Last week, as fashion fans watched model Bhavitha Mandava open Chanel’s 2025 Métiers d’art show—staged on a New York City subway platform—they had no idea just how accidentally appropriate the setting was. Why? Because, as fashion lore has it, the New York City subway is where the 25-year-old graduate student once caught the eye of a fellow passenger–a fellow passenger who just so happened to be Matthieu Blazy, who was then creative director at Bottega Veneta.
Mandava hails from India, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture before moving to New York to pursue a master’s in interactive design and media at NYU. Fate, it seems, had other plans. After that chance encounter on public transport, the student found herself walking the spring 2025 Bottega runway, before being cast in a house campaign.
Blazy has since been appointed creative director at Chanel, and he’s brought his muse with him. Not only did she walk his debut spring 2026 show, Mandava was the first model out onto the makeshift Métiers d’art runway—housed in a decommissioned Bowery J/Z subway station—last week. She became the first Indian model in history to open a Chanel show.
“Can’t put into words how much this means to me,” Mandava wrote in an Instagram post after the show. She included a video clip of her thrilled parents watching the show online from back home in India.
As entries into the fashion world go, it’s one to beat. Mandava was cast in Dior and Courrèges shows soon after her Bottega debut. Now, as a favorite of Blazy, the lecture hall may suddenly seem a long way away for Bhavitha Mandava.
