Chanel blasts off on new course with Matthieu Blazy debut show

Clutch your pearls. Cover your ears. Talk about a big bang: under a galactic stage set, the designer Matthieu Blazy just blasted the world’s most famous fashion brand through the sound barrier and into the 21st century.

Backstage after his debut, Blazy quoted what Coco Chanel once said when asked why she wore the same tweed jacket day after day. “She said, if I translate into English: ‘I don’t give a fuck. I like them worn.’” This is Blazy’s take on the house Coco founded: Chanel, with no fucks given.

Under a helium solar system, a giant sun blazing and Saturn spinning within its rings, Blazy was thinking big and thinking new. In the front row, Ayo Edebiri and Nicole Kidman both wore Chanel jeans. The 2.55 quilted bags came scrunched and open, “lived and cherished, as if it was your great-grandmother’s bag, and you took it to a party on the Lower East Side or in Paris at Pigalle.” There were suits in clownfish Nemo stripes, exquisite oversize Charvet cotton shirts for evening, and a standing ovation finale as the model Awar Odhiang danced on the runway in a silk T-shirt and rainbow-feathered skirt.

Coco Chanel was born in 1883; Blazy in 1984. This was the bold spirit of a Coco born a century later. On the first day in his new job, Blazy took off the jacket he was wearing, scissored it to the hipbone length of a Chanel jacket, snipped off the collar, changed the button, and threaded a gold chain through the hem – an old Chanel trick, to make a jacket swing right. That was the template for the first two Chanel suits on to his runway, cropped bellhop jackets worn not with pert skirts but with trousers, cut the way Coco liked them, loose enough to ride a horse. “This is the paradox of Chanel. She wore men’s clothes because she wanted to be equal to men. But she also wanted to seduce them,” Blazy told reporters backstage.

The genius of Chanel is that it sells what money cannot buy. Whether it is printed on a £25 bottle of nail polish or stitched into a £200,000 haute couture dress, the Chanel name stands for class, taste and the power of great style. The responsibility for keeping the flame of that name alive now rests with Blazy.

Speaking backstage before the show, Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion, described Blazy’s take as “a certain insolence”. Karl Lagerfeld, with his theatrical show sets and outrageous public pronouncements, had that, as did Coco herself. Chanel’s sales have been resilient in the 16 months without a creative director, said Pavlovsky, “but we have surfed. We need a new spark.” He said that he had told his new hire that “if Chanel looks the same as before, I will be super upset” – but also reminded him that Chanel is a £20bn business. “I said: ‘You have only one responsibility, and that is that I don’t want a decrease.’”

Luckily, Blazy is “a product guy”, as Pavlovsky put it. Coco was the first designer “to make a handbag part of a look”, in Blazy’s words. Perhaps by accident, she laid the groundwork for a luxury industry where clothes are the figurehead, leather goods the engine. Audacious new Chanel bags – Pedro Pascal, in the front row, sported a new unisex version – were part of almost every look. Camellias, a house motif, were supersized and scissored into sea urchin strands. A black-trimmed white suit nodded to the iconic No 5 perfume bottle.

Clues as to the direction of Blazy’s Chanel were drip-fed in the days before the show. There were a few black-and-white teaser images – the back of a woman’s head, with a tousled bob and white-feathered earrings; a Chanel-branded white shirt in a garment cover, a masculine outfit of striped shirt, trousers and polished brogues laid over an armchair – shot by David Bailey, a choice that hinted at the grand sweep of fashion history. The invitation to the show was a necklace: a silver pendant of a tiny house, rendered in storybook simplicity. The Kremlinologists of Paris fashion week parsed these clues, only to be blindsided by the boldness of Blazy’s approach. This was a more surprising debut than Jonathan Anderson’s Dior, because while reinvention is in the bones of Dior, Chanel has steered a steadier course. It takes guts to modernise a house where clients will still happily pay for a suit that was invented a century ago.

The actor Ayo Edebiri was guest of honour as a new Chanel ambassador. Putting a black woman at the centre of his vision of Chanel is a marker of Blazy’s forward momentum. Pavlovsky said the new roster of “creative affinities” was “about adding depth and diversity to the panel of women who represent the brand”.

This is Chanel’s big post-Lagerfeld moment. Virginie Viard directed design for five years after his death, but Lagerfeld’s publicity-shy deputy never entirely broke out of the shadow of her former boss. Pavlovsky paid credit to Viard, who did “an extraordinary job of handling the transition” but said Chanel needed “a new creative eye” to bring momentum. Blazy has chosen New York as the location for Chanel’s next show on 2 December.

“Chanel is universal, like Coca Cola,” Blazy said. He has given the bottle a good shake.