Matthieu Blazy

Matthieu Blazy has been Chanel's artistic director since 1 April 2025, the first designer hired from outside the house to hold that job since Karl Lagerfeld arrived in 1983. He was announced on 12 December 2024, spent a non-compete period completing his exit from Bottega Veneta, and showed his first Chanel collection, for Spring/Summer 2026, at the Grand Palais in Paris on 6 October 2025. The gap between announcement and appointment is easy to compress in hindsight into a single event; it was in fact a four-month handover, then a further six months of studio work before the public saw a stitch of it. (WWD; Yahoo/WWD; CNN)

He arrived at Chanel already known for a specific kind of authority: three years spent making Bottega Veneta look expensive by understatement rather than logo, and a habit of crediting the atelier's hands as loudly as his own name. Both instincts travel awkwardly to a house built on five decades of instantly legible codes — tweed, the quilted flap bag, the two-tone shoe, the camellia. What he has done with that tension, rather than resolve it, is the substance of the record below.

Paris, an interrupted plan to study archaeology, and Brussels

Blazy was born in Paris on 27 June 1984 to a French father, an art expert who worked at the Drouot auction house, and a Belgian mother, a historian and researcher; he grew up in the city's 14th arrondissement in what he has described as "a house of artists," with a model agent for a neighbour and a garden shared between several families. He found his way into fashion sideways, through magazines other people had thrown out — "I call it the trash education," he told AnOther — and had originally intended to study archaeology in the south of France before applying, at the last moment, to La Cambre in Brussels, one of the few fashion schools built around a five-year liberal-arts curriculum rather than a narrower technical one. (AnOther; Fantastic Man)

His graduate collection, built around the astronaut Claudie Haigneré, sat in front of a jury that included Raf Simons, who hired him on the spot as a menswear designer. Internships at Balenciaga under Nicolas Ghesquière and with John Galliano preceded it. In 2011 he moved to Maison Margiela — then still working under the founder's rule of anonymous authorship — where he designed pieces for the Artisanal line and the women's ready-to-wear show; it took until 2014, and a Margiela Artisanal collection widely praised in the press, for Vogue's Suzy Menkes to name him in print, writing that "you can't keep such a talent under wraps." Among the unattributed work from that period is the crystal-encrusted mask Kanye West wore on the 2013 Yeezus tour. (Fantastic Man; British Vogue; The Cut; Hypebeast)

In November 2014 he joined Phoebe Philo's team at Céline as senior designer on pre-collections, the least visible but commercially heaviest part of a luxury house's output, and stayed through the period widely credited with defining that decade's idea of intellectual minimalism. In August 2016 he followed Raf Simons again, this time to Calvin Klein as design director of women's ready-to-wear during Simons's brief, expensive tenure as the brand's chief creative officer; he left in 2019, when that project ended. (The Cut; The New York Times; Business of Fashion)

Bottega Veneta: restraint as a house language

Blazy joined Bottega Veneta in 2020 as design director of ready-to-wear, working under Daniel Lee, and was promoted to creative director with immediate effect on 15 November 2021 when Lee departed. Kering's chairman François-Henri Pinault cited his "wealth of experience and broad cultural background"; Bottega's then-CEO, Leo Rongone, called him "an extraordinarily talented individual." His first collection, for Fall 2022, was shown in Milan the following February. (Bottega Veneta, via GlobeNewswire; The New York Times)

He ran the house on a smaller design team than his predecessors and pushed decisions down toward the craftspeople actually making the clothes rather than concentrating them in a single studio hierarchy — "I like to work in teams," he has said of the approach. "It's not me facing products and giving opinions." The debut collection introduced what became his signature trick: calfskin printed and constructed to read, at a glance and even at a touch, as faded denim jeans or a cotton shirt, a trompe-l'œil that depended on Bottega's leather-working rather than disguising it. (The Fashionography; South China Morning Post)

Accessories became the clearest evidence of that philosophy in commercial form. The Kalimero bucket bag, introduced in 2022, and the Andiamo — Italian for "let's go" — that followed for Spring/Summer 2023, were both built from a single piece of leather in Bottega's intrecciato weave, the technique of hand-plaiting narrow leather strips into a woven surface that has been the house's identifying mark since the 1970s.

The Sardine, which followed for Spring 2024 with a sculptural handle shaped like its namesake fish, went further: by Fall/Winter 2024 the handle itself had been re-engineered from linked metal sections so that it moved like a swimming fish rather than a fixed handle. (Culted)

Blazy's Bottega Veneta also extended past the runway: he designed the house's Paris flagship on avenue Montaigne, which opened in September 2023, and its costumes for the Venice Dance Biennale that summer. In September 2023, Vanessa Friedman profiled him in The New York Times under the headline "The Magician of Milan," a label the trade press subsequently repeated as shorthand for a designer who had made a house associated with quiet wealth newly difficult to look away from. (Designboom; Culted)

His Spring/Summer 2025 collection showed in Milan on 21 September 2024 under the title "What would the kid in you want?" — a set of leather beanbags shaped like animals and clothes built around the "primal pull" of dressing as play rather than performance. Kering announced his departure for Chanel on 12 December 2024, the same day Chanel confirmed his appointment there, and named Louise Trotter, formerly of Carven, as his successor. Trotter arrived at the end of January 2025, but the Fall/Winter 2025 collection shown that February was Blazy's — he stayed to present it, and it is his last for the house. Trotter's own first Bottega collection was Spring/Summer 2026, shown in September 2025. (AnOther; FashionUnited)

Chanel: reducing the codes without discarding them

Chanel had gone without a permanent artistic director since Virginie Viard's June 2024 departure when it named Blazy on 12 December 2024. He began work on 1 April 2025 and spent the following six months building a studio — hiring, among others, Andrew Heather from Maison Margiela into the haute couture atelier — before his debut. (Yahoo/WWD)

That debut, Spring/Summer 2026 ready-to-wear, was shown at the newly restored Grand Palais under a set of suspended spheres referencing Saturn's rings and the view of Earth from orbit — an image the house tied to Gabrielle Chanel's own fascination with astronomy. The opening look, a cropped camellia-buttoned tweed jacket over wide trousers, echoed a silhouette Chanel herself was photographed wearing. Rather than restage archive pieces, Blazy said he had stripped the collection back: "I took out a lot of embroidery. I made things way more simple. In a lot of companies you think that you have to add embroideries in order to make something bombastic ... but I always saw the opposite." He has been explicit that he does not treat the house's identity as fixed to a short list of motifs — "why reduce Chanel to five codes? It doesn't make sense. Because it's not what she did" — and that he works from Chanel's written history rather than from repeated visits to the archive itself: "I'd rather have the story than the imagery." (Wallpaper*; AnOther)

Three further collections followed within a year: a haute couture debut in January 2026 built around bird imagery; ready-to-wear for Fall/Winter 2026, shown in Paris that March; and a second couture collection, in July 2026, that drew on fairy tales from Chanel's own library, its embroidery deliberately worked to look torn and re-mended. Of couture specifically he has said: "Chanel couture is not about the big 'wow.' ... If people think that couture is a big painting, I think maybe at Chanel it's more like a miniature — something that feels precious, but that you can also put in your pocket." (Malay Mail; WWD; AnOther)

Commercially, the appointment has been read as a rare instance of a creative reboot showing up quickly in a balance sheet. Chanel's 2025 revenue rose 2% at constant exchange rates, to $19.3 billion, reversing a 4.3% decline the year before, with the Americas — a market largely unaffected by the collection's later arrival elsewhere — growing 7.2%. When Blazy's debut collection reached stores in March 2026, demand outstripped supply in several cities, a phenomenon the fashion press labelled "Blazymania." As of September 2026, he remains Chanel's artistic director. (MarketScreener/Reuters; Vogue)

Reading and dating the work

Three houses in Blazy's career carry his authorship in ways a label alone will not tell you. At Maison Margiela between 2011 and 2014, the house's own anonymity rule means nothing on the garment identifies him individually; only outside reporting, not the tag, connects a specific piece to a specific hand. At Bottega Veneta, his runway seasons run from Fall 2022 through Fall/Winter 2025 — the last of them shown in February 2025, after his move to Chanel had already been announced and after Louise Trotter had arrived at the house. That overlap is the trap: Trotter was named in December 2024 and joined at the end of January 2025, but her own authorship does not begin until her Spring/Summer 2026 debut in September 2025. Anything in between is Blazy's, whatever the calendar suggests about who held the title. A season code or style number, not an appointment date, is what actually places a Bottega Veneta piece from that window.

At Chanel, the house did not change its tag design, hologram authenticity system or numbering convention at the change of creative director, unlike a rebrand such as Céline's removal of its accent in 2018 — so a label alone cannot distinguish a Blazy-era piece from a Viard-era one, or from the roughly ten months in which the house showed no artistic director's name at all. The reliable method is the same one that applies to any recent luxury garment: match the style number stamped on the authenticity card or the interior tag against the season it was shown, not the date it was purchased, since retail delivery for ready-to-wear typically runs two to five months behind the runway and couture longer still.

References

• WWD. "BREAKING: Chanel Picks Matthieu Blazy as New Creative Director." 12 December 2024.
• WWD/Yahoo. "Matthieu Blazy Is Quietly Building His Team at Chanel." 2025.
• CNN. "Matthieu Blazy: Chanel's new designer ... debuts at Paris Fashion Week." 7 October 2025.
• AnOther. "Chanel's Matthieu Blazy: 'I Was Never Not Interested in Fashion.'" 26 February 2026.
• Fantastic Man. "Matthieu Blazy."
• Suzy Menkes. "At Margiela, A Star Is Born." British Vogue, 9 July 2014.
• Véronique Hyland. "The Most Famous Designer You've Never Heard Of." The Cut, 10 July 2014.
• Hypebeast. "Ye's Maison Margiela 'Yeezus' Tour Mask Is On Sale for $50,000 USD." 14 April 2023.
• Véronique Hyland. "Report: Matthieu Blazy Has Joined Céline." The Cut, 20 November 2014.
• Matthew Schneier. "Can Raf Simons Reinvent Calvin Klein?" The New York Times, 9 February 2017.
• Business of Fashion. "Calvin Klein Set to Hire a New Creative Lead." 10 January 2019.
• Bottega Veneta, via GlobeNewswire. "Bottega Veneta appoints Matthieu Blazy as Creative Director." 15 November 2021.
• Jessica Testa. "Bottega Veneta Has a New Designer." The New York Times, 15 November 2021.
• The Fashionography. "Matthieu Blazy: 'We Don't Compromise on What We Show.'"
• South China Morning Post. "Milan Fashion Week: Bottega Veneta's ingenious trompe l'oeil for its spring/summer 2023 collection." 2022.
• Culted. "The 10 Bottega Veneta bags Matthieu Blazy worked overtime for."
• Designboom. "Industrial glass blocks engulf Bottega Veneta's avenue Montaigne flagship store in Paris." 27 September 2023.
• Culted. "Matthieu Blazy Designs Bottega Veneta's Costumes for Biennale Danza." 31 July 2023.
• AnOther. "Bottega Veneta Asks, 'What Would the Kid in You Want?'" September 2024.
• FashionUnited. "Bottega Veneta announces creative transition: Louise Trotter to succeed Matthieu Blazy." 12 December 2024.
• Wallpaper*. "Matthieu Blazy makes a joyful Chanel debut: 'I want to have fun.'" October 2025.
• Malay Mail. "Chanel takes flight: Blazy's bird-inspired couture lands in Paris." 28 January 2026.
• WWD. "Chanel Fall 2026 Ready-to-Wear Runway, Fashion Show & Collection Review." March 2026.
• AnOther. "Matthieu Blazy's Chanel Haute Couture Was a Fairytale." July 2026.
• Reuters, via MarketScreener. "Chanel returns to growth as Blazy's designs win over new shoppers." 19 May 2026.
• Alexandra Hildreth. "In New York, Customers Are Going Coco for Matthieu Blazy's Chanel." Vogue, 13 March 2026.