What’s it like to debut at Chanel? Four months in the life of Matthieu Blazy

He is standing in his studio now with Krzysztof J. Lukasik, an accessories designer, and Marie-Valentine Girbal, his research head, in practice his right hand. The two of them communicate wordlessly: When Blazy is uncertain of a decision, he will often glance at Girbal, who will tell him, with a flinch of the eyes, what she thinks. (“At some point, we just got in sync,” she explains.) Where Lagerfeld’s creative entourage comprised an inner circle of male models and soigné sophisticates, Blazy’s tribe of top deputies, brought from Bottega, tend to be easygoing millennial design geeks: If they weren’t huddled here, designing the collection for one of fashion’s largest global brands, one suspects, they might be in a basement office somewhere putting out a good small magazine. “It’s nice to be surrounded by those kind of people,” says Artur Davtyan, Blazy’s design director and his other longtime right hand. “You’re able to have conversations based not only on aesthetics—‘We like that’—but on trying to build concepts around collections.”

Now jazz is playing. Girbal and Lukasik are reviewing prototypes for bags. When Blazy started the collection, he envisaged allusions (he wasn’t sure why) to Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella. So the team has been experimenting with globe-shaped “universe” bags, made of metal and painted with two layers of enamel, studded with stones as stars. They put him in mind of a planetarium he visited as a boy. He unclasps a prototype and peers inside.

“Wow!” He glances at Girbal. “Do you like it?”

“Yes,” she says.

“I’m going to have this one, if possible, in my office,” Blazy says, eyeing the orb thoughtfully.

A new group enters, to review swatches. A three-decade veteran sourcing expert of the Lagerfeld days suggests an evening bag in eggplant-coloured tiny, shimmering sequins, a style that had great success at Chanel in the past. Blazy resists: He isn’t wild about that purple, and he can’t abide small sequins. “It’s personal trauma,” he says.

“Would you like to see maybe a storyboard of these bags we did over the past year?” she asks.

Blazy smiles. “I will tell you my trauma,” he says. One Halloween, he explains, while he was living in New York, working at Calvin Klein, he agreed to dress up in drag for the first time. His dress was covered in small sequins. Almost immediately, he got stuck in an elevator for two hours. He had to crawl out over the feet of firefighters. “Just to finish my walk of shame, I went out of the hotel and couldn’t get a taxi,” he says. He smiles and shakes his head: “No small sequins.”