Chanel’s Métiers d’art 2026 show turned a NYC subway platform into a runway for Blazy’s city-inspired couture vision.
On Tuesday, Matthieu Blazy unveiled his first Métiers d’art collection for Chanel on an abandoned New York subway platform. While preserving the Maison’s tradition of showcasing its artisans’ exceptional skills, he devised a distinctly glamorous New York subculture.
Models opened the show by stepping out of a stationary train car and onto the platform, emerging one by one like impeccably dressed New Yorkers on the go. The scene set up the commute as the show’s central metaphor.
Chanel’s “sub(way)-culture” reframed the commute as a unique style language, where the people usually overlooked become sources of inspiration when you really look.
The subway served as a symbol of universality – the city’s great equalizer.
“The New York subway belongs to all. Everyone uses it: there are students and game changers; statesmen and teenagers,” said Blazy on the subway as inspiration. “It is a place full of enigmatic yet wonderful encounters, a clash of pop archetypes, where everyone has somewhere to go and each is unique in what they wear. Like in the movies, they are the heroes of their own stories.”
Blazy positioned the subway platform like a film set, echoing Coco Chanel’s early work creating costumes for Hollywood. Getting dressed and commuting were cast as acts of performance, with each person becoming a character in the city’s story.
New York has long been a reset button for Chanel. During Gabrielle Chanel’s 1931 trips to the city, she found renewed confidence in seeing her designs adopted in unexpected ways. Blazy’s return to New York tapped into that history, viewing the city as a place where Chanel reinvents itself through the people who wear it.
Blazy’s embrace of character and humor signaled a fresh direction for Chanel. His storytelling merged fantasy with couture, conceiving a cast drawn from New York’s imagination and its daily reality.
Eclectic matriarchs and feather-dusted showgirls appeared alongside women in sharp workwear, downtown figures in denim, and surreal animal-inspired touches that referenced the city’s longstanding ‘urban jungle’ identity.
Each look presented a version of a woman, whether she is headed to work, to a date, on an errand, to somewhere or nowhere important. Their confidence and individuality created a cohesive living mosaic of everyday archetypes.
The collection moved fluidly from 1920s Art Deco opulence to 2020s streetwise utilitarianism. Ateliers of le 19M transformed classical silhouettes with playfulness, treating denim like lingerie, embellishing a men’s shirt with a Chanel chain, turning flannel into tweed, and reimagining tweed into animal print.
When tiny closets are full, and we mostly appear from the shoulders up on Zoom calls, fashion risks feel unnecessary. Blazy’s focus on joy reads almost radical. His work suggests that the act of getting dressed can still carry meaning, even in a digital era.
Blazy tapped into the subtle truth that New Yorkers dress for themselves, but also for the world we commute through.
The Métiers d’art 2026 show celebrated craft alongside the strange spectacle of getting dressed in New York. In doing so, it made the subway feel like a shared runway.
By Ally Reavis.
All images courtesy of Chanel.
