CHANEL: BLAZY’S FLIGHT BENEATH THE GLASS ROOF

I stepped beneath the glass roof of the Grand Palais as one enters a memory that is not yet one’s own. Everything was colour, everything was momentum: shades answering one another like echoes at the edge of a cliff, silhouettes coming and going, some severe, others playful, and upon each one the hand of a man, Mathieu Blazy, who had sought to embrace Chanel in its entirety, its legend and its future, with 83 looks spanning a remarkable range of styles.

How difficult it is to speak of abundance! Several looks seized my attention, but the field of possibilities was so vast that I could not single out one without doing the others an injustice: the collection as a whole was successful, and when success is complete, it leaves little room for individual praise. Is it any wonder that the house has seen its turnover grow by sixteen per cent, and by more than double digits? I wager that this collection will allow it to hold its position next year.

Tweed remained, the house’s old companion, but redrawn and softened, so that the woman might feel at ease in it, no longer imprisoned by the suit but free to live in it as though it were a dress. Nevertheless, a yellow skirt suit, bright as a summer morning on the coast, held my gaze for a long while.

Then I looked up. Seagulls on the ceiling. I confess that a flash of irritation first rose to my lips, and I nearly cursed these shrieking birds. But the gravity of the place called me back to a more measured thought: what message did those wings carry? Jonathan Livingston, perhaps, that seagull who refuses to fly merely for the sake of sustenance, who seeks to master the sky for its own sake, whom his flock banishes and whose exile elevates him, before he returns to teach the outcasts the meaning of freedom. Dare to go beyond the limits imposed upon you, follow your passion, help others find their own path: that was the message.

And I understood that this seagull, like the house that had summoned it beneath its vaulted roof, will always be searching for its way, and that perhaps it is precisely in searching for it, without ever quite reaching it, that it remains alive.

FM