A deep dive into Matthieu Blazy’s New York Métiers d’Art Chanel show

A narrative about identity, nostalgia, and the city that once reshaped Coco herself.

Image from Chanel.com

Did we really understand the story behind Chanel’s latest Métiers d’Art show?

Everyone posted the runway looks. No one explained why Chanel chose a decommissioned New York subway station as its stage, or what Matthieu Blazy was truly trying to say about Chanel, about New York, and about fashion itself.

Fashion is personal, but it is also a discipline steeped in craft, culture, history, politics. To talk about it seriously requires clarity, not cheerleading. Blazy seems acutely aware of this. His Métiers d’Art presentation wasn’t mere spectacle, it was a thesis about identity, urban life, and the evolving meaning of Chanel itself.

This was Blazy telling us who he is. And who Chanel becomes under his direction.

To grasp Matthieu Blazy’s intent, you have to understand Chanel’s long, standing relationship with New York, a city that impacted Coco herself and ultimately reshaped her vision of modern dressing. NYC became a key part of her enduring legacy, blending glamour with practicality. 

Chanel’s connection to New York

Chanel’s connection to New York is often romanticized - When Coco Chanel arrived in New York in the 1930s, one might say she was unprepared for the pace of the city and its unruly rhythm. New York didn’t breathe; it rushed. And that rush shaped her and the way she designed.

Here, she understood what modern women were asking for: clothes built not for decoration or conformity but for movement, independence, and survival in a city that demanded stamina. Her silhouettes sharpened, simplified, and quickened. That velocity never left the DNA of the house.

So when Chanel comes back to New York, it is never random. It is a return to the city that gave Chanel its rhythm - Paris gave Chanel its poetry. New York gave it its pulse.

Blazy’s Chanel: Echoes of a City

This season, Matthieu Blazy transformed the disused Bowery station, one of New York’s oldest abandoned platforms, into a couture stage. Not a backdrop. A concept. A cultural crossroads where the city’s history, its chaos, and its everyday lives collide.

“I think it's the one city where every part of society has to use the subway,” Blazy said backstage. “I wanted a happy chaos, what you see every morning, everyone’s invited.”

And that is exactly what the collection felt like: a couture anthology of New York archetypes. You could spot the downtown creative, the hurried editor, the polished businesswoman, the effortless It-girl, all dressed in layered, purposeful silhouettes - clothes that moved like rush-hour bodies, weaving, dodging, asserting themselves.

Chanel fit into this gritty, electric environment with surprising naturalness. It was the house’s richness and artistry, filtered through New York’s fast paced environment.

A Living Archive Disguised as a Commute

The collection pulsed with cultural memory: Diana Vreeland’s crimson sash, superhero iconography, gangster pinstripes, the nanny’s exuberant animal prints, even the sly humor of The Flintstones and Marsupilami yellows. These references were sincerity and irony. and fragments of our shared pop imagination, reframed through the precision of Chanel’s ateliers.

As the collection unfolded, the pop-cultural collage transitioned into old Hollywood glamour filtered through New York grit. Silhouettes took on the flicker of vintage cinema frames, illuminated by meticulous, luminous embroidery. Gloria Swanson appeared, literally, on a jacket referencing Tonight or Never, the 1931 film for which Coco Chanel designed the wardrobe, turning the runway into a dialogue between fashion history and contemporary imagination.

The Return of Leopard - A Chanel Code, Forgotten Then Revived. Leopard resurfaced throughout the collection- not as trend, but as legacy. Coco Chanel wore it. Manhattan socialites revered it. Jackie Kennedy, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, Barbra Streisand in 1966, it’s a lineage of women who understood the print’s urban authority. Blazy revived it with intention, treating it not as novelty but as evidence of Chanel’s own archives reawakened.

What emerged was not a series of references, but a living archive. Fashion meeting cinema meeting city mythology, all disguised as an ordinary subway ride.

A New Blueprint for Modern Dressing

Each model embodied a different New York character. The show felt like watching a movie, observing everyday life from the outside: people waiting, reading newspapers, adjusting coats, losing themselves in thought. The public transit runway we all walk every day.

The clothes? Fun. Playful. Textural. Patterned. A breath of fresh air for Chanel, something Chanel has not confidently embraced since the passing of Karl Lagerfeld. There was movement, color blocking, eccentric texture play. Even tweed, Chanel’s stiffest historical fabric, rippled with feathery ease.

The Chanel woman under Blazy is expressive, cinematic, culturally literate - someone who treats the city as her runway, who mixes codes, who moves through the world with intelligence and humor. A woman many of us suddenly want to be. This kind of designing, rooted in authenticity and imagination, gives hope for fashion’s future. He honors Coco’s foundations while staying true to his own creative handwriting.

Image from Chanel.com

The Final Picture

In the end, Blazy’s Métiers d’Art collection wasn’t simply about New York. It was about its noise, its memories, its mythology all reinterpreted through the hands of Chanel’s artisans. A city in motion. A house in transition. A designer finding his chapter in a century-old story.

Watching the show felt like watching an iconic fashion movie, like - a Sex and the City subway montage reimagined through couture. Everyday life elevated. Ordinary characters made mythic, a 70s cinema, and contemporary street documentary. Chanel stitched into the choreography of ordinary life. Blazy didn’t just recreate New York.He restored Chanel’s pulse, right where Coco first found it.