Who is Matthieu Blazy, the new man at Chanel?

The most coveted show of this year’s Paris Fashion Week: Matthieu Blazy’s debut at Chanel. But who is the 41-year-old designer?

The franko belt is relatively inconspicuous. He is certainly not one of the big prominent names that he stands out for the post. He was selected for the French fashion house Chanel after an extremely successful three -year job at the Italian fashion house Bottega Veneta.

However, the new job is an enormous promotion and a career jump. It changes from a medium -sized Italian label to the second largest luxury clothing brand in the world. This achieves annual turnover of around $ 20 billion.

He is said to have impressed with his profound presentations during the selection process at Chanel. He embodies “a new generation with sincere modesty,” said Bruno Pavlovsky, President of Chanel’s fashion division, about Blazy when announcing his appointment.

In addition to Blazy’s creativity, the compliment of his character underlined another of his perceived qualities: he lacks a huge ego in an industry that is famous for such.

This is seen as a good addition to the discrete family owners of Chanel, Alain and Gerard Wertheimer. They were looking for a loyal personality to take over the creative management in the legendary history of the brand.

“Chanel is a family -run company privately owned,” said Serge Carreira, a fashion expert at the Paris University of Sciences Po, after Blazy’s nomination compared to the AFP. “The brand can follow a long -term approach and give things time.”

Blazy’s biggest challenge will be to bring the brand out of the 40-year era, which was shaped by its legendary designer Karl Lagerfeld.

By last year, Chanel was headed by Virginie Viard, the successor to the late Lagerfeld. This year’s collections were looked after by an internal team.

Most coveted tickets

Blazy received broad recognition for his work at Bottega Veneta. He helped modernize the look of the classic Italian leather goods house and make it more playful and daring. At the same time, he expanded the product range. He supervised the introduction of the first fragrances and the high -quality jewelry. He also updated the classic ‘Intrecciato’ braiding pattern of the brand with successful pockets such as the Kalimero, Andiamo and Sardine. One of his first projects was the design of jeans for seven thousand US dollars. It was made of leather that is printed with a jeans pattern, which looks like the cotton version.

However, Chanel is a different size. This means that “the pressure to underpin this creative edge with portable designs is certainly much higher,” said Williams.

Blazy presented some of his first designs at the beginning of this month at the Venice Film Festival. The British actress Tilda Swinton was seen in a wide -cut white pants and a short -sleeved blouse.

The entire collection will be unveiled on October 6th in Paris, the penultimate day of the Paris Fashion Week.

Friendship with Raf Simons

Blazy is a strong smoker and often simply dressed in jeans and t-shirt. He collects art and is closely friends with the Belgian fashion master Raf Simons. Simons was his mentor and former boss twice.

Blazy grew up in Paris with his father, an art expert, and his mother, a historian. He has a twin sister and a brother.

“Tom Sawyer was the hero of my childhood,” he said last year in an interview with the New York Times. He referred to the free -spiritual title figure from Mark Twain’s novel.

His own youthful rebellion led him to be sent to boarding schools in France and England. After graduating from school, he studied fashion at the La Cambre art college in Brussels. After completing his conclusion, he was hired by Simons. This was the starting signal for a career that quickly let him rise through large European and American labels.

For the first time, he attracted public attention when he designed a collection for the French fashion house Maison Margiela in 2014 as part of an anonymous collective. The renowned British fashion journalist Suzy Menkes was so impressed by his work with rare fabrics that she “came out” in an article in the Vogue. “You can’t keep such a talent secret,” she wrote.

This helped him to continue to rise and led to employment at Celine and Calvin Klein. There he worked again under Simons, this time in New York. His two -year activity in the United States ended abruptly when they were released in 2018. Blazy then stood on the street with a cardboard box with his office things. “It felt like in a film,” he told the New York Times.