TRACES OF MARGIELA IN BLAZY'S CHANEL SS27

words by DEBORAH DRENOFCI

The SS27 Chanel collection, beyond the beautiful garments presented, was an elegant tribute to the multi-dimensional queen Coco Chanel. Undoubtedly, Matthieu Blazy continues to put his talent to work, unveiling the unknown edges of who the Chanel woman can be, or better said, who the Chanel woman is. This time, however, he made it personal, going beyond Coco Chanel's wardrobe references. Blazy shook hands with his past at Maison Martin Margiela (MMM), weaving some interesting references throughout the collection. After all, what is fashion without history, and what is history if the past is not acknowledged, admired, or even given a playful wink?

Long before Chanel or Bottega Veneta, Blazy, a fresh graduate from La Cambre, was mentored by Raf Simons. By 2011 he had joined the Artisanal team at MMM. At first, his genius was kept behind the curtain. It wasn't until the Fall 2014 Artisanal show that Suzy Menkes revealed his identity.

Throughout this season's Chanel collection, the hem chain was brought to the surface as a decorative element on shirts, skirts and jackets. A signature of the Chanel jacket itself, the hidden hem chain was originally a weighting technique Gabrielle Chanel used to keep the garment hanging straight and flat. The fact that Blazy took Chanel's own hidden code and made it visible, using it as ornament, relates to MMM through Martin Margiela's fascination with presenting the draft as the craft, namely leaving the seams exposed to capture the process. The same idea showed in the boning left exposed along the backs of the jackets, a bit of deconstruction added to the Chanel poise.

images courtesy of CHANEL and MAISON MARGIELA

Place Chanel's Look 15 — with its voluminous tulle and long-sleeve corset bodice — next to Look 02 from Margiela's Fall 1997 show, and Blazy's wink is hard to miss. The Chanel-branded hook-and-eye closures reference Margiela's functional elements turned decorative. But there's more. Martin Margiela was known to dislike logos, so Blazy branding the very hardware reads like an affectionate joke between the two houses.

Let's stay with the Fall 1997 collection a little longer and shift the focus to the opening look, a coat made of paper. The same motif appears in Chanel's Look 65, a paper-like trench with dark brown and white cuts, where something as fragile and humble as paper is treated with the seriousness of couture.

It's safe to say Blazy has a soft spot for buttons. In this SS27 collection, buttons were decorative elements full of attitude. The Fall 2014 Artisanal show, on the other hand, featured Look 12, a sleeveless jacket covered in buttons and other ornaments. Speculating further, Blazy may also have borrowed the show's bold mixture of colours, echoed in this season's Looks 21 and 22.

Some say originality as a concept is struggling to get by; others believe a true visionary knows how to expand horizons so far that the friction between them becomes the art. But Blazy knows one thing, and in this lies his power — creativity is not so much about originality or authenticity as it is about recycling an idea, a technique or a concept, and admiring it as it takes a new shape. Perhaps to create, and therefore claim authorship, is to fully acknowledge that creative energy is passed on, mastered and woven through many different minds and disciplines.