Chanel heads into fresh era with its new artistic director
With Matthieu Blazy about to debut his first collection for Chanel, its president says change – but not too much – is ahead.
Chanel is on the precipice of a new chapter. It may come to fruition in 20 years. Which is exactly how Bruno Pavlovsky, the maison’s long-time president of fashion, believes it ought to be.
“We are now entering a new era for the brand. After Karl, Virginie … now we’re entering the big change for Chanel. The big new impulse is coming,” says Pavlovsky of the maison’s incoming new artistic director of fashion activities, Matthieu Blazy. The search for the successor to Virginie Viard, who Karl Lagerfeld referred to as “my right arm and my left arm”, took some six months after her abrupt departure last June. Pavlovsky was prepared to wait. For one, the right person had to be in it for the long haul.
“It’s part of the reason why we wanted to have, if I may say, an emerging talent, a new talent and probably one of the only conditions, or criteria, was to get somebody for the next 20 years,” he says.
“So, even if there is no age for the talent, I think it’s good to have somebody from the new generation.”
Pavlovsky knows better than almost anybody that designing for the house of Chanel is laced with complexity. Its codes – the tweed suits, the interlocking CC logo, the pearls – are irrevocably entwined with its story. The mythology and allure of the house’s founder, Gabrielle Chanel, will always be bigger than any designer. Yet a creative director’s contribution is also essential in adding to this story. In the case of Blazy, it means bringing fresh eyes.
“Chanel is quite a complex brand and you need sometimes to understand, to take the best of what the brand is today. Chanel, it’s a lot about Mademoiselle Chanel, it’s a lot about Karl, it’s about their contribution. It’s a lot about the codes, it’s a lot about creation. It’s not true that you can enter in this world from one minute to another. You need some time to understand, to talk with people, to share,” says Pavlovsky.
“The good news with the codes is that you don’t choose them. You cannot decide to stop them … they’re part of the brand and you cannot decide, ‘I will give up’, or if you decide that it could be a very big mistake. You see what I mean? You have to be clever enough to take these codes as a way to communicate the modernity of the brand,” says Pavlovsky. Blazy, he says, is excited to take said codes and toy with them.
“The best designers love to work with constraints. Not in terms of creative constraints, imagination. [But] when you talk with architects, when you talk with the designers, the more talented, I think, they love to twist or to switch this incredible heritage to go somewhere else. That, for me, is the job of Matthieu to come, and Matthieu is super excited for that.”
The enduring appeal of Mademoiselle Chanel – from the lacquered Coromandel screens in her Paris apartment, to her famous bon mots and even more famous love affairs, the way she wore a pair of scissors tied around her neck with a ribbon and wanted to give women freedom with her little black jersey dresses and cover them with “constellations” – remains a constant source of inspiration for each of the ateliers at Chanel. Capturing the essential spirit of Chanel will always be, says Pavlovsky, threaded through any new chapter for the maison.
“That’s the objective and the interest of the job, which is very different from some other brands [where] you can start from scratch … To create from scratch, it’s another mindset. It’s not what we like at Chanel. At Chanel, we like to continue to value this incredible heritage, incredible patrimony. We love to have a look to the future because our next step is about the future, but being very respectful.”
All of which is to say that Chanel has not been in a holding pattern ahead of Blazy’s arrival. This is especially true in the Australian market.
In June the maison opened its largest boutique in Australia, in the heritage-listed former David Jones menswear building on Sydney’s Market Street. The space was designed by celebrated architect and longtime Chanel collaborator Peter Marino and includes the first dedicated Australian Chanel watch and fine jewellery boutique.
This is, says Frederic Grangie, president of watches and fine jewellery at Chanel, a significant move. It speaks not only to the potential of this category in Australia, but globally, too.
Oh, and in watches and jewellery – especially so, really – time matters.
“We are really thinking, and it’s not a joke, we are thinking 20, 30 years from now. Anything that we do, because we are building that living patrimony, and we do it with humility,” says Grangie. “If you look at the creation style here, it’s a question [Arnaud Chastaingt, director of the Chanel watchmaking studio] and I ask ourselves, ‘Twenty years from now, what will people think of this? How did it build or contribute to building the brand?’. When it comes to watches and fine jewellery, it is very important that in key cities … we bring that message of a pure player to the market.”
Luxury fashion brands being considered a pure player when it comes to watches and fine jewellery used to be an altogether trickier prospect. The watchmaking world in particular tends to evolve at a slower, more traditional pace. Some Swiss watchmakers have been perfecting their craft for hundreds of years.
Chanel launched its first watch, the Première, in 1987, its octagonal shape inspired by the topper on a bottle of Chanel N°5. Yet as Grangie points out, well, times have changed. Or they’ve caught up. Chanel has owned its watch manufacture – in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the heart of Swiss watchmaking – since 1993. When it first launched the J12 ceramic watch in 1999, now one of the watch world’s youngest “icons”, it bought a German ceramic factory to master the material that then was little used in watchmaking. For one of the Chanel highlight pieces at this year’s Watches and Wonders fair in Geneva, the J12 Bleu, Chastaingt and his team spent five years developing exactly the right shade of blue. The Première, meanwhile, took on yet another new iteration, twisted into a glamorous gold bangle with the Galon.
Chanel has been serious about investments in horology, too. Following on from taking a 20 per cent stake in one of the world’s most celebrated independent watch brands, F.P. Journe, in 2018, last year it nabbed 25 per cent of the similarly cultish Swiss watchmaker, MB&F. The intention – much like its investment into an array of craft-focused métiers d’art, such as button makers and milliners, many of which are housed in Chanel’s le19M building on the outskirts of Paris – is to support generational skill and foster creativity. Chanel’s philosophies on protecting know-how and owning the supply chain are just as important for the maison’s watch and fine jewellery positioning, too.
“The decision from the very beginning was to say we will be vertically integrated,” says Grangie. “We will master all the skills that are required as we do in fashion, as we do in fragrance. Think about the fragrance. Chanel N°5 is 104 years old. It is the greatest fragrance in the history of humankind. It’s here to last. Certainly for one more century. And how is that possible? Well, because the creation is extraordinary, but the integrity of N°5 today is as good as in 1921. That’s the real key.”
This year’s timepiece launches included charming cocktail watches that reflected Chanel’s array of lipstick colours, plays on Mademoiselle Chanel’s personal totems, such as the lion, and a cartoon of Mademoiselle herself, wearing a smart, little black jacket, boater and pearls, on the dial of the Boy·Friend Coco Art watch.
This sense of profound whimsy is undoubtedly part of the maison’s success. For another, unlike most watch brands, its creations are 95 per cent female focused. (“We are really a feminine brand,” says Grangie.) Moreover, as he notes, the Chanel watch and jewellery collections are unlike anything you will find elsewhere.
“We are always respectful of the past, of the history of the legend of Gabrielle Chanel. And yet every single time they’re bringing something new to that story. So from that perspective, there will be an element of surprise, certainly an element of beauty in the creations. But also that ‘I haven’t seen that before’ [feeling] today is very, very important on the market,” he says.
The watches may be witty, but they’re also extremely serious.
“We are building our own path and that’s why it’s so important not to compromise on the integrity of the creations,” says Grangie.
In this diligence, the maison discovered opportunity.
“We noticed that these two categories had much higher potential than what we imagined originally,” says Grangie. “And, really, over the past few years we’ve seen it. We’ve certainly seen it in the sales, we’ve seen it in the feedback also from the clients. And so we have invested more.
“I would say the potential for haute horology is very high.”
The resilience of the watch and fine jewellery client – the new Sydney boutique will also house some exceptional high jewellery pieces for limited periods – is important in an unsteady luxury climate.
Chanel, which remains privately-held and family-owned, has been one of the few luxury brands to soundly weather a global downturn. Still, its most recent results showed revenues of US$18.7 billion ($28.8 billion), a 4.3 per cent dip compared with the previous year. Leena Nair, chief executive of Chanel, said at the time of reporting that ebbs and flows were to be expected after a period of “unprecedented growth”.
The maison continues to be bold in its investments across its boutiques, creative ecosystems and craftsmanship. As reported by Vogue Business, in 2024 Chanel increased its expenditure by 43 per cent to its highest levels of US$1.76 billion. There are similar plans for 2025 and last month Nair, who has helmed Chanel since 2021, was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire in recognition of her contributions to the retail and consumer sector.
For Pavlovsky, stratospheric growth is not always especially desirable.
“I’m very confident in the future. What we’ll probably not see again is this kind of incredible growth, which I believe is not always very good for the business,” he says.
What matters more, he points out, is ensuring that in every city, in every country where Chanel is present, there is the best of the brand on offer.
“For us, it’s super clear; we want to be the leader, the best ultimate brand,” Pavlovsky says. “I’m not talking about size, I’m talking about quality of creation, I’m talking about quality of client experience, I’m talking about quality of product … and for that you need to continue to stay who you are and not try to become somebody else.”
Staying very Chanel, in all of the maison’s universes, still allows new ways of doing so. “We need to cultivate our differentiation … We are a creative brand, we’re not
a marketing brand. I think it’s something that is super important and we need to continue to surprise our clients. It is not as if the job is done. The job is never done and it’s never finished,” says Pavlovsky.
The best may well be still to come. Chanel has time to wait.
This story is from the July issue of WISH.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout