Chanel showed Matthieu Blazy’s Spring-Summer 2027 collection in Paris on the evening of Monday 5 October, with 83 looks. In the house’s words, the successive chapters of Gabrielle Chanel’s life “come together in a journey through time”, around the figure of the bird and a new smocked tweed, and the clothes will be in boutiques from March 2027. According to AFP, the show took place in the nave of the Grand Palais, under a sky of illuminated origami cranes. So far Chanel has published the looks, a short text and a credit for a series of photographs by David Bailey, and little else. But this is Blazy’s third ready-to-wear collection for the house, and it carries forward the idea he introduced at his first haute couture show in January: birds, and freedom.
83 looks and a date in March
Start with the numbers. Chanel’s site lists the looks from 1 to 83, the same count as the lookbook published by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, and gives a single availability date, March 2027. For comparison, the federation’s lookbooks show 77 looks for Blazy’s first ready-to-wear show, Spring-Summer 2026, and 78 for Fall-Winter 2026 in March. The official calendar placed the physical show at 20:00, by invitation, with the film of the show online from 21:00, Paris time. The house text is five sentences long. It begins “Past, present, future” and ends with a line that sums up the season: “Different selves emerge and transform.” The text, the looks and the film are on Chanel’s collection page. No music credit, set designer or prices have been published, and Chanel has named no ambassadors for the show.
Birds, feathers and a stretch tweed
The bird is the thread. Chanel places “a sense of freedom” at the heart of the collection, “embodied not only in the figure of the bird, but in the very construction of the garments and the innovative development of the fabrics, from eased tailoring to smocked tweed”. According to AFP, Blazy described that tweed as “a stretch fabric, a feat that was previously impossible”, and the agency also noted a trompe-l’oeil tweed bearing the Chanel name, cut from fine, lightweight silk. The theme has deep roots in the house. Chanel calls the feather “an emblem of the House since 1932”, and it is one of six motifs, with the lion, the number 5, the comet, the ribbon and the camellia, that the house presents as “inherited from Gabrielle Chanel”. Birds were already the subject of Blazy’s first haute couture collection, shown on 27 January 2026. Its text was brief. “Then come the birds. Of all colours, shapes and horizons. With them, a simple, joyful idea: freedom.” Eight months later, the idea has moved from couture to ready-to-wear, and Blazy summed it up in two sentences.
“This is a collection that tells the story of Gabrielle Chanel’s many lives. Like a bird, she took flight, and each step she took led her towards freedom.” Matthieu Blazy, Artistic Director of Fashion Activities, Chanel, in his statement for the show, as reported by AFP on 6 October 2026.
David Bailey’s feathers and nests
Before the show, Chanel gave a first view of the season in pictures. Its collection pages carry the credit “Photographs by David Bailey”, and AFP describes the series as black-and-white photographs by the British photographer, built around feathers, nests and birds’ feet. The film of the show appeared on Chanel’s official channels under the title Chanel Spring Summer 2027 Show. The set, as AFP reported it, was a sky of illuminated origami cranes reflected in the nave. Some details are still to come. The look pages show images only, with no list of pieces, materials or accessories, and no collection title has been published.
A year of Matthieu Blazy at Chanel
The timeline explains the attention. Chanel appointed Blazy Artistic Director of Fashion Activities, responsible for haute couture, ready-to-wear and accessories, and he joined in 2025; the appointment was announced on 12 December 2024, as AFP reported at the time. His first ready-to-wear show, Spring-Summer 2026, took place on 6 October 2025, and in its annual results Chanel wrote that he “lit up the Grand Palais in Paris with his debut”. In December 2025 he took the Métiers d’art collection to a New York City subway station, and later to Seoul. The first haute couture show followed in January 2026, Fall-Winter 2026 on 9 March and the first Cruise collection in Biarritz, the town where, Chanel recalls, Gabrielle Chanel opened her couture house in 1915; Haute Couture Fall-Winter 2026 came on 7 July. Spring-Summer 2027 is the third ready-to-wear show in that sequence. During the same Paris Fashion Week, Jonathan Anderson showed Dior in the Tuileries, and the full schedule is in our Paris Fashion Week guide.
The Grand Palais, built for 1900
The building is part of the picture. The Grand Palais was built for the Exposition Universelle of 1900 under the direction of Charles Girault and opened to the public in May of that year. Its nave covers 13,500 square metres under a glass roof of 17,500, the largest nave in Europe by the building’s own account, and it rises to 45 metres under the dome. After four years of restoration it reopened in full in June 2025, having hosted the Olympic and Paralympic fencing and taekwondo events in 2024. One of the entrances to the nave is now called the Entrée Gabrielle Chanel. The women’s week of Paris Fashion Week closes on Tuesday 6 October with Louis Vuitton.
The Luxury.it perspective
The word to keep from Chanel’s text is selves. “Different selves emerge and transform” is a short sentence, and it describes what Blazy has done for a year: reading Gabrielle Chanel as a series of lives, from Biarritz to the rue Cambon, and giving each collection one of them. The bird suits that method because it stands for movement, and the house already owned the feather; its own jewellery pages say the Chanel feather “embodies movement and freedom”. For readers the calendar is simple. The collection reaches boutiques in March 2027, and the feather is already in Chanel’s fine jewellery, where it has been a motif since 1932.
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