Chanel gives the New York City subway a glamorous rebrand

Rachel Tashjian

New York (CNN) — On Tuesday afternoon, Kristen Stewart was ensconced in a New York City subway car, feeling “genuine overwhelm.” Not by the usual stress of a commute subway stuff – pushy crowds, delayed trains – but by Chanel’s latest runway show.

“It’s an emotional environment. It feels cinematic,” she said. “If it says anything about what we want and where we are, I find it incredibly encouraging, emotional and so embodied.”

We weren’t on a functional train, of course – this was at the abandoned Bowery Station in downtown Manhattan, a platform rented out regularly for film and photo shoots, and for this occasion, the gritty setting (albeit with a fresh paint job) for the Chanel Métiers d’art show.

Rarely has spending over an hour underground in the city’s subway felt so glamorous.

Stewart, who has been a Chanel ambassador since 2013 and has therefore worn the designs of all three of the brand’s post-Coco Chanel designers, saw a realism in the models’ mix of casual clothes and exuberantly formal ones, with jackets thrown over arms and newspapers stuffed into handbags.

This is a rare quality at a fashion show, she acknowledged after the first showing. (The house staged another later in the evening). “To be able to schlep and look like that – that is aspiration,” she said. “It’s difficult to find yourself in a fashion show. But there were so many selves.”

Matthieu Blazy, Chanel’s new artistic director, is receiving this sort of ravenous acclaim across the industry, from the celebrities who have worn his clothes like Stewart, Ayo Edebiri and Teyana Taylor, to the editors and influencers who swooned at his October debut show at Paris Fashion Week.

Even though there was a nasty rain (“I’m wearing….THIS!” a woman in a pale gold and pink Chanel jacket with a big gold branded bag and matching flats wailed at the sky as we waited to go inside), and the subway air was frigid, the mood among Stewart, plus Chanel stalwarts like Tilda Swinton, Rose Byrne as well as A$AP Rocky and Margaret Qualley — the pair of which starred in a short film directed by Michel Gondry for the label ahead of the show — was giddy.

Why New York? Chanel touted founder Coco’s frequent travel to the city, but it should also be noted that America is packed with VICs, or Very Important Customers, who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on their favorite brands and whom labels are increasingly courting to drive sales. Many, in their Chanel flats, tweed jackets and handbags made of jumbo pearls, appeared daunted by the prospect, however fantastical, of riding public transportation. After all, the lifestyle of wearing head-to-toe Chanel is the kind that tends to come with a private driver. A woman in a white feathered pant suit under a gold leather trench gingerly pawed at the turnstile, unsure whether to push or pull or… what?

Then actor Christine Baranski glided through, looking like model Suzy Parker posing for Richard Avedon in the late 1950s, showing the gals how it’s done.

And why December? Because Chanel’s Metiers d’arts collection is staged annually in December, at glamorous locations in Japan, and Senegal and Scotland in the past, to highlight the output of ateliers, like millinery Maison Michel, shoemaker Massaro and embroiderers Lesage, that Chanel has acquired to ensure their obsolescent artistry endures. In these shows, more so than others, flaunting extraordinary craftsmanship drives the design.

As for the show, Blazy, like Baranski, found the train thing a breeze. A subway car pulled into the station and models in funky hats, light tweed suits over T-shirts and knit dresses that oozed but weren’t slinky strode out of the train and around the platform. As the show went on, they took on that familiar New York City boredom, where you look so great in your fur coat and big-night-out eye makeup but you’re stuck waiting for the train to get you there. Some moved past each other with a hurried city strut, in defiance of usual runway walk protocol.

It may sound crazy for a house like Chanel, where jackets easily sell for thousands, but Blazy’s subway show was a statement that he wants to make clothing for “real life” – a concept that, as much as big fashion brands hate to admit it, is about as far as the world of perfume and it-bags as you can get. Most designers are simply too focused on their vision (or bottom lines) to think about how women really live and want to feel.

But the designer made a convincing argument. This collection looked unbelievably light but meticulously designed. Blazy’s flapper dresses and feathery skirts are the rare contemporary garments that move with the light-catching excitement that Coco and brand rival Jean Patou’s designs of the 1920s intended, when illumination and motion were truly sexy thrills. With his pragmatic glamazons and funny little hats and accessories – one classic flap had the head and legs of a giraffe affixed to it – his clothes are witty without being memes.

We’re probably past the point when what a designer shows on the runway is going to influence what the average Jane finds in her local store (especially because the go-to these days is typically Zara or online retailer Shein).

But it would be marvelous if Chanel and Blazy could somehow disseminate that mindset: that a woman can have an aching shoulder from carting her stuff around all day, and feel pulled in a million directions by work and friends and love, and still make time for herself to wear that special dress or casual but treasured jacket or handbag that makes her giggle.

Maybe basketball star Angel Reese, who attended the show and said it was her first time on the New York subway, put it best. Asked how she felt her celebrated game day tunnel fits influence her performance on the court, she said they’re inseparable: “I think look good, feel good,” she said. “Now that we’re incorporating fashion into basketball, being able to come in and walk the tunnel in a nice fit, and then go into the locker room and switch it up, just gives me the inspiration of knowing that I can continue to do both, because it’s possible, and everything’s possible.”

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