PARIS – Showmanship returned to Chanel on Monday. At Paris Fashion Week , the brand's new creative director Matthieu Blazy opened the season’s most anticipated debut beneath colossal celestial bodies — Saturn with its rings, a full solar system suspended above a jet-black and a mirror-bright runway — staking a claim for theater from the first second.

Reflections doubled the cosmos underfoot as a front-row constellation of stars, including Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard and Tilda Swinton, looked up. By night’s end, the room rose in a standing ovation. As Vogue's doyenne Anna Wintour has said, “fashion needs its showmen.” Chanel had one again.

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