Loose Threads
Well, Us Weekly was right all along — stars really are just like us! Behold, the outlet’s fashion month reportage:
The effect of Lauren Sánchez Bezos’s Vogue cover seems to be that she’s a fashion person now. How else to view her showing up at highly anticipated shows for Chanel and Balenciaga, and roaming Paris wearing a vintage 1995 John Galliano skirt suit, all documented by Vogue? The funny thing about this is she’s newly working with Sydney Sweeney’s stylist Molly Dickson. (Vogue, which has removed bylines from its Lauren Sánchez stories, reported that Resurrection Vintage in L.A. loaned the Galliano look out specially for her.) Sweeney attended Sánchez’s wedding to Jeff Bezos, per Page Six, not because she was their friend, but because she was starring in an Amazon movie.
People are still mad about the Balenciaga ad campaign scandal and therefore Meghan Markle took some heat for showing up to the brand’s spring 2026 show, Pierpaolo Piccioli’s debut. Then again, Meghan seems to take heat for everything she does.
The Miu Miu show was full of aprons. Miuccia Prada told Vogue, “We in fashion always talk about glamour or rich people, but we have to recognize also that life is very difficult... And to me the apron contains the real difficult life of women in history, from factories to the home.” So… Miu Miu is going to sell aprons for thousands of dollars? Alrighty!
Nocturnal Skincare’s serum seems to be at the center of a variety of TikTok trends. There’s “morning shed,” where people load up on beauty products at night to shed them in the morning. And the classic glazed donut.
Shein is opening permanent stores in France through Société des Grands Magasins, reports Reuters. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo was among those who spoke out against this, stating that Paris ought to promote “sustainable local commerce.”
Chanel’s Mid End to a Strange Season
On Monday, Matthieu Blazy debuted his first show for Chanel on a thoroughly Instagrammed stage set with planets, because who doesn’t like space? (Front row guests included, fittingly, Lauren Sánchez Bezos — the face of space!)
Blazy’s collection wasn’t otherworldly in the sense that it seemed alien and impossible to wear or GET. It also wasn’t otherworldly in the sense that it was epically gorgeous or fashion redefining. Behind cell-phone cameras, fashion people I talked to are disappointed. To be fair, it’s near-impossible to live up to that much hype. One of the most salient takes on the spring 2026 shows that I heard was that the season was supposed to be a great reset! With 15 creative director debuts! Maybe everyone should have just stayed where they were?
Chanel certainly won’t concede that point, though. The brand is doing everything it can to build up Blazy. Right after the show ended, it posted on its Instagram account a quote from Coco herself: “I love everything that is above: the sky, the moon, I believe in the stars.” And from Blazy: “I wanted to do something quite universal, like a dream, something outside of time, and I was fascinated by the universe of stars, a theme so dear to the House. We all observe the same sky, and I think it provokes the same emotions in us.”
Sure, sure.
Blazy, 41, finds himself in the enviable position of getting to lead a massively successful luxury brand in the wake of a designer whose runway shows were widely disliked. The pressure was on, but he seemed unlikely to mess it up.
Blazy benefitted first from experience. His collections at Bottega Veneta, where he last worked, were critically acclaimed and widely heralded as the emblem of 2020s chic. But he also benefited from the way his predecessor Virginie Viard is being written out of Chanel’s story, allowing him to ascend to that rare fashion-god status enjoyed by few — and typically male — designers.
This stature is associated with men like Tom Ford, Karl Lagerfeld, maybe Jonathan Anderson — designers who hardly ever did or do anything wrong, or if they do, it’s readily forgiven by the fashion establishment (see: all those offensive things Karl Lagerfeld said; the Met’s Karl Lagerfeld exhibition). Chanel has an obvious incentive to elevate Blazy to a place where criticism can’t chase him out of there the way it did Viard. And the brand is positioning him as the next Coco Chanel herself — or the next Lagerfeld. The Business of Fashion interviewed Blazy before the show, reporting:
Gabrielle Chanel opened her boutique at 31 Rue Cambon in 1918. Since then, there have essentially been two acts in the story of the house. The first act was her own, the second was Karl Lagerfeld’s. Then came what Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion, called “an intermission” under Lagerfeld’s right hand and successor, Virginie Viard. Now, said Pavlovsky, it was time for Act Three with Blazy, a 40-year-old French-Belgian whose career spans stints with Raf Simons, Maison Margiela, Celine and Calvin Klein before four years as creative director of Bottega Veneta, where he was one of Kering’s brightest sparks.
One can only imagine how Viard, who worked at Chanel for 30 years, might feel about this. Lagerfeld once said she wasn’t just his right hand, but “my right arm and left arm.” After he died, she served as creative director from 2019 to 2024. Now, she’s being relegated to “an intermission.”
I never found Viard’s runway shows appealing, but given the concern about a lack of women leading top brands right now, it would behoove Chanel to let her go with more reverence instead of pretending like she never happened. While the online peanut gallery was vocally against her clothes, it never sounded like her tenure was an abject failure, business-wise. Retailers (who actually had to sell Chanel) were quick to sing her praises in Women’s Wear Daily after her departure was announced. And someone who worked at Chanel whom I interviewed for “Retail Confessions” told me they were able to sell her ready-to-wear more easily than Lagerfeld’s.
Chanel is a private company and only releases limited financials, but it revealed that its fashion business under Viard more than doubled in 2023, while the ready-to-wear business grew by 23 percent. In 2024, revenues decreased 4.3 percent, but lots of luxury brands were also struggling. While Viard surely benefitted from the luxury industry’s pandemic-era boom, it’s difficult to argue that that decline should rest entirely on Viard’s shoulders. The Business of Fashion suggested Chanel’s steep price hikes (medium flap bags have nearly doubled in price since 2019) might have impacted their results.
But now we have Blazy, who looked to Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s personal life for his inspiration. The shirts in the collection, made in collaboration with Charvet, were inspired by what the love of Chanel’s life Arthur “Boy” Capel wore. Blazy told The Business of Fashion:
“…[W]hat happened with Boy showed that the whole company of Chanel is based on a love story. I don’t think any of this would have happened if she was not this woman so madly in love with this man. Because she was just doing hats until she met him. After, it became a partnership when he started to pay to build the business up, but the fundamental is based on love.”
Actually, the celebrities like Nicole Kidman who showed up in these shirts and the models who wore them on the runway looked modern and fresh for Chanel. Blazy is only getting started and has plenty of material to work with from Chanel’s story since he didn’t want to obsess over the archive itself (a wise move, when so many viral looks are near-archival replicas). In the future, he ought to explore further how Chanel herself freed women from corsets and gave them more comfortable, functional, modern clothing, versus her relationship with a man.
But I’m left at the end of this strange season thinking that fashion has some soul-searching to do about the women who drive its business. They are kept out of the upper echelon of design houses in favor of men who turn runways into circuses or who call their 30 years of hard work an “intermission.” At Alaïa, we saw women’s arms restrained in body suits; at Glenn Martens’s show for Margiela, mouths forced open disturbingly with metal prongs; at Duran Lantink’s debut for Jean Paul Gaultier, some exceedingly vulgar prints and proportions. Blazy succeeded in that he didn’t make the women on his runway look ridiculous. In fact, many of them looked lovely, some perfectly fine, and others forgettable.
Blazy made one point in The Business of Fashion many would agree with: “I think we are at a stage where fashion needs to re-imagine its own narrative. Luxury is not enough anymore. It’s expensive and it’s rare, so it’s good? That’s not enough.”
What did you think of Blazy’s first Chanel show? Drop your thoughts below!
Update: Due to an editing error that has been corrected, this post incorrectly stated upon publication that Pierpaolo Piccioli debuted at Alaïa.
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