Matthieu Blazy presented his first ready-to-wear collection for Chanel at Paris Fashion Week on October 6–7, 2025 — the house's first under a new creative director since the previous design era ended — and followed it with his first Métiers d'Art show, staged in New York on December 2, 2025, per the house's announcements and contemporaneous reviews. Reception of the debut was strongly positive across the trade: Numéro called it 'a glorious debut', The New York Times framed it as a house brought 'back to life', and Harper's Bazaar UK described an 'epic new era'. Six months on, the press verdict is settled; the commercial one, by the industry's own clocks, is not.
Why did this debut carry unusual weight?
Because of the succession's length and scale. Chanel had run without a permanent creative director following the 2019 death of Karl Lagerfeld and the 2024 departure of his successor, operating on in-house design teams while the search proceeded — a period trade coverage described as unprecedented for a house of its revenue scale. Blazy, appointed in December 2024 from Bottega Veneta, where his craft-led collections had won consistent reviews, arrived with the profile of a designer who had already succeeded once at a major house. The October show was therefore read as the answer to a question asked publicly for over a year: what direction would the largest privately held French fashion house take?
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What did the reviews actually agree on?
Direction rather than detail. The consensus across the October coverage held that Blazy kept the house's codes — tweed, the camellia, the chain — while loosening the silhouette and palette toward a lighter register, a reading echoed again at his couture work for the house, which Vogue's coverage described as taking Chanel in a softer, lighter direction. The December Métiers d'Art show extended the argument geographically: the annual craft-focused event, traditionally a travelling ambassador for the house's specialty ateliers, was staged in New York on December 2, 2025 — Blazy's first destination show, and a statement about where the house's growth attention sits.
What remains unproven?
The order book and the timeline. Industry practice grants a new director several seasons before a commercial verdict, and Chanel's private ownership insulates it from quarterly pressure — but the measures watchers cite are concrete: sell-through of the debut collection in directly operated stores, the reception of Blazy's bags as a product category, and whether the lighter direction converts in the house's key Asian markets. A full cycle of collections under the new design — ready-to-wear, couture and Métiers d'Art — will be complete only through 2026, which is why analysts' phrasing in the season's wrap coverage was consistent: a critically successful start, an open commercial file.