Chanel
In late 2025, Matthieu Blazy will show his first collection as Chanel’s creative director. He will be tasked with steering the maison into the 21st century, following Virginie Viard’s departure in 2024, which set off a much talked-about search for a successor. The house of Chanel has had many masters, but its signature has remained the same—bold, understated elegance. To borrow another Coco-ism: “Fashion passes; style remains.”
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel founded the label in 1910. With a snip of her ribbon-looped scissors, she released women from their corsets and put them in fluid jersey suits and loose chemise dresses. “Nothing is more beautiful than freedom of the body,” she said. Chanel opened up a new world for her customers, in which they could dress and play as she did—like the boys.
In his 1954 book The Glass of Fashion, Cecil Beaton observed the key to Chanel’s success was “the genius who creates the need, though that need must reflect the unconscious wishes of the moment if that genius is to be accepted.” To the liberated legions shedding their mantles of feminine festoonery, Chanel offered wide-leg trousers, cardigan jackets, striped Breton tops, turbans, turtlenecks, pea coats, and, of course, the LBD.
Karl Lagerfeld was named creative director in 1983, 12 years after Chanel herself had died. At the time, the label was mostly known for its perfumes, but Lagerfeld would eventually turn it into one of the most important and influential fashion forces in the world. In his 36 years at the helm, Lagerfeld manipulated and modernized the classic Chanel suit and many, many more of the brand’s éléments éternels, from the quilted bag, pearls, gold chains, and buttons to the camellia motif, black bows, and two-tone shoes. Although he shared with his predecessor a love of looks both lean and luxe, boyish and feminine, Lagerfeld had from the start taken Coco’s sacred codes and subverted them—mocked them, even, as he borrowed from pop culture and injected a soupçon of biting wit.
Lagerfeld worked at Chanel until his death on February 19, 2019. The same day, the house named Viard as its new artistic director. She had worked alongside Lagerfeld for 30 years, and he famously described her as “my right arm… and my left arm.” During her five-year tenure, she created many unforgettable moments, including a collaboration with Sofia Coppola for a 2022 Metiers d’Art Collection (Coppola being a former Chanel intern herself), and staging a collection at the breathtaking Château de Chenonceau during the pandemic for an audience of one—Chanel muse Kristen Stewart, who stood up at the end of the show in a singular standing ovation.
