Chanel Banks on Unique Textiles to Elevate Matthieu Blazy’s Designs

PAU, France — On the eve of the Chanel cruise 2027 show in Biarritz, the looms at the ACT3 workshop in the nearby city of Pau were churning out not just the brand’s signature tweed, but a brand new fabric developed especially for the resort collection.

Creative director Matthieu Blazy updated the traditional striped linen of the Basque region of southwest France by adding flecked horizontal bands, using the fabric to give the signature Chanel skirt suit a sporty twist. A worker stood by to supervise the machine, making sure that no knots ruined the smooth surface of the densely woven cotton.

Stringent quality control is non-negotiable at ACT3 — an acronym that stands for Activité Création Tissage, or Creative Weaving Activity in English. The company has worked hand-in-hand with Lesage, the embroidery and weaving specialist owned by Chanel, for close to 25 years, and officially became part of the company in 2014.

It’s the sole French production site for the tweeds developed by Lesage for Chanel and also caters to other fashion brands, as well as interior designers like Peter Marino. 

ACT3 was founded in 1996 by Maria Messner, an Austrian textile engineer who fell in love with the Basque country and decided to jump-start its fading textile tradition by launching her own operation.

“I wanted to create local jobs,” she told reporters during a visit to the facility. “Everyone was suffering. Factories were closing one after another, so it was easy for me to buy up machines and borrow staff.”

Meissner, who has a passion for painting, spotted a gap in the market: high-end textiles that require a creative eye and a focus on quality over productivity.

“I was doing the opposite of everyone else. Instead of speeding up the loom, I was slowing it down. I spent nights and weekends figuring out mechanisms to slow down, or even stop, traditional looms to allow the human hand to intervene,” she explained. 

At the facility, an artisan supervises each of the 30 looms, stepping in to fix a broken thread, flatten a ribbon or bring out the texture of a fringe with a comb or scraper.

Keep It French

ACT3 now employs 45 people, all of them trained on the job. Among the current team, one transferred from the aeronautical industry, another was a hairdresser, and a third previously worked as a tailor in the Chanel haute couture workshop in Paris. 

Though the market remains challenging, the weaver can rely on a steady stream of orders from Chanel, which has a policy of acquiring specialty manufacturers in order to secure its supply chain and protect traditional know-how. 

Bruno Pavlovsky, president of fashion and president of Chanel SAS, said the French fashion house works with around 2,000 manufacturers in ready-to-wear, of which 70 belong to its Manufactures de Mode unit. Around a third are based in France and two-thirds in Italy.

“At Chanel, we are dedicated to ensuring the survival of these houses,” he said. 

He believes French manufacturing is key to producing the kind of high-end fabrics that set Chanel apart from the competition — think tweeds made with fancy yarns that provide texture, sparkle and color. “That’s where ACT3 plays a key role. We go to them for fabrics you can’t find elsewhere,” he said. 

But Pavlovsky lamented that overall demand for higher-tier textiles remains relatively limited. “Unfortunately, the sector is not exactly thriving. I find that in general, apart from Chanel, brands tend to take the easy way out and are less demanding on the quality of the fabrics they use,” he said.

Chanel’s customers, on the other hand, are exacting about the provenance of their clothes. “Chanel is French, and the ‘made in France’ label remains important in ready-to-wear,” Pavlovsky said.

That’s why he’s encouraged Blazy and his team, many of whom followed him to Chanel from his previous post at Bottega Veneta in Italy, to get to know its arsenal of domestic manufacturers. 

“They didn’t imagine for a second that you could find such sophisticated and unexpected production tools in France,” the executive said. “Matthieu has led the way in embracing the possibilities, and his team has set off to discover all these hidden treasures one by one.”

Weaving the Impossible

Aurore Parent, director of Lesage, said the arrival of new creatives at Chanel after decades of relative stability under Karl Lagerfeld and his successor, Virginie Viard, has galvanized her teams, from the design studio based at Le19M, Chanel’s craftsmanship hub near Paris, to the technicians at ACT3 charged with turning samples into reality. 

Blazy is a fan of knobbly textures, often achieved by twisting yarns around each other, and has brought a distinctive color palette, such as the combination of ecru, burgundy and mint green on the striped “bayadère” fabric in his cruise show.

“We’ve definitely sensed a change under Matthieu’s creative direction, but our teams are used to dealing with creative briefs. They thrive on novelty,” Parent said. “Some of the fresh color combinations are quite surprising, compared to the past, but it’s always good to challenge yourself.”

Meissner said she relished the opportunity to expand her repertoire. “With every style evolution, we progress,” she said.

She pointed to a sample of black tweed made with “bubble” thread from Vimar 1991, the prestigious Italian yarn producer owned by Chanel since 2000, for one of Blazy’s recent collections. Its production requires constant supervision to prevent the surface bobbles from clustering.

“It’s the kind of fabric that Matthieu loves and that for us represent a new technical challenge, which we relish,” Meissner said, adding that each technical solution feeds into the weaver’s knowledge bank. 

“It feels pretentious to say that we try to be weavers of the impossible, but that’s the only thing that makes sense,” she added. “Even if we have to slow down production to a crawl, the only thing that matters is getting it done. We want the last yard of fabric to be as perfect as the first.”