On Tuesday, Chanel held its Métiers d’Art show — the first by artistic director Matthieu Blazy — underground in New York City’s Bowery subway station. It was quite a change of décor compared to the last time Chanel held this show in New York, inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in December 2018 (which was Karl Lagerfeld’s last Métiers d’Art).
“New York is, in a way, our second home,” Bruno Pavlovsky, president of Chanel fashion and Chanel SAS, told Vogue Business a few hours before the show. “Staging a show here opens a new chapter led by Matthieu’s creative vision. At the same time, New York is where Karl wanted to bring things to a close. So we’re re-engaging with New York through Matthieu’s perspective, looking toward the future with a different energy… Previously, we were uptown; now, we’re on the Lower East Side. It really shows how much New York offers — a whole range of adventures, opportunities and energy.”
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This year’s Métiers d’Art, one of Chanel’s 10 yearly collections, also marks a shift in how the brand approaches its shows. Blazy’s arrival prompted a rethink of the show calendar, and he introduced a new internal organization in order to work further ahead.
Pavlovsky explained: “We asked ourselves this question with Matthieu: do we actually want to make 10 collections? And if we do, how should we organize ourselves? How should we structure things in order to be able to create them? It’s not just for the sake of making 10 collections — it’s because we have two couture collections. They are a unique moment for expressing the brand’s creativity, and it’s important. Then, we have eight collections for our stores. Each collection has a very specific role, and we decided that it was important to continue working this way.”
He continued: “Matthieu wanted to try out having dedicated teams who work far upstream on research for a collection, and then go on to create prototypes, etc. It’s a method that’s a bit different from what we had until now. At Chanel, we tended to focus on the collections one after another.”
“We’re only on the second collection [under Blazy], but it allows us to see things clearly and that’s important to structure things when so many things are happening. It’s important to stay relatively calm — even to sleep at night — given everything we have ahead of us. It seems — even though we’re only a few months in — that based on the results in October, it worked very well, and it should continue.”
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It’s a good time to show in New York. The show, held a year after Blazy’s appointment at the creative helm of the house, coincides with a moment when the US market is driving luxury’s growth, buoyed by the stock market. The US market is Chanel’s largest market, as well as its top for couture.
“The American market has rebounded for several months now, so our plan today is to keep growing our client base and enhancing the experience we offer them, which will naturally help grow our business,” Pavlovsky said. “It’s really about the experience we deliver in the stores first and foremost.” The house has just renovated its boutique in Bloomingdale’s flagship in New York, alongside other retail projects in the pipes.
A number of luxury houses are following suit, each staging their resort 2027 shows Stateside. This includes Dior, Louis Vuitton and Gucci. Chanel has yet to reveal the location of its upcoming cruise show.
Chanel was not immune to the global luxury downturn. The brand said in May that sales for 2024 were down 4.3% to $18.7 billion. In an interview with Le Figaro in October, Pavlovsky hinted that the house would return to growth this year. On Tuesday, he confirmed that 2025 will be “an interesting transitional year of growth for the house”.
“Throughout 2025, we gradually witnessed a positive shift everywhere, including in China — a testament to all the work carried out there,” he said. “During the same period last year, we were the only ones to present our Métiers d’Art collection in Hangzhou. This was a highlight for the brand, enabling us to engage both our teams and clients in a meaningful way. Over the course of the year, things got better and better and we have regained a healthy level of activity.”
The in-store arrival of Blazy’s highly acclaimed debut collection in March 2026, and of the Métiers d’Art collection two months later, should help sustain momentum in the first half of the year.
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Lagerfeld launched the Métiers d’Art shows in December 2002 to pay tribute to the craftsmanship of Chanel’s maisons d’art. Chanel counts 60 specialist suppliers and manufacturers. Eleven of them are based at 19M, Chanel’s hub on the outskirts of Paris, including the embroiderer Lesage, the feather and decorative flower maker Lemarié, goldsmith Goossens, milliner Maison Michel and shoemaker Massaro.
“The Métiers d’Art are now a solid pillar in how the brand operates because we see them contributing to the development of all the collections. They are present in haute couture, of course, and they are also present in other collections, to varying degrees,” Pavlovsky said. “It’s a way of talking about know-how — really the craftsmanship that defines our products and the assortments in our boutiques.”
Speculation is heating up this week around whether or not Chanel will launch a menswear category, fueled by the announcement on Saturday of A$AP Rocky as a new house ambassador. The American multi-hyphenate also stars alongside Margaret Qualley in a short film directed by Michel Gondry and released ahead of the show. In a past interview with Vogue Business in May 2023 and again in May 2025, Chanel global CEO Leena Nair dismissed the idea of expanding to the menswear category.
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On Tuesday, Pavlovsky was clear: “We don’t need to [launch a menswear line]. We’ve always had pieces in our collections that could be worn either by men or by women — mostly by women, but that men could borrow from women. We don’t do sizing for men. We demonstrated it again in October with our collaboration with [men’s luxury shirtmaker] Charvet, even though that was not the point. We’re in a world that is completely mixed, with no boundaries. So if men want to wear pieces from the collection, there is absolutely no problem.”
“The arrival of A$AP Rocky also offers a fresh take on our collections and that’s what’s interesting,” he said. “It’s not a way to tease the launch of a category. We’re happy with what we do and Matthieu feels this freedom of exploring quite broadly.”
