The Caterpillar and the Butterfly: Mythmaking at Chanel

PARIS — Matthieu Blazy is a born world builder. Walk onto the set of his new Chanel show and you see colourful Meccano-via-Mondrian cranes. Work in progress. This was his fourth public outing for the brand and what he is creating grows more alluring by the season. And all of it is an incarnation of his ongoing “conversation” with Gabrielle. It’s uncanny.

He is a man obsessed. Take, for instance, the wall in Chanel’s apartment on Rue Cambon that she had covered in gold-painted gauze. A humble foundation transfigured into something grand. It’s a virtual metaphor for her own life and work. Chanel liked making beautiful things out of “poor” fabrics. So is Blazy. He is fixated on that wall. His never-ending research into everything she ever said or did is continually throwing up similar nuggets of inspiration, like the interview she gave to the French newspaper Le Figaro in 1955. Asked to define her own fashion, she compared it to a caterpillar by day, a butterfly by night. “We need dresses that crawl, dresses that fly, because the butterfly doesn’t go to the market, and the caterpillar doesn’t go to the ball.” Asked for her favourite colour, Chanel answered, “Everyone would expect it to be black, but it’s actually iridescent.” Like a butterfly’s wings. Her musings took Blazy to a higher state. The collection he showed on Monday was the spectacular result.

Chanel Autumn/Winter 2026 (Launchmetrics.com/Spotlight)

“Chanel is function and Chanel is fiction,” he said. The show opened on function, first, simple but sportive ensembles in ribbed knit, and then a “new” suit, an overshirt and skirt, which already looks like the entry point for a new generation of Cocophiles. But Blazy generated energy by mixing up his vision of Chanel, caterpillars and butterflies entwined. You craved slo-mo. There were a couple of simple dropped-waist jersey dresses that he said “crawled,” but they were necklaced with his new Chanel “pearls,” stones polished by Japanese artisans. There was a suit made exquisite by a tulip cloqué, “like red lips, or a kiss,” Blazy marvelled, but then he showed another iteration of his “new” suit in an adaptation of a man’s blouson in pressed tweed, thrown over a grey cashmere cardigan and an untucked shirt. Everything was untucked. No constraints. His idea of sportswear.

The fiction interludes included a trio of beautiful dresses from another time, the 1920s or early 30s. Blazy asked Montex, Lemarié and Lesage to work together on embroidery. There were also fine silk knits whose historical edge was a possible concern for Blazy until he joined a model who was wearing one for a cigarette outside the atelier. The dress lived now. His absorption in Chanel’s world was evident in other looks that echoed an impossible century ago, most notably the polarising man’s belt slung at hip level or lower. Not a flapper, he insisted. The skirt was too short, too close to the hip, too flared. He said it was something Chanel tried: to create a new erogenous zone. But nothing survives of her efforts because she never kept an archive.

Blazy feels Chanel innovated so much that her innovations became so normalised they were almost overlooked. “Innovation doesn’t need to look too new. Me, I’m always trying to push because of that.” He meets her challenge in fabrics like nothing she herself would have come up. Would she recognise her tweeds? Here, Blazy looked at the tweed suit as a canvas, imagined applying Jackson Pollock’s ideas of action painting to it, mixed rubber and silk on cotton gauze (a “poor” fabric, remember?) and removed yarn from the tweed, which he then had printed on the lining so there were now two layers and the tweed was lighter. But those printed threads were still visible, moving under the top layer, so the substance was still palpable. Kinetic. Phew!

Or, Blazy conscripted Odile, the woman he calls his new best friend, at the patrimoine, Chanel’s feted archive, to explore Gabrielle’s experiments in trompe l’oeil during the 1920s and, yes, she printed tweeds on a cotton base. “We did the same, on a silk viscose base.” Printed tweed suits, ever closer to the holy grail of ultimate lightness, with the surreal flourish of a button printed under the real button, and an iridescent lining to make the lightness gleam.

The key to the iridescence came, typically, from Blazy’s research. He found a quote about Chanel No. 5 from a man who said that, if he had to describe it as a painting, it would be a Monet, because it was an impression of flowers rather than any specific bloom. Which circuitously led Blazy to the famous series Monet created in London of the Houses of Parliament, with their pearly, pinkish glow. “That was our unicorn,” he said. “We went full on, always mixing the iridescence with the gauze, the ‘poorness,’” And Monet’s paintings were the direct reference for the floor of the Grand Palais on Monday night.

It was maybe 20 years after Monet made his paintings that Chanel, on a trip to London, bought a little Edwardian purse in metal mesh. A butterfly in Blazy’s mind. He created a small group of exquisite looks in metal mesh, tweed-printed. Chanel at night, the butterfly in moonlight. They were a prelude to a handful of evening looks: a coat in cotton gauze (of course), entirely hand-embroidered by Montex; a hand-crocheted butterfly dress with the ease of a t-shirt; a singularly gorgeous column of black and ivory paillettes, shot with red around the neckline. In a preview, Blazy surveyed this trio laid out on a table and sighed, “I wish I was a Chanel girl.” I understood exactly where the sentiment came from. I know I felt the same way about a tweed jacket lined in a silk scarf printed with a drawing Chanel’s friend Sem made of her as a black swan. It would be an entirely private pleasure. “It doesn’t need to scream,” Blazy said empathetically. “We don’t design for Instagram.”

The last two looks of the show were a black crepe trouser suit and a full-skirted dress, also in black crepe, which featured a deep-scooped back with a black camellia suspended in mid-spine. They were powerfully minimal send-offs to a presentation that was otherwise awash in colour and texture and ideas galore. In that same preview, Blazy was brooding on where he’d been, where he was going. “These first shows, you need to inject the vocabulary, the research, the innovation, and also the exploration of Chanel and what she stands for. I’m looking forward to a time when they’ll be installed as my pillars and I can do something that has nothing to do with all that. Start to explore other fields.” After his latest triumph, that prospect should set pulses racing in the rapidly expanding world of Blazymaniacs.