At the Grand Palais, Chanel staged its Fall/Winter 2026 show beneath a forest of brightly coloured cranes. The runway floor shimmered with holographic reflections, the machinery hovering above like something mid-assembly. The message was difficult to miss: the house is being rebuilt.
The first sound in the room was the voice of Cesária Évora. Her morna carried across the space as the show began, the melancholy of the Cape Verdean singer cutting through the spectacle with something slower and more intimate. Chanel openings tend to lean cinematic or orchestral; this was different. Évora’s music, steeped in longing and nostalgia, set a mood of quiet gravity before the clothes even appeared.
Matthieu Blazy is still early in his tenure at Chanel. Fall/Winter 2026 marked his second ready-to-wear outing for the house, and the show’s staging made the situation explicit. Chanel, in this moment, is under construction. Not dismantled, not revolutionised overnight, but rebuilt piece by piece.
The starting point came from Gabrielle Chanel herself. Blazy cited one of her lines as a guiding principle: “We need dresses that crawl and dresses that fly.” It’s a phrase that captures Chanel’s long tension between restraint and fantasy, practicality and glamour. The collection unfolded somewhere between those poles.
The opening looks were stripped back. Black knits, quiet tweeds, silhouettes that returned to the architecture of the Chanel suit. It felt like the designer was laying foundations, examining the codes that built the house before moving further outward.
Then came the shifts.
Dropped waistlines appeared across the collection, a clear nod to the 1920s flapper silhouette that Coco Chanel helped popularise. The line of the body lengthened and loosened. Tweed jackets sat lower on the hip. Dresses skimmed rather than structured.
At the same time, Blazy pushed the material vocabulary forward. Silicone-woven textiles and metallic mesh introduced a new tactile dimension, while surfaces carried the kind of experimental manipulation that has become part of his signature. Fabrics shimmered, flexed and caught the light in unexpected ways.
The construction metaphor lingered throughout. If the cranes above the runway suggested building work in progress, the clothes themselves felt similarly assembled, heritage components combined with newer technical interventions.
The soundtrack shifted as the show progressed. At one point, Lady Gaga’s Just Dance collided with dialogue from the film Billy Elliot, an unexpected reference that introduced a lighter, almost playful note. The ballet connection carried into the styling: dancer-like hair, a certain athletic ease in the silhouettes, a subtle undercurrent of ballet discipline running through the looks.
By the finale, the show had fully moved into the second half of Chanel’s duality. Sequined gowns appeared, pastel eveningwear catching the light of the holographic floor. Embellishment returned, the clothes loosening into glamour.
But the underlying message remained consistent. This was not a moment of instant transformation. The cranes above the runway suggested patience rather than completion.
Blazy seems less interested in dramatic gestures than in something slower: the gradual reconstruction of a house whose codes are among the most recognisable in fashion. Tweed, flapper silhouettes, experimental textiles, flashes of evening grandeur. The pieces are being assembled.
For now, Chanel is still under construction.
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