10 standout looks from Chanel’s Métiers d’Art show in the New York subway

Matthieu Blazy said he was fascinated by the New York subway because he believes New York is the only city in the world where all layers of society use the underground. He spent years in the Big Apple working for Calvin Klein, and he shared this with Vogue Runway on the occasion of his long awaited Métiers d’art show for Chanel. After making his debut for the French fashion house in October with the spring/summer 2026 collection, which the media and the public almost unanimously hailed as the debut of the season, Blazy found himself facing the task of meeting enormous expectations. These are often higher for the second show than for the first because the second one proves that the debut was not just a random flash of brilliance or a stroke of luck. The audience witnessed that moment last night when the inactive 168 Bowery subway station on the J and Z lines was transformed into a runway. The sound of trains echoed through the speakers and the unusual runway was complemented by carefully considered scenographic elements such as vintage phone booths.

But last night’s show was special for another reason. Chanel last held a show in New York in 2018 when the late Karl Lagerfeld presented the Métiers d’Art collection at the Metropolitan Museum in front of the Temple of Dendur. For his first Métiers d’Art show, a collection that has celebrated the beauty of craftsmanship behind Chanel’s creations since 2002, Blazy drew an impressive A list crowd into the New York subway. Along with the house’s new ambassadors, including A$AP Rocky and Ayo Edebiri, the audience also included Tilda Swinton, Meg Ryan, Teyana Taylor, Dapper Dan, Kristen Stewart and many others.

Chanel once again delivered a spectacle. After the lights dimmed, a real train pulled into the platform and eighty models stepped out, weaving through the station as if it were an ordinary New York day. Each look embodied a different New York archetype, from a college student in jeans, which were of course not ordinary denim but silk trousers crafted using Lesage techniques in one of Chanel’s ateliers, to a seventies journalist, an eighties businesswoman determined to conquer the world, and a woman reminiscent of Coco Chanel herself, who moved to New York in the early nineteen thirties and often said that it was New York that made her rich and famous.

In addition to the different types of women Blazy imagines encountering in the subway, the show also spanned various eras, which was especially evident in details like the beehive hairstyles of the sixties or the power suit that defined the eighties. Animal prints and flapper style dresses were inspired by Coco Chanel’s wardrobe. Tweed jackets were paired with handwoven leopard patterns, and silk fabrics echoed her admiration for Astrakhan fur. At moments, you could even catch subtle references to the 1931 American comedy Tonight or Never, the film for which Coco designed the costumes.

The Métiers d’art show, which travels the world, celebrates the artistry and mastery of Chanel’s specialized ateliers and craftspeople each year, from the Rue Cambon workshops to the le19M studios, including the leatherworkers, milliners, glove makers, shoemakers and embroiderers. With his second collection for the Parisian house, Blazy proved that he knows how to draw on this wealth. Now that we have seen his remarkable debut was no coincidence, all that remains is to wait two more months for his first haute couture collection for Chanel.

Below are the 10 most striking looks from the collection.