Chanel’s new showman, Matthieu Blazy, took his designs on the road Tuesday — or rather, underground, with a buzzy New York runway show staged on an actual subway platform.
The designer, just weeks after his splashy Paris debut for Chanel in October, took over a decommissioned part of Manhattan’s Bowery station for his first Métiers d’Art collection. The annual show, which takes place in a different city each year, celebrates the craftsmanship of the artisans that partner with Chanel.
In this case, it was two shows—one in the afternoon and one in the evening. And befitting the first Chanel shows in New York since 2018, there were VIPs aplenty: A$AP Rocky, Tilda Swinton, Ayo Edebiri, Rose Byrne, Kristen Stewart, Sofia Coppola, Lupita Nyong’o, Jessie Buckley, Margaret Qualley, Bowen Yang, Jon Bon Jovi, and many others.
The location had been a closely held secret. Guests entered via a doorway at 168 Bowery, and at first, it seemed like Chanel had perhaps decorated an event space to resemble a subway station, complete with tiled walls, turnstiles and a newsstand (with its own bespoke newspapers).
But down a flight of stairs was the real platform. Guests settled into bleacher seats resembling subway benches. “Stand clear of the closing doors!” came the announcement on the soundtrack, familiar to New Yorkers. Then a train came rolling in, and out of the cars came the models.
The show was a marked contrast in vibe with the last Métiers d’Art collection in New York in 2018, when the late designer Karl Lagerfeld took over the Egyptian Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for what felt like a mini-Met Gala, with clothes channeling the luxury of Egyptian royalty.
Blazy was inspired not by royalty but by ordinary urban commuters, of different ages and types, coming together in a mashup of styles from different eras, from the 1920s onward.
“The New York subway belongs to all,” the designer said in his show notes. “Everyone uses it. There are students and game-changers, statesmen and teenagers. It is a place full of wonderful encounters, a clash of pop archetypes.”
His models strolled the platform, some checking for arriving trains—feigning annoyance at their lateness—or leaning against a post as they waited. Their numbers increased until, by the end, there was a virtual rush hour of fashion, with the eclectic soundtrack playing the Happy Days theme song as a finale.
Some of these commuters wore classic Chanel suits—perhaps with an “I (Heart) NY” T-shirt—and others, tweed coats, flowing black capes or brightly patterned skirts. All were intended to show off the craftsmanship involved.
“This felt like breaking the system,” said Stewart, speaking after the afternoon show. “I genuinely had an emotional response to the show. I felt like I just saw so many different versions of a person walking. It wasn’t one woman.”
Stewart, like others, had no idea going in what the show’s theme would be, and thought the subway environment felt like “a flurry of fleeting caught moments.”
“Like, ‘Where is she going?’ I wanted to go with them,” Stewart said. “I believed in it. All of this is artifice, but when you do a really good impression of the truth, you find your own. This felt real to me.”
It was real enough that Chanel had printed its own “newspaper”—called La Gazette—to accompany the show, with articles and interviews. An interview with Blazy quoted the designer as saying the collection was inspired partly by the 1931 visit to New York of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel.
And he sang the praises of the subway.
“It’s almost like it’s the vortex of the city,” Blazy said. “It connects everything.”
—Jocelyn Noveck, AP National Writer