Photo: Courtesy of Chanel
I first came to Biarritz in 2000 and again in 2004, both times to visit Karl Lagerfeld at his home, Villa Elhorria. His driver-slash-butler picked me up at the airport in an armored BMW and, like Batman, sped up the hill to Lagerfeld’s compound. For two days on each visit, we never left. Biarritz, the sea, the Côte Basque did not exist except as a view from the terraces and lawn. I thought it was heaven: alone in a minimalist 1920s house with books, flat-screen TVs (a novelty then), beautiful white bed linens, the butler, the cook, and a wizard of stories.
We talked and talked — about Yves Saint Laurent and his torrid love affair with Jacques de Bascher, Lagerfeld’s own German childhood, and his first years in Paris. I have no memory of us talking about Coco Chanel, even though Biarritz was her town. It’s where she opened her couture house in 1915 and got the perverse ideas that changed fashion and brought her the money to set herself up in Paris. But in 2004, Lagerfeld was on his way to becoming a star in his own right. That autumn, he did his collaboration with H&M.
This week, I’ve been back in Biarritz for Matthieu Blazy’s first cruise collection for Chanel, which was shown on Tuesday at the Casino (in two showings for a total of 850 guests) in a series of all-mirrored rooms overlooking the sea and intended to evoke the radically sleek emptiness of Coco Chanel’s first couture salon and the Art Deco lines of her packaging. The color of the carpeting was that of sand. The spirit of Blazy’s designs followed suit: salon to beach.
From left: Photo: Courtesy of ChanelPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel
From top: Photo: Courtesy of ChanelPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel
The night before, Chanel gave a dinner at Les Halles de Biarritz, a popular food market. Every vendor had set out small plates of its specialties: Iberian ham and sausages, potato galette, sea urchin, oysters, croquettes, fresh fruit, and gâteau Basque, a cake filled with cherries or cream. There was champagne and wine from Bordeaux and a stand for cut flowers: peonies, ranunculus, poppies. “I think I know everyone here,” said Bruno Pavlovsky, the president of fashion at Chanel, referring to the vendors. He also has a home in Biarritz.
Everyone was grazing like contented farm animals. I saw Nicole Kidman chatting near a bin of apples, and Tilda Swinton, in a striped sailor’s sweater and dark full skirt, sharing duck ragù with Jerry Stafford, a creative director and stylist. Duffy, the hairstylist for Chanel and other brands, was there with his wife, Lucy Chadwick, a gallery owner in Biarritz, and their son, Jack. Jack had on a wetsuit because he and his dad were going swimming before dark.
Normally, fashion dinners are a bore: forced company at long tables with an annoying pecking order (and the designer hogging the actors and artists). But in the market — Blazy’s idea — everyone looked happy.
Blazy has made enormous strides since his debut last fall and has more or less left most of Chanel’s competitors in the dust. He is positive-minded about what is chic and at the same time conscious of what works in everyday life. (He likes to say “function and fiction.”) He freely brings back styles he has done before, like the quarter-zip sweater. (“Why not?” he said.) He has broadened his cast to reflect more types of women — ages, lives — in a way that feels wholly easy. In the cruise show, he had a model who was six months pregnant. Well, why not? In a black two-piece bathing suit with the skirt of her lanky tweed suit closed under her belly, she looked lovely.
From left: Photo: Courtesy of ChanelPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel
From top: Photo: Courtesy of ChanelPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel
After four or five years in the aesthetic dumps following Lagerfeld’s death, Chanel is now the most dynamic brand in high fashion. More than that: It’s progressive in its values and assumptions. I realized that in the market. And it’s due to Blazy and his team as much as to executives like Pavlovsky.
Blazy said he wanted to consider the years between 1915 and 1926, when Coco Chanel designed the minimalist “little black dress,” and how Biarritz shaped her thinking since it attracted aristocrats, socialites, and artists, among them Picasso, Man Ray, and Cocteau. She also liked the plain look of workwear — sailor shirts, or marinières, maids’ uniforms, anything in common jersey.
“If you think about it,” Blazy told me, “the little black dress is so minimal, so reduced, it’s a beach dress. It’s not a servant dress.” His answer was essentially a sleeveless T-shirt dress in black silk crêpe with off-white topstitching. The original 1926 drawing showed a huge bow tacked onto the back, which Blazy transferred to a bag with trailing fabric.
Photo: Courtesy of Chanel
“She was always, in the best way, an opportunist,” he said of the house’s founder. “There are camellias all over Paris. It’s mine. Picasso wore the marinière. It’s mine. She wore the shirt herself.” Blazy thinks she took cloque, a pebbly silk once used for evening clothes, from Balenciaga: “He does it as a big dress, but she says, I’m going to do daywear with it. Again, she takes something couture and makes it easy. It’s the paradox. She takes something poor” — jersey, say — “and makes it rich.”
Blazy used white cloque for a coat that echoes a beach robe and put it over a pareo and a top embroidered by Lesage in resort-postcard colors.
Photo: Courtesy of Chanel
As consistent as he is, Blazy keeps building out his ideas, notably in the area of sportswear separates, like loose silk blouses with multiple jabot ties (which lighten up a suit) and knits. The knitwear in this collection is outstanding — in particular, easy dresses with knitted scarf wraps at the hips. One of my favorite looks was a liquid, superlight suit in a dotted burgundy jacquard knit with jagged edging. It was taken from a 1913 style and made new.
Photo: Courtesy of Chanel
And Blazy has dug into logos, to his own surprise. He found dresses from around 1930 in which Chanel had incorporated the CC logo in the construction. Quite graphically — and believably, I think — he has done the same with knits and suits. He told me, “The logo always made me scared to use, but now that I’ve found this, I said to the team, ‘You know what, guys? Full on.’ Not as much as we could do, but if it’s too much, ça va.”
From left: Photo: Courtesy of ChanelPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel
From top: Photo: Courtesy of ChanelPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel
Chanel works because Blazy has brought so many of his own ideas as well as a magisterial sense of play. Why not make a loose-fitting polo shirt that recalls a souvenir postcard? In his debut show, he introduced a dark trouser suit in cotton viscose that has been a best seller. He uses the fabric again in dark navy for trim sailor pants and a jacket. “We had a great response from the clients,” he said. “It doesn’t wrinkle. For me, what I’ve brought to Chanel — it’s this fabric.”
From left: Photo: Courtesy of ChanelPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel
From top: Photo: Courtesy of ChanelPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel
I liked the show so much I returned to the Casino for the second one. “It’s always better the second time,” Blazy said with a laugh backstage. “The girls have been in the clothes longer.”
Chanel is progressive in other ways. The company recently bought Villa de Larralde, the building in Biarritz that once housed Coco Chanel’s ateliers and salons. Once it is renovated, Pavlovsky said, it will likely be used as an educational and workshop space similar to Galerie du 19M in Paris, where Chanel presents exhibits of its satellite ateliers like Lesage and sees a thousand visitors a day.
“For me, this is the second pillar of a luxury brand — to stay connected,” Pavlovsky said. “We have 15,000 people working in our manufacturers. We need to recruit, we need to train, we need to be ready for the next 20 years.” To that end, Chanel conducts annual meetings over three days in Paris public schools to talk about careers in fashion, and one day is open to families.
“The parents want to be reassured that if their kid wants to be a couturier or an embroiderer, they will be able to make a living,” he said.
I asked if his peers at other brands were doing similar outreach, and Pavlovsky shook his head: “They don’t care. But for me, the new luxury is about that.”
