Just six months after Matthieu Blazy unveiled his debut collection for Chanel, and a week after it landed in stores, excitement over the new designer has reached fever pitch. There have been queues outside shops, grapples at the tills and dozens of social media posts bragging about purchases. Now, Blazy’s Chanel effect is coming for the high street. Prepare for bouclé jackets and quilted chain-link bags galore.
“It is a good sign that it has become immediately a reference point for the high street,” says Mario Ortelli, a managing partner at the luxury advisory firm Ortelli & Co. “When a new product and new creative direction is successful it is copied by the high street. If not, it means it is not relevant or is only relevant for a niche set of consumers.”
Fuelling this latest round of Chanel-mania is Blazy’s first video campaign. Just minutes after launching online earlier this week it had racked up hundreds of thousands of views. Starring Margot Robbie, it riffs on Kylie Minogue’s 2002 music video for Come into My World, which saw the pop star duplicated multiple times as she ran errands on a Parisian street. Acting as a conversation between two different eras, the pairing of Minogue and Robbie has generational reach. Both starred in Neighbours – Minogue as Charlene from 1986 to 1988, Robbie as Donna from 2008 to 2011. Some shoppers will remember Minogue’s original video, some will just know Robbie as Barbie, while others, including gen Z, have got the millennium bug for Y2K fashion.
Chanel enlisted the French film-maker Michel Gondry, who made the original video. This time around, several identical Robbies are seen strolling down a fake Rue Montmartre with a fleeting glimpse of Minogue. As Robbie emerges from a green Fiat 500 and swings around a vintage street lamp, her carbon copies all wear the exact same look – an oatmeal tweed jacket with frayed cuffs, styled unbuttoned over a simple white vest with a pair of stonewash straight-leg jeans.
It is this specific outfit formula that is proving to be consumer catnip. It is a simple look but one that captures how Blazy is managing to give a nod to the original Coco Chanel codes while adding a heavy dollop of his own millennial ease. Forget the duplicated Wuthering Heights star, all anyone cares about is how long the high street is going to take to copy the pieces she wears. Not long, it turns out.
M&S has gone big on bouclé-inspired jackets for spring, complete with Chanel-esque gold buttons, for £55. At Zara, raw-edged jackets and cardigans are topping the bestseller list, while Mango’s £49.99 tweed take should come with a hoodwink warning.
As for the jeans, JW Anderson for Uniqlo’s straight-leg jeans in the “65 blue” colour and H&M’s washed baggy blue pair are a close match.
This is the crux of Chanel’s new allure – its existing availability. Ella Baynes, an insight executive at Savvy Marketing, says the cost of living crisis has shifted the definition of luxury. “In the midst of an affordability crisis, the simplistic look is aspirational but also in the realms of achievability,” she says.
Baynes points to the everydayness of the campaign as being enticing. “It shows that Chanel can be worn in the way you live now. Even if most shoppers can’t afford it, they can attempt to recreate the basics of Robbie’s outfit. And for those who may be swayed to invest in one piece from the campaign, it seems a more accessible jump into luxury if the piece can be worn again with things they already own.”
Julia Hobbs, British Vogue’s contributing senior fashion features editor, describes a Chanel jacket and jeans as “fashion’s version of the perfect pop song”. She compares the look to Anna Wintour’s debut Vogue cover in 1988, where she featured a model in a bejewelled Christian Lacroix top and casual Guess jeans – a mix of high and low fashion and the first time denim appeared on a Vogue cover.
“The irreverent styling in the Margot Robbie campaign sees the jacket sleeves pushed up to the elbow,” says Hobbs. “The denim silhouette is itself ingenious, a non-intimidating anti-fit, which everyone from your mum to your gen-Z colleagues will already own. Nothing about the look is trying too hard.”
Nostalgia also plays a role. With grim news all around, fashion and consumers are taking comfort in the not-so-distant past. Blazy, who is 41, has been throwing it back to the 90s and 00s since the outset with show soundtracks featuring everything from Snap!’s Rhythm is a Dancer to Oasis’s Wonderwall.
“While other luxury brands are reaching for hard-edge sex appeal and internet hype, Blazy’s Chanel is championing joy,” Hobbs says.
Baynes adds that the pop culture reference is a “low barrier to entry”, explaining: “Viewers don’t need to be well versed in fashion to understand the concept of the campaign.”
