Chanel brings back the little black dress with Matthieu Blazy’s haute couture debut
By Lara Owen, PA
Set among pluming pink toadstools, Matthieu Blazy’s first haute couture show for Chanel dove into a woodland fantasy and delivered a fresh reinterpretation of classic house codes that felt both light-hearted and confidently chic.
Based on the runway and this week’s previous haute couture shows, it seems an emerging trend may be millennium pink, alongside sheer tulle, peplum trims and airy, weightless tailoring.
For Blazy, Chanel represents a unique vision of couture that he wanted to explore in his debut collection. “There is something about the Chanel lightness that I really want to explore,” he told Vogue Singapore.
“Couture doesn’t need to be heavy. It doesn’t need to be big. It’s something about the making, how it falls on the body.”
Joining in a roster of highly anticipated artistic debuts this season, his first spring/summer 2026 collection received critical acclaim.
Weightlessness certainly ran through the collection – mint tones, sheer layers, swathes of tulle and pops of yellow gave the clothes that airy quality. Long, flowing lines replaced rigidity, it was clear that this was couture designed to move.
Within that softness, Blazy kept Chanel’s DNA intact. The classic just-below-the-knee length returned again and again – drop waists, flapper-style V-necks and a louche, boyish silhouettes nodded to Gabrielle Chanel’s liberated Twenties vision.
The traditional, perhaps stuffy, fitted tweed jackets were reworked into oversized shackets, while the classic Chanel court shoe was updated into a slingback, making it feel cooler and more contemporary.
At the heart of the show was Blazy’s reimagining of the little black dress. Invented by Gabrielle Chanel, the “LBD” became shorthand for elegance and independence. Blazy’s versions honoured that lineage.
Some were pared-back, with clean boat necklines and straight hems; others were subtly adorned with small jewelled brooches. They felt modern without losing their timelessness – a reminder that Chanel’s most radical idea was, and still is, simplicity.
The closing look distilled Blazy’s vision. The bride, model Bhavitha Mandava, emerged in an oyster-white two-piece: a feathered midi skirt paired with a relaxed jacket, white plumes drifting through her hair.
It echoed the iridescent, feathered accents seen at Jonathan Anderson’s Dior show on Monday, suggesting a wider couture shift towards the airborne lightness and a new kind of femininity that leans into fluid form and freedom, as opposed to rigid, binding structure.
Sitting front row, singer Dua Lipa brought sunshine to Paris in a yellow, black and orange two-piece, while singer Gracie Abrams also opted for summer brights in a yellow tweed jacket.
Rapper A$AP Rocky, whose long-term partner Rihanna attended the Dior haute couture show on Monday, kept it pared back in a brown leather trench and salmon shirt.
On the other hand, channelling Blazy’s vision of the LBD was actress Nicole Kidman, who sat front row next to former Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, wearing a black silk dress with pluming monochromatic feathers from the maison’s pre-fall 2026 collection.
Actress Penelope Cruz also opted for all-black in a crochet two-piece, also from Chanel’s pre-fall collection.
By preserving Chanel’s codes while softening their edges, Blazy’s debut haute couture show demonstrated that couture can honour heritage while speaking vividly to the future of fashion.
