Most people associate CHANEL with its strongest codes: the tweed jacket, pearls, the black dress, camellias, beige and black, restraint, polish. The kind of bourgeois elegance that has been imprinted on us so clearly and oh so beautifully that it almost becomes the whole story. What I love about Matthieu_Blazy is that he is truly broadening what CHANEL means for today. It’s the job, it’s the assignment. It was crystal clear in his debut show and he pushes it even further in his first Metiers d’art collection which was first shown in New York and later restaged in Seoul. Case in point: I instantly fell in love with look 4, a fabulous leopard situation. A rare sighting indeed. It’s not something you immediately associate with the house. Of course animal patterns existed here and there (SS07HC, FW09HC with Karl and MDA 2023 with Virginie) but they never became one of the dominant CHANEL codes. In January, he showed me these two images of Gabrielle Chanel wearing leopard in the mid-1920...