“Haute couture is the essence of Chanel, built on the fundamentals Gabrielle Chanel established in 1915, and to which she dedicated her entire career: clothes made to measure, like a second skin, designed for real life, crafted through gestures passed down in the ateliers,” Bruno Pavlovsky, president of fashion and Chanel SAS, tells Vogue Business. “Today, Chanel’s creative power also lies in our unique ecosystem — five haute couture ateliers and a sixth dedicated entirely to galons [stripes], together with the savoir faire of the maisons d’art at Le 19M,” the headquarters in Aubervilliers near Paris, which brings together the 12 specialist maisons d’art.
“Matthieu Blazy builds on these foundations as a field of experimentation, pushing boundaries with new materials and techniques,” Pavlovsky continues. While Chanel won’t publish its 2025 earnings before this spring, he noted in December that 2025 will be “an interesting transitional year of growth for the house”.
Two back-to-back shows were each attended by 750 guests. Like at Blazy’s ready-to-wear debut, the front row was a mix of longtime Chanel ambassadors including Penélope Cruz, Charlotte Casiraghi and Vanessa Paradis, as well as new faces like Nicole Kidman and A$AP Rocky, plus Dua Lipa, who starred in a Chanel campaign last year. The model casting included mature women, and Bhavitha Mandava, the Indian model who opened the Chanel Métiers d’Art show in New York, closed the show.
The soundtrack by Michel Gaubert and Fabien Leclercq included Moby’s “Porcelain” and Oasis’s “Wonderwall” mixed with The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony” — each quintessentially millennial. “The music has this kind of melancholia, but also optimism, so I really hope that moment is not like a boom, boom, boom, but like a breath,” Blazy told Phelps.
