There was plenty to look at inside the Grand Palais on Monday night. Matthieu Blazy’s SS27 Chanel show unfolded beneath a flock of illuminated swifts and swallows, suspended above a runway that looked almost like the earth seen from space. Nicole Kidman, Dua Lipa, Pedro Pascal, Ayo Edebiri and Alexa Demie were in the room, while a soundtrack that began with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando eventually landed on Britney Spears’s “Gimme More.” Blazy called the collection La Conversation – Part Three – Different Faces of the Same Coin, an exploration of the many Gabrielles who eventually became Chanel.
The clothes followed that biography loosely. Edwardian corsetry left its trace in boning and curved bodices, menswear became raw-edged tailoring and pencil skirts, and ’30s evening dresses appeared in sequins and beads. Tweed was pulled apart, interrupted with transparency and eventually smocked so it could stretch and move. Dyanira Hurbuscher opened in a sheer white slip carrying Gabrielle Chanel’s own 1955 2.55 bag, while Anok Yai later appeared in a constellation-print dress as the collection travelled from day into night.
And then there was Rachel Ojuromi.
The 22-year-old from Lagos walked in a pale yellow open-weave skirt, a checked tweed jacket cinched with a narrow brown belt and metallic sandals, another piece of tweed hanging casually from her hand. A few months ago, Chanel existed in Rachel’s world very differently. She and her best friend Debby Fasingha had recreated Blazy’s Métiers d’Art looks with pieces from their wardrobes and Lagos markets, shooting them around the city. Blazy found the post and commented “Everything.” By October, Rachel was wearing his Chanel in Paris.
That trajectory says something rather useful about Chanel right now. Luxury spends an extraordinary amount of money constructing desire, yet desire becomes much easier to understand once it has a face. Rachel’s casting travelled because people had already met Rachel. They knew the Lagos streets, the thrifted clothes, the humour of her videos and the friendship behind them. Chanel stepped into a story that already had an audience rather than manufacturing one from scratch.
Blazy has done something similar with Bhavitha Mandava.In December 2025, she became the first Indian model to open a Chanel show, walking the Métiers d’Art collection in a disused Bowery subway station wearing a quarter-zip and jeans. The setting echoed where her modelling story had begun. Chanel later turned that same everyday uniform into couture for her Met Gala debut, with “denim” rendered in printed silk muslin, and in March named Mandava its first Indian model house ambassador. Her biography has effectively become part of the clothes.
There is history here. Marie-Hélène Arnaud became one of Gabrielle Chanel’s favourite models during the house’s post-war return and helped define the image of its revived tailoring in the late 1950s. In 1983, Inès de la Fressange became the first model to sign an exclusive contract with a fashion house, becoming a model and ambassador for Chanel before fronting Coco fragrance the following year. Karl Lagerfeld later formed similarly defining relationships with Claudia Schiffer, his longtime muse through the 1990s, and Stella Tennant, whose androgynous presence marked a shift in the house’s visual language.
What the Chanel creative director seems to have inherited is the understanding that the quickest route into people’s memory is through people themselves.
In an industry forever trying to create icons, the house seems happiest when it finds a person worth following and gives her room to become one.
