The planets aligned for Chanel in Paris on Monday night.

After months of excruciating buildup, Matthieu Blazy delivered a case study in brand rejuvenation with a show at the Grand Palais that managed to feel both spectacular and unexpectedly intimate.

Newly (re)minted brand ambassador Nicole Kidman, flanked by her daughters Sunday Rose and Faith Margaret, joined celebrities including Margot Robbie, Penélope Cruz, Ayo Edebiri and Pedro Pascal inside the recently renovated glass-and-steel building, which had been transformed into a planetarium symbolizing the “Universe of Chanel.”

The giant orbs, reflected in a glossy black floor marbled with colored pigment, made for an otherworldly backdrop reminiscent of Karl Lagerfeld’s most spectacular show sets.

At 8:14 p.m. precisely, it was time for fashion’s equivalent of the moon landing. (That’s only a mild exaggeration, considering that Blazy is just the fourth official creative director in the history of the 115-year-old brand.)

The designer had teased the show with a handful of black-and-white images by veteran photographer David Bailey that suggested he would take the house in a starkly minimal direction. It turned out that was only part of the story.

His first look was a checked wool pantsuit with the jacket chopped off. The idea was inspired by founder Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s habit of borrowing clothes from her boyfriend Arthur “Boy” Capel.

Both were clients of Charvet, so Blazy tapped the French heritage shirtmaker to help him develop items like an oversized white tuxedo shirt that he paired with a swooping black skirt, or a striped men’s shirt that was cropped and worn with a scarlet ballgown covered in feathery tendrils.

“I was interested in the revolution she brought, and there was no way back,” an elated Blazy explained after the show. “She decided for herself what she could be, and she could be both faces of the same coin.”

Chanel’s androgynous leanings were balanced by a highly seductive approach to eveningwear, he found. Blazy channeled it through silky separates and slithering gowns in a graphic palette of beige, ivory and black, which resonated with the French capital’s celebration of the centenary of Art Deco.

Chanel’s minimal perfume packaging, inspired by her childhood spent in an orphanage in the Cistercian abbey of Aubazine, was echoed in a drop-waisted tunic with a full midi skirt. Knits, conversely, were dense and textural, with skirts the color and texture of straw, and tops that looked like shredded paper.

Blazy said he was inspired by wheat sheaves, one of Coco’s many lucky charms. Gold versions dangled from a black sack dress, and they appeared as fuzzy allover embroidery on an oatmeal tweed coat.  

That not all of it was easily digestible worked in Blazy’s favor. Under his predecessor Virginie Viard and the studio team that succeeded her, Chanel relied on brand codes writ large — witness the giant pearl necklace handbags of its last collection. Blazy literally squished those codes, proposing a complex, layered interpretation that promises to give the brand fresh cultural relevance.

Describing his first season as a “rollercoaster,” he said he was initially overwhelmed by the archive. “It was too much beauty, almost, and I didn’t know where to take it from,” he recalled. “The good thing with the codes of Chanel is that you can also reduce them. They still look like Chanel.”

A case in point: the brand’s iconic quilted handbag, known as the 2.55, which he put through the wringer, stripped of its chain, or made in the burgundy leather traditionally used for its lining.

“I didn’t know what to do with it. I started to play with it, change the chain, embroider, change the leather. It didn’t work,” he recalled.

“And suddenly I thought, how can we take this bag, not just explode it, but almost make it like it’s been borrowed from your great-grandmother, and then passed through generations, and you went to a party in the Lower East Side or in Paris at Pigalle — something lived, something cherished,” Blazy said.

His ultrasoft take on the brand’s signature two-tone flats, meanwhile, was inspired by a chocolate praline.

Blazy’s greatest challenge, perhaps, was the tweed suit. He offered frayed and fringed versions in cozy blanket textures, which took their cue from Chanel’s offhand approach to her own clothes, which she shared with another lover, the Duke of Westminster. “She saw him as the chicest man on earth, because he liked to wear his clothes worn and used,” he said.

Some came in inflated proportions that were technically intriguing, though not always flattering. Among the most alluring were the checked versions with low-slung wrap skirts, which he said were inspired by an archival suit.

“There are Chanel women all around the world, and I saw that suit from 1964 and what was so mesmerizing about this suit is that I couldn’t tell where it came from,” he said. “It could have been French, but maybe from other horizons.”

Back to that cosmic show set. Blazy said he wanted to convey an idea of freedom and borderless dressing. “We all look at the same sky. We all see the stars. There is something universal. It should also be beautiful and enjoyable, and this is what we have to propose also in fashion,” he said.

Model Awar Odhiang closed the show in an ivory silk T-shirt, slit open in the back, worn with a ball skirt covered in multicolored flowers. As she clapped her hands and danced towards Blazy, the audience rose with a roar of approval. By reaching for the stars, the designer just set Chanel on a new orbit.