (eased fits, lower armholes, freer movement) and more interestingly, philosophically. “Joyful” was his word. As usual, Blazy’s right.
