Chanel Boosts Capabilities for Matthieu Blazy’s Couture Debut

PARIS – For most designers, getting handed the reins of an haute couture workshop is like being a kid in a candy store. 

But when Matthieu Blazy visited Chanel’s craftsmanship hub Le19M for the first time, he left feeling overwhelmed. For his first haute couture collection for the French luxury house, he leaned into the maxim that elegance is refusal.

Blazy set himself a challenge: to telegraph the brand without relying on its habitual signifiers. In fact, his first look – a nude chiffon version of the classic Chanel suit – felt almost like a ghost of the original. 

“I wanted to see whether, when you strip away the usual Chanel signatures – the tweed, the jeweled buttons – you can still get to that essence,” he told WWD in a preview. 

It marked an about-turn from his predecessor Virginie Viard, who often designed entire collections around brand codes like tweed, or camellia flowers. But since officially starting as artistic director of fashion activities last April, Blazy has framed his work as a conversation with the house’s founder, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel.

He noted that when Chanel opened her haute workshop just over a century ago, there was no ready-to-wear, so she was dressing women not only for special occasions.

“She wasn’t burdened by the expectations of couture – always having to create heavily embroidered, visually striking pieces. Her couture was designed to support women in their everyday life, and that’s something I found interesting: to explore whether we could make something as simple as a black skirt or pants,” he said. 

“Initially, everything was more complex, and during the design process, I kept stripping things away. I took out anything that felt too heavy. We had made some huge, gorgeous dresses. It’s not that they didn’t work, but I felt the message wasn’t clear. We were losing sight of the essence of the house, which is clothes that women actually wear,” he said.

Trusting the Process

The 41-year-old designer has always had manufacturers on speed-dial, whether at Maison Margiela, where he was in charge of the made-to-measure Artisanal line, or at Bottega Veneta, where he turned out hit handbags including the Sardine.

“Here at Chanel, it’s at another level. It’s just extraordinary, and you can quickly get lost in it. Everything is possible, so the real question becomes: what actually makes sense?” he said. “That’s a dialogue I have with the artisans themselves. Embroidery has to tell a story. We don’t make things just to look pretty – it’s a process, and it has to take you places.”

That’s not to say he didn’t take full advantage of Chanel’s formidable capabilities, which continue to grow (more on that later.) Once he got over the smorgasbord effect, Blazy set to work with its specialized ateliers, which include embroiderers Lesage and Montex, featherer Lemarié and pleat maker Lognon, to create his signature craft-intensive textures.

He asked his team not to look at clothes, but instead to design from images of birds. “They spent three months researching techniques,” he said, comparing it to preparing the ingredients in a recipe.

He was interested in Chanel’s use of humble materials, like jersey and cotton, so he had jackets and coats made from crushed or woven raffia. A sheer woven fabric was embroidered with black and white feathers to evoke the texture of tweed, while Lesage and Lemarié collaborated on textiles with surface effects woven in.

Blazy doesn’t like to sketch, preferring to get stuck in. “Sometimes you begin with the material, and that leads you to the dress. Sometimes you have a dress in mind, and then you have to find the right material,” he said.

“What I don’t like is knowing at the outset of a collection what it will look like in the end. That just makes it static. What I really enjoy is the process – the surprises, the way it builds as you go. It also leaves much more room for conversation with embroiderers, artisans, and workshop heads. It has to feel alive,” he said.

A School of Couture

In order to give his teams breathing room, the Chanel design studio has undergone its most wide-ranging reorganization since Karl Lagerfeld took the creative reins in 1983.

Where previously a single studio churned out 10 collections a year, the house has hired an additional 30 people and created three dedicated teams: one for haute couture, one for ready-to-wear, and one for Métiers d’Art and cruise.

“I like working in a healthy environment, and I want people to have the time to follow through ideas,” Blazy explained. “The workshops are happier, and everything is done with less pressure.”

Bruno Pavlovsky, president of fashion and president of Chanel SAS, said it was time to bring the house, which generated revenues of $18.7 billion in 2024, into a new era. The new organization is designed to help Blazy steer what has become a juggernaut.  

“He’s in charge, and there’s a small army behind him to transform each collection into billions of dollars in revenue,” the executive said.

Chanel is also expanding its couture division, which saw a record year in 2025, even though the collections were designed by a studio team in the interim between Viard’s departure and Blazy’s official arrival.

“We’ve never seen such high demand,” said Pavlovsky, citing a resurgence in events, ranging from weddings to dinners and other special occasions.

Chanel employs 200 people full-time in its couture workshop. “I think within the next two or three years, that number will be closer to 250 or even 300,” Pavlovsky said.

In addition, the company plans to expand Le19M with the opening of a dedicated school of haute couture, to complement its Lesage embroidery training unit.

“We feel the time has come to invest more in supporting our teams,” he said. “That doesn’t mean the schools we work with aren’t doing their job, but we see that when young people join us, it can take between two and five years to bring them up to speed.”

The classes at the new school, to be located near Chanel’s sprawling Le19M facility in the northern suburb of Aubervilliers, will be run by former members of the couture workshop.

“The training will be tailored to each person’s needs, but we want to give them a solid foundation so that when they join a workshop, they can be effective much sooner,” he said. “The goal is really to bring a new generation to a level of technical mastery that lets us be faster in the workshops and do things even better.”