Vive Le Ballet! Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel Lights Up the Stage at the Opéra Garnier

Reported by Vogue.

The Opéra Garnier doesn't do anything quietly, and last Saturday's ballet season opening gala was no exception. Le Tout-Paris showed up in force — Charlotte Casiraghi, Chiara Mastroianni, and a glittering 750-person guest list among them — for an evening that managed to feel like both a celebration and a farewell. According to Vogue, the night opened with a défilé set to Berlioz's Marche des Troyens, the full company processing from the youngest petits rats, aged eight, to étoiles including Hugo Marchand, Germain Louvet, and Guillaume Diop — all in Chanel tutus and diadems. Among them: Dorothée Gilbert, who gives her final performance this Thursday.

The stakes were bigger than one season. Come July, the Opéra Garnier closes for a five-year, €450 million renovation. Chanel — the house's Major Patron and Exceptional Patron for the restoration — co-led the evening's fundraising alongside Rolex, together pulling in €1.8 million for the works. It's the kind of cultural patronage that doesn't make for easy Instagram content, but quietly keeps institutions like this one breathing.

Matthieu Blazy Dresses the Danseurs

The real conversation piece of the night was Matthieu Blazy's costume work for Rings of Saturn, a new duet choreographed by Juliano Nunes for Marchand and Louvet. Blazy built the look around navy cotton poplin shirts re-embroidered with Lurex, silk velvet, and cotton thread in the colors of Saturn's rings — gold-trimmed buttons, barrel trousers in black grain de poudre. Marchand admitted he initially expected something that showed more of the dancer's body. He came around fast. The matched colorways — poppy, green, blue, echoing the embroidery on the corsets — made the two men, friends since age thirteen, look like twins. "You can see all the craft, the haute couture tradition, in the way it's knitted into the shirt," he said. Sarah Andelman called it outright: "a real success."

The broader program pushed the evening past nostalgia into something more alive. Jean-Christophe Maillot's Vers un Pays Sage — a tribute to his artist father — dressed dancers in spare white bodysuits and trousers against shifting color-block backdrops. Designer Alain Paul, a former dancer himself, clocked the energy immediately: "It had a very New York feeling — like Merce [Cunningham] or Martha Graham — minimal, sharp lines, its own youthful language." Aszure Barton's Busk closed out three hours of programming to rapturous applause. Three chefs handled the dinner.

Marchand put the whole night into perspective with the kind of clarity you only get from someone who's lived both sides of the dream: he was once a small kid in that procession staring up at the étoiles, and now he looks out at the petits rats looking back at him. "We all pass through and we try to deliver the best for this house, and the house remains," he said. "It's been like that for 350 years." A building about to go dark for five years has never felt more alive.

When couture meets choreography at this level, the result isn't costume — it's collaboration.

Read the original at Vogue.