Portraits by Annie Leibovitz. Fashion Photographs by Rafael Pavarotti.

Fashion cannot exist without change, but some changes reach beyond the season. When it was announced last year that Chanel was without a creative director, people across the industry looked to the house in nervous expectation. For nearly 40 years, Chanel had articulated the vision of one man: Karl Lagerfeld. After he died, in 2019, his longtime deputy Virginie Viard had carried on his style. Viard’s departure last year opened one of the highest seats in fashion, but also raised the possibility that Chanel’s taste could take a startling turn. Matthieu Blazy, a comparatively young designer who had distinguished himself doing surprising things with leather at Bottega Veneta, was not considered an obvious choice, and when he was announced as artistic director last December, he had the task not just of working his way out from a very long shadow but of showing where, as a designer of largely unknown capacities, he might go. The future course of the house would come down to his October debut.

When the night of that first show arrives, the vaulted backstage of the Grand Palais, a Beaux Arts wonder on the banks of the Seine, shivers with preparation. The floor, covered in light gray felt, is taped off with a runway order. Models rush and loiter in robes and hair clips. Forty minutes before the showtime of 8 p.m., Blazy appears, looking tense and pale. “I’m a bit all over the place, to be honest—I’m going to have a cigarette,” he says, and rushes off again.

Blazy arrived at Bottega after a nearly 20-year career as a deputy at work in the shadows, a secret weapon who had become an open secret. At Raf Simons, where he began out of school, he was known for introducing complexity into patternmaking; at Maison Margiela, he designed the crystal-studded masks that became one of the house’s emblems. His work at Bottega was characterized by a sophisticated understanding of craft and its capacity to hold apparently contradictory ideas in surprisingly human wholes. “It’s strength meets softness, structure meets fluidity,” says Ayo Edebiri, who is attending the show as a Chanel ambassador. “But also, he sees every type of woman. I feel like myself in a really gorgeous dress, but it could be sexy or demure.” Nicole Kidman, a longtime affiliate of Chanel, says, “From the moment I met Matthieu, I was struck by the way he approaches everything with his heart first.”

Four screens to one side of the room offer a window to the world outside: the interior of the hall, two views of red-carpet arrivals, and drone surveillance of the teeming crowds behind gates on the sidewalk outside. Everyone is searching for Blazy. The models are taking their spots in the lineup; audiovisual workers murmur into their earpieces. When the designer finally appears, he makes a brisk tour, smiles widely at his colleagues, then retreats to his own nerves. He’s worried about nothing in particular, and about everything, he says. “My mom describes it as the stress when you drop your kids off for school on the first day—you know it’s going to be fine, but still,” he says, wrapping his arms tightly around himself and looking at the models waiting to be counted off. He glances from the screens to the models, then adds, with an air of cautious contentment, “It feels like the big leap.”

Some weeks earlier, one warm Wednesday evening in July, I met Blazy on the steps of the Église Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the oldest church in Paris and, as its name suggests, a monument once surrounded by meadows. Today it’s a testament to the power of perdurance—the way that a peripheral feature standing long enough cannot just blend into the landscape but become its defining attribute, the heart of its allure.

For Blazy, it is also home. “I live not far from here,” he says, rising from his crouch on the church steps to greet me. “And my father had a gallery nearby, so growing up I was here constantly.” He is neither tall nor short, and is wearing his signature white T-shirt—no logo—with a natural-colored sweater around his shoulders and relaxed, faded blue jeans with exquisite black crinkled lambskin loafers of his own design. At Bottega, where I met him a few years ago, he was known for turning high refinement toward a youthful celebration of ecstatic daily life. I watched him at one of his first engagements, a banquet of grandees in Italy, as he stood to give a friendly, bashful address, his role seeming like a crown still deliriously large on his 37-year-old head.