CHANEL Métiers d’Art 2026: Matthieu Blazy’s First Collection Campaign

A Closer Look

• Matthieu Blazy’s first Métiers d’art collection for CHANEL, built around eclectic cosmopolitan personas
• Collection spans silhouettes from the 1920s to the 2020s — superheroes, socialites, students, working girls
• Savoir-faire of six Maisons d’art: Lesage, Massaro, Goossens, Lemarié, Atelier Montex and Maison Michel
• Campaign shot by Craig McDean and filmed by Rahim Fortune, both in New York
• Nine models including Anok Yai, Julia Nobis, and Anne Vyalitsyna bring the CHANEL women to life
• Part of the annual Métiers d’art tradition held every year since 2002

First Impressions

Matthieu Blazy opens his first chapter at CHANEL with a premise that is quietly radical: fashion as permission. “It’s almost a sense of inventing your own superpowers,” he states, citing Gabrielle Chanel as the original practitioner of that freedom. The Métiers d’art 2026 collection arrives not as a single coherent character study, but as a city block at rush hour — plural, contradictory, alive.

The campaign image of a woman pairing an elevated knit with a floor-length gown beside another in denim and a baseball cap sets the register immediately. This is a CHANEL that refuses to resolve its tensions, and that refusal feels purposeful rather than indecisive.

A Visual Language Across a Century

The collection moves through time with cinematic confidence, from Art Deco extravagances through to contemporary streetwear energy, without treating either end of that spectrum as a footnote. Silhouettes embody different personas — superheroes, working girls, students, socialites — sharing a single runway as they might share a pavement in New York or Paris.

The House’s iconic codes — the suit, two-tone shoes, pearls, camellias — are present but reframed rather than reverently preserved. Wrap skirts, fluid pants, and supple leather bags reinforce Blazy’s consistent preoccupation with freedom of movement. Accessories carry their own narrative weight: leopard-print headpieces, giraffe and squirrel bags, brooches featuring does and Dalmatians sit alongside the expected camellia, each detail a small act of storytelling. The ROUGE ALLURE VELVET sensibility — colour as declaration, not decoration — runs through the accessories with equal authority.

The Craft Behind the Collection

What distinguishes the Métiers d’art from any other CHANEL outing is the explicit centering of artisanal authorship. Lesage’s intricate embroideries, Massaro’s footwear construction, Goossens’ jewellery, Lemarié’s featherwork, Atelier Montex’s embellishment, and Maison Michel’s millinery are each legible in the finished garments — not as decoration applied after the fact, but as the collection’s structural vocabulary.

All six belong to the 11 Maisons d’art housed at le19M, the creative hub CHANEL founded in Paris in 2021. Since 2002, this annual collection has functioned as the House’s most direct declaration of that relationship — less a seasonal exercise than a sustained act of institutional loyalty to the artisans who work year-round within CHANEL’s orbit. The N°5 Eau de Toilette lineage shows how CHANEL has long understood that its most enduring creations are inseparable from the hands that make them.

The Campaign: New York, Filmic, Plural

Craig McDean’s photographs and Rahim Fortune’s film share a sensibility: these are not fashion images so much as character studies. Shot in New York, the campaign features nine models — Julia Nobis, Penelope Ternes, Bhavitha Mandava, Josephen Akuei, Jesi Evans, Anok Yai, Feng Jiao, Anne Vyalitsyna and Riley Lusher — each inhabiting a distinct CHANEL woman, real or imagined.

The choice of New York as backdrop rather than Paris signals something deliberate. Blazy is not anchoring this collection in the House’s historical geography — he is asserting that the CHANEL woman exists wherever she chooses. That cosmopolitan premise, which underpins both the clothes and the imagery, is the most coherent through-line in a campaign designed around productive contradiction. Elsewhere in the CHANEL universe, LES EAUX DE CHANEL reflects a similarly place-inspired imagination — a House that finds its identity in movement as much as in memory.

A Considered Opening Statement

Blazy’s debut Métiers d’art collection resists easy summary, which is likely the point. It addresses the GCC woman who dresses across contexts — a business meeting, a gallery opening, an evening that begins formally and ends otherwise — without asking her to compartmentalise. The range is genuinely wide: from Art Deco embroidery to baseball caps, from gowns to denims, unified less by silhouette than by the quality of attention each piece has received.

For a first collection under this particular mandate, it is a confident articulation of who CHANEL intends to be under Matthieu Blazy’s direction: a House that holds its heritage without being held back by it.

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