THE WHISPER OF IMPOSSIBILITY: ON BLAZY´S CHANEL AND THE SOUL OF HAUTE COUTURE

 

    original image and video courtesy ©Chanel

A meditation on craft, lightness, and the misunderstood poetry of making 

When Matthieu Blazy sent his first haute couture collection down the runway at Chanel on this grey January morning, beneath the vaulted glass ceiling of the Grand Palais, something curious happened. The room, packed with Nicole Kidman, Dua Lipa, Penélope Cruz, and every significant name that attends such occasions, witnessed garments so ethereal they seemed to float rather than walk. Silk mousseline suits rendered transparent. Featherwork achieved through pleating rather than plumage. Tank tops and jeans reimagined in organza through trompe l'oeil. The collection asked a question the fashion world has been grappling with ever since Worth founded the first true couture house in 1858: what, precisely, constitutes haute couture? 

The answers came swiftly, as they always do in the digital age. Forum members declared the collection mundane, a snoozefest, questioning whether haute couture was even "in the room with us." Critics wondered where the embellishment lived, where the iron-clad corsetry resided, where the heavy-handed drama had gone. In their estimation, Blazy had committed the cardinal sin: he had made couture that whispered rather than shouted. 

Here lies the magnificent misunderstanding. 

THE WORK COAT IN KAKISHIBU CLOTH

 

    image courtesy ©Kaptain Sunshine

Time settles into fabric here, absorbed through fibre and dye until cloth becomes memory. Cotton intertwined with hemp forms an Oxford weave of substance and breath, carrying a tactile density that feels considered and composed. The surface bears the depth of kakishibu dye, drawn from fermented persimmon tannins, imparting a tone that evolves gently with light, movement, and wear, gathering character as seasons pass. 

 

Cut in a relaxed silhouette that embraces the body with ease, the coat moves with serenity and measure. Its oxford cloth, washed repeatedly to enhance softness and volume, holds a colour imbued with organic depth, echoing soil, air, and craftsmanship. Broad patch pockets and reinforced closures lend the piece an intuitive utility, where each detail, from layered external storage to thoughtfully placed internal compartments,  resonates with the quiet rigour of design. 

 

VILLA ZEGNA, WORN BY LIGHT

 

    original images and video courtesy ©Zegna

Dubai offered Alessandro Sartori a landscape demanding a singular form of attention. Inside the Opera House, reimagined as Villa Zegna, the Spring/Summer 2026 collection breathed in measured proximity to the heat, the air, and the desert sand. The setting dictated the rhythm of the cloth, framing a wardrobe calibrated for the honesty of exposure and the grace of movement. 

Sartori’s narrative began with fabric intelligence. There is a profound ethics in the way these materials behave. Linen, poplin, and silk suits appeared as though washed into softened stripes, their surfaces already yielding to the body’s heat. Silk tailoring reached a ghostly lightness, suits weighing a mere three hundred grams, articulating a value system where portability becomes a spiritual asset. The construction remained precise, achieving an ease born of balance and structural harmony. 

Leather entered this sanctuary in a transformed register. Washed and softened until it reached absolute pliancy, it moved as a mirror to the body, a second skin responsive to the smallest gesture. Knit leathers, sanded hemp twills, and rustic hand-spun silks expanded a tactile vocabulary grounded in material behaviour and the truth of the surface. This is the Zegna strength: innovation expressed through stillness. 

NEW STEPS, OLD HABITS

 

    ©tedorè

The body holds its own intelligence, older than thought, wiser than intention. Long before we articulate what we want or need, our muscles have already begun their quiet negotiations with the world. We carry our histories in the way we reach for things, in the angle of our shoulders when we enter a room, in the precise rhythm of our breathing when we face something unfamiliar. This knowing lives beneath language, beneath conscious decision. It is the accumulated wisdom of every gesture we have ever made, every step we have ever taken, stored in sinew and bone and the mysterious architecture of habit. 

Watch anyone move through their morning routine, and you witness this: the body as archive, as living museum of all our previous mornings. The hand finds the light switch in the darkness. The foot knows exactly where the floor begins. We are fluent in the grammar of our own repetition, speaking it without thinking, performing it without rehearsal. 

Transformation, when it comes, arrives wearing the clothes of routine. We wake with new resolve and find ourselves pouring coffee with the same hand, in the same motion, at the same hour. The spoon traces its familiar circle. The cup meets the lips at the practised angle. And yet something has shifted, some interior landscape has rearranged itself while the exterior movements remain unchanged. The gesture contains both the person we were yesterday and the person we are becoming today. They coexist. They blur into one another like ink dropped into water, creating patterns we cannot predict, colours we have never seen before. 

FEMME À LA GUITARE

In Femme à la guitare (1924), Pablo Picasso shapes a woman from tension held in grace. She rises from an ochre field like a thought that has chosen permanence. Her body, monumental and fractured, carries the weight of a decade lived with urgency. This is the era of Olga Khokhlova, wife, dancer, gravitational force, whose presence settles into Picasso’s figures through atmosphere rather than likeness. The woman here breathes that same inward composure, a posture shaped by restraint and endurance. 

 

The painting belongs to a year of deliberate solitude. Paris stirs with manifestos and new creeds, while Picasso occupies a quieter threshold, moving between classical gravity and Cubist memory. Black planes gather around the figure like condensed time. Pale openings appear as moments of release. Line behaves as thought made visible: steady, searching, intimate. 

The guitar crosses her torso with the intimacy of a second spine. For Picasso, this form carried a lifelong resonance, a geometry through which emotion could be held and ordered. Sound becomes structure; rhythm becomes body. The woman plays to remain whole, anchoring herself within the architecture of the image.