Matthieu Blazy Lifts Chanel with Barely There Sandals in Biarritz
Matthieu Blazy’s fifth Chanel show on the Biarritz beachfront put barely there sandals beside pink denim skirt suits, tissue-fine silks and a little black dress. The setting pointed straight back to Gabrielle Chanel’s 1915 couture house in the town, while the collection kept Chanel’s high-spending clients in view.
Biarritz and 1915
Gabrielle Chanel opened a couture house in Biarritz in 1915, and Blazy used that address as more than scenery. Chanel beach towels had already been pressed into service by sales assistants at the boutique to create extra changing-room space for shoppers, a small sign of how hard the resort location was working before the catwalk started.
The show itself leaned on Chanel’s own archive without turning nostalgic. A little black dress opened the sequence, and Blazy said, "She borrowed the black dress from the workers, from the servant, from the shop girls." He added, "She decontextualised it and put it on the aristocracy, imposing her taste on them."
Pink Denim, Newspapers, Kaya
Pink denim skirt suits and tissue-fine silks worn over sporty tank tops gave the collection a retail edge, not just a reference-book one. A newspaper print suit carried headlines about Chanel’s time in Biarritz, and Blazy said, "I like to read the newspaper, like men."
Kaya, who was six months pregnant, wore her suit jacket open over her bump and swung a pair of tiny two-tone shoes from her handbag as a show-day gift from Blazy. Chanel jeans at €3,100 a pair had already signaled demand in the boutique, and the runway choices looked built for the same customer who can absorb that pricing without blinking.
Bruno Pavlovsky and VICs
Bruno Pavlovsky said, "Matthieu’s research is stunning, and it gives him the freedom to twist, to create the Chanel of today and tomorrow." He also said Chanel had "tens of thousands" of VICs, defined as very important clients who spend more than €100,000 a year in-store, and said the house has more VICs than any other brand.
That client base explains the calm in the message around growth. Pavlovsky said Chanel does not want crazy growth and does not need to go fast, which fits a show built to reward the people already shopping the brand rather than chase a bigger, broader audience.
The takeaway from Biarritz is simple: Blazy is using Chanel’s past to sell its present, and the brand’s best customers are the ones being courted most directly. The next move is not about scale; it is about whether this mix of archive, resort dressing and high-price desirability keeps landing with the VICs who already matter most.
