JUst six months after Matthieu Blazy unveiled his first collection for Chanel, and a week after it hit the stores, the excitement of the new designer has reached fever pitch. There have been lines outside stores, brawls in the streets and dozens of social media posts boasting about the purchase. Now, the Blazy Chanel effect is coming to the high street. Get ready for bouclé jackets and lots of chain-link bags.
“It’s a good sign that it has immediately become a point of reference for the high street,” says Mario Ortelli, managing partner at luxury consultancy firm Ortelli & Co. “When a new product and a new creative direction succeeds, it is copied by the high street.
Fueling this latest cycle of Chanel-mania is Blazy’s first video campaign. Within minutes of launching online earlier this week it had garnered hundreds of thousands of views. Starring Margot Robbie, it pokes fun at Kylie Minogue’s 2002 music video for Come into My World, which saw the pop star copied numerous times while doing errands on a Parisian street. Acting as a dialogue between two different eras, Minogue and Robbie’s connection has a generational reach. Both starred in Neighbors – Minogue as Charlene from 1986 to 1988, Robbie as Donna from 2008 to 2011. Some consumers will remember Minogue’s original video, others will know Robbie as Barbie, while others, including gen Z, got the “millennium bug” for Y2K fashion.
Chanel enlisted French filmmaker Michel Gondry, who made the first video. This time, several identical Robbies are seen walking down the fake Rue Montmartre with a fleeting glimpse of Minogue. When Robbie gets out of a green Fiat 500 and goes around an old street lamp, his carbon copies all wear the same look – an oatmeal tweed jacket with ruffled cuffs, made uncomfortably over a simple white vest with straight jeans.
It is this particular style of clothing that is proving to be consumer catnip. It’s a simple look but captures how Blazy manages to embrace Coco Chanel’s original codes while adding a heavy dollop of millennial comfort. Forget the star of Wuthering Heights, all anyone cares about is how long it will take the high street to copy the pieces they wear. It’s not long, it appears.
M&S has bouclé-inspired coats for spring, with Chanel-esque gold buttons, for £55. At Zara, wool coats and cardigans top the sales list, while Mango’s £49.99 tweed should come with a hoodwink warning.
As for the jeans, JW Anderson for Uniqlo’s straight-leg jeans in the color “65 blue” and H&M’s washed-out blue are the perfect match.
This is the pinnacle of Chanel’s new charm – its availability now. Ella Baynes, insight director at Savvy Marketing, says the cost of living has changed the definition of luxury. “Amidst affordability issues, a simple look is aspirational but also within reach,” he says.
Baynes points out that the daily campaign is an attraction. “It shows that Chanel can be worn with the way you live now. Even if most customers can’t afford it, they can try to recreate the basics of Robbie’s outfit. And for those who might be inspired to invest in one piece from the campaign, it seems like they can jump into luxury if that piece can be worn again with things they already own.”
Julia Hobbs, editor of the high fashion sections of British Vogue, describes the Chanel jacket and jeans as “the fashion version of the perfect pop song”. He compares the look to Anna Wintour’s first Vogue cover in 1988, where she posed in a Christian Lacroix jeweled top and Casual Guess jeans – a mix of high and low fashion and the first time denim appeared on a Vogue cover.
“The irreverent style in Margot Robbie’s campaign sees the jacket sleeves rolled up to the elbow,” says Hobbs. “The denim silhouette itself is a smart, fearless fit that everyone from your mom to your gen-Z co-workers will already own. Nothing about the look is trying too hard.”
Nostalgia also plays a role. With depressing news everywhere, fashion and consumers are finding solace in the past. Blazy, 41, has been bringing it back to the ’90s and ’00s from scratch with hits featuring everything from Snap!’s Rhythm is a Dancer to Oasis’s Wonderwall.
“While other luxury brands seek to appeal to sex and the internet, Blazy’s Chanel promotes happiness,” says Hobbs.
Baynes adds that the pop culture reference is a “low barrier to entry”, explaining: “Viewers don’t need to know fashion well to understand the concept of the campaign.”
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