{"id":532232,"date":"2026-07-04T04:56:47","date_gmt":"2026-07-04T04:56:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/532232\/"},"modified":"2026-07-04T04:56:47","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T04:56:47","slug":"a-blazy-of-glory-meet-the-millennial-fashion-titan-bringing-chanel-into-a-new-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/532232\/","title":{"rendered":"A Blazy of glory: Meet the millennial fashion titan bringing Chanel into a new era"},"content":{"rendered":"

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When Dua Lipa shared photos from her Italian wedding extravaganza<\/a> last month, there was one question on everyone\u2019s lips. Who dreamed up that glorious wedding dress, decked out in beading and dramatic feathers, which felt like a wonderful rejoinder to years of tastefully minimal celebrity bridal style? The answer was Matthieu Blazy, the French-Belgian fashion designer who joined Chanel as its creative director<\/a> in December 2024. <\/p>\n

Lipa\u2019s gown made history as his very first bridal design for the storied French house<\/a>. It also cemented the 41-year-old\u2019s status as the industry\u2019s man of the moment \u2013 because over the past few months, the fashion world has been gripped by \u201cMatthieu-mania\u201d, ablaze for Blazy, gone Coco for his version of Chanel\u2026 and whatever other puns the style press might come up with. <\/p>\n

And what made it all the more alluring is that Blazy cuts a much more unassuming figure than most of fashion\u2019s pantheon. Typically dressed in a quarter-zip jumper and jeans combo, he maintains a quiet life outside of the fashion circus with his partner, an artist based in Italy whom he prefers not to name publicly. On the night that he signed his Chanel contract, he eschewed a fancy celebration in favour of babysitting for some friends. It\u2019s all worlds away from the pomp and myth-making of his predecessor, \u201cKaiser Karl\u201d.<\/p>\n

Fashion types might well be prone to hyperbole, but when Blazy\u2019s spring-summer 2026 collection arrived on shelves in Chanel\u2019s Paris Rue Cambon flagship branch back in March, stylish people seemed to go absolutely wild. The collection debuted to a warm response at Blazy\u2019s first runway show for the brand <\/a>in October 2025, which followed his hiring to replace outgoing creative director Virginie Viard<\/a> \u2013 previously right-hand woman to Chanel legend Karl Lagerfeld \u2013 the year before.<\/p>\n

It arrived in store to coincide with the city\u2019s fashion week, and so the international circus of editors, models, influencers and buyers was ready to pounce. There were reports of queues lasting hours, of customers grabbing two-toned pumps from the feet of their fellow shoppers \u2013 not very chic behaviour! \u2013 and of rapid sell-outs and lengthy waitlists. The fashion influencer Bryanboy told The New York Times that he had \u201cnever seen women go absolutely feral like that\u201d. <\/p>\n

\"BlazyBlazy taking a bow after his debut Chanel runway show last October (Getty)<\/p>\n

Those pumps, a reimagining of the classic Chanel \u201cbicolores\u201d<\/a>, were among the most lusted-after pieces, along with the mega-tote bags seen on celebrities such as Hailey Bieber, Kendall Jenner and Blackpink singer Jennie, and the embroidered shirts made in collaboration with Parisian brand Charvet. <\/p>\n

The biggest sign that it was a true hit with the most stylish crowd, as the NYT\u2019s veteran fashion critic Vanessa Friedman sagely pointed out, was the fact that they seemed willing to actually buy it, instead of holding out for a gift. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou know a brand has reached official \u2018it\u2019 status when fashion editors, influencers and stylists start spending their own money actually shopping, rather than simply accepting what is offered for free,\u201d she wrote in a piece deconstructing this new \u201cChanelmania\u201d. <\/p>\n

The Blazy effect, then, adds up to a rare success story in a luxury fashion landscape that has proven tricky for even the biggest brands to navigate over the past few years<\/p>\n

So what is it about Blazy\u2019s clothes that has whipped up such a frenzy? Faced with the legacy of a fashion house like Chanel, some designers might feel weighed down by heritage or beholden to tradition, in a way that might cause their creativity to ossify. But Blazy seems to have struck the elusive balance between past and present, reworking signature Chanel styles like the boucl\u00e9 jacket, the two-tone pumps or the quilted bag in colours, shapes and textures that feel fresh and desirable. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear that he\u2019s revelled in going back through the archives to play with shapes like Coco Chanel\u2019<\/a>s signature breezy drop-waist silhouette from the 1920s, but the end result doesn\u2019t feel too much like a history lesson. \u201cTo be modern, you don\u2019t have to be disruptive or crazy,\u201d he told the Financial Times earlier this year. \u201cIt can be a small gesture \u2013 you just have to give a little twist.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"Blazy\u2019sBlazy\u2019s designs play with Chanel\u2019s signature styles in ways that still feel contemporary (Getty)<\/p>\n

And he\u2019s managed to make the \u201cChanel woman\u201d come over as less straitlaced, too. For one of his first ad campaigns, for Chanel\u2019s 25 handbag, he dressed brand ambassador Margot Robbie in a tweed jacket with casually distressed edges, over a simple white vest top and a pair of jeans. <\/p>\n

The fact that said campaign was a nod to Kylie Minogue\u2019s 2002 music video for \u201cCome Into My World\u201d, with a Paris street populated with dozens of boucl\u00e9d-up Margot clones, only helped inject some fun \u2013 and Noughties nostalgia \u2013 into proceedings too. And Blazy isn\u2019t averse to a bit of virality-chasing, either \u2013 just look at the fuss kicked up when he sent models down the runway wearing footless sandals, essentially a pair of heel protectors strapped onto the back of the feet, at his Cruise show in Coco\u2019s old stomping ground of Biarritz.<\/p>\n

Of course, fashion isn\u2019t just about big creative swings \u2013 it\u2019s also about the bottom line. Many a visionary creative director has been hired in a flurry of publicity, only to be disposed of unceremoniously when the disappointing sales figures roll in. But revenue for last year was up by 2 per cent to $19.3bn, and Chanel recently told the Financial Times that sales were growing by \u201ca high single-digit percentage\u201d in 2026 so far, with chief executive Leena Nair hailing Blazy\u2019s \u201cextremely positive reception\u201d. There are plans afoot for the brand to expand its presence in China, a crucial market for luxury goods. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile LVMH, the conglomerate that owns labels such as Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior, reported that its fashion and leather goods division had declined by 2 per cent in the first quarter of this year, while revenue at Gucci dropped by 10 per cent in the final quarter of 2025, its parent company Kering confirmed in February. <\/p>\n

\"Renewed:Renewed: The creative director has reimagined classic Chanel shapes in fresh colours, patterns and textures (Getty)<\/p>\n

The Blazy effect, then, adds up to a rare success story in a luxury fashion landscape that has proven tricky for even the biggest brands to navigate over the past few years. Even super-rich customers seem to have tightened their (Hermes) belts<\/a> against a backdrop of global financial tumult, while the more aspirational shoppers who might invest in, say, a designer bag every few years, have been turned off by so-called \u201cgreedflation\u201d in the industry, with brands bumping up prices in the wake of the pandemic as a way of boosting margins, without offering their shoppers anything new or innovative. <\/p>\n

Before Chanel, Blazy\u2019s CV was already impeccable. He started out working in menswear for Belgian designer Raf Simons, who hired him on the spot after judging the collection Blazy produced while studying at Brussels\u2019 prestigious La Cambre art school. He moved to Maison Margiela and later spent a stint at C\u00e9line under minimalism icon Phoebe Philo. Blazy reunited with Simons when he was hired by Calvin Klein, then headed to Italy to work at Bottega Veneta; here, his signature was exquisite craftsmanship, helping to make the brand\u2019s bags some of the most in-demand in the business once again. <\/p>\n

\"BlazyBlazy was more of a wild card contender for the top job at Chanel (Getty)<\/p>\n

When his Chanel appointment was announced, it came as something of a surprise to industry prognosticators, who had been name-dropping flashier figures like Hedi Slimane, John Galliano or even Marc Jacobs as potential successors to Viard and Lagerfeld. <\/p>\n

But Blazy\u2019s record spoke for itself, and Bruno Pavlovksy, the brand\u2019s president of fashion, has said that he was immediately won over by the way he talked about Coco, and what he could do with her legacy. \u201cWe didn\u2019t choose Matthieu to just \u2018do Chanel\u2019, we chose him so he could push the boundaries of what Chanel is, for the future,\u201d Pavlovksy told Business of Fashion. \u201cHe will bring his modernity, his way of working \u2013 Chanel is ready to let itself be transported.\u201d <\/p>\n

And a new generation of shopper, it seems, is clamouring to be transported into Blazy\u2019s world too. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":532233,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[10863,72,61,60,10864],"class_list":["post-532232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-bestof","tag-business","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-topix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=532232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532232\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/532233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=532232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=532232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=532232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}