Dear Chanel, We’re Tired of Waiting.
Chanel‘s Fall 2025 couture fashion show review
By Mackenzie Richard Zuckerman
Yesterday, Daniel Roseberry used his Schiaparelli show notes to pit Coco Chanel’s “functional elegance” against Elsa Schiaparelli’s “imaginative fantasy.” The comparison sounded like a challenge, and it echoed through the Grand Palais Salon this morning as Chanel unveiled its latest couture chapter. Sadly, instead of answering Roseberry with a bold retort, the house offered barely a polite nod—beautiful, impeccably made, but largely risk-averse. Chanel’s culture, once defined by audacity, now feels like it’s holding its breath until Matthieu Blazy arrives.
Legacy isn’t a life-raft; it’s ballast if no one steers the ship.
THE COLLECTION
THE VIBE
Chanel broke the 55-look threshold last season; this time we got just 48. Fewer looks, but not sharper ideas. Of those 48, a full third (looks 6, 8 – 11, 13 – 15, 17, 19 – 22, 26 – 27, 29, 42) revolved around the house’s classic tweed jacket—minutely tweaked, lovingly hand-finished, yet visually indistinguishable from iterations we’ve catalogued for years. The cumulative effect was déjà vu in high definition.
Look 46 supplied the clearest counter-argument: a sheer organza duster left half-buttoned so a diagonal line of crystal studs framed a bare torso, its floor-skimming skirt frosted with camellia-rosette appliqué—fragile, yes, but quietly subversive. Looks 24 and 25 chased a fresher energy: the first teamed a blossom-encrusted black tank with a swooping ivory satin wrap-skirt and stompy boots; the second stacked a jewel-box, garnet-sequin bolero over a wine-red draped dress for baroque-meets-rock swagger. Look 36 proved Chanel can still weaponise tweed: a long, belted coat-dress shot through with snowy flecks and topped by a plush shearling collar—a monochrome study as crisp as an Alpine dawn. These sparks show the atelier can evolve the code when it tries.
Chanel proved it can still whisper innovation—then promptly turned up the volume on repetition.
The show’s mise-en-scène hinted at narrative depth. Sofia Coppola, now a semi-official “friend of the house,” produced a limited photo book and sat front-row, but her cinematic eye barely registered on the runway. Chanel keeps hiring her taste yet under-utilising her intellect—the very quality Coco prized in her own circle of modernists.
THE DIRECTION
THE WRAP UP
Craft alone cannot carry a couture house that once rewrote fashion’s grammar.
Chanel’s privilege is enormous: staggering resources, generational goodwill, and codes every design student can sketch from memory. But privilege without provocation breeds ubiquity.
Today’s collection tells us only that Chanel can still make exquisite clothes. We already knew that.
Until Blazy’s debut, the house risks drifting—commercially safe, culturally quiet. Luxury may buy time, but it cannot buy relevance. Relevance demands opinion, friction, a willingness to offend before it bores. Chanel invented that playbook; now it needs to read its own history more dangerously.
Craft is Chanel’s birthright; risk must be its rebirth.
