Matthieu Blazy - Designer, Creative Director of Chanel

[Grets]

 

[PDFSD]

her face tells me she loves it

 

[eugenius]

Like Chanel said: “Take one thing off.” I think a lot of his looks would benefit if he really just took ONE feature off his clothes. I bet this outfit would look better if he removed the white..stuff..on her blouse.

 

[PDFSD]

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PUCK​

Fashion’s Hero of the Year Is…​

Despite some initial skepticism (she’s from H.R.—and Unilever?!), Chanel C.E.O. Leena Nair has shrewdly solidified her power base in a family-owned company dominated by lifers, and established a financial model that has become the envy of the industry.
Inner Circle Exclusive

From Nair’s earliest days in the job, she has made steady efforts to manage around the challenge—focusing on steady, non-trend-driven business units like accessories, while creating a professional culture within a private family business. Photo: Jason Alden/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Lauren Sherman
December 18, 2025

The New York launch party for EE72, Edward Enninful’s publishing oddity, took place in September at Cut, the tacky restaurant beneath the Four Seasons Downtown in Tribeca. Overall, it was an unremarkable event, despite the A++ guest list. I remember dutifully completing two loops around the oddly elongated space, but didn’t notice any of Enninful’s numerous celebrity friends who would pass through that evening, including cover star Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey, and exercise hounds Jeff and Lauren Bezos. I did, however, notice the entrance of Chanel C.E.O. Leena Nair.
In fact, everyone seemed to note her arrival. The crowds parted, Charlton Heston–style, as she appeared in a shimmery black knit dress, a pair of tango shoes, and a quilted clutch. I could have sworn it was a white suit, because she was so magnetic. A self-fact-check showed that my memory had betrayed me, but you get the idea.
Fashion industry C.E.O.s aren’t usually this magnetic. They’re usually men, for starters, and rarely command any sort of presence. Even the most pompous or gregarious or good-looking ones are, at the end of the day, insecure and often surprisingly provincial (navy) suits. The fashion industry is still largely a family business, after all, and luxury houses are generally clandestine, anachronistic, and messy fiefdoms that value discretion and loyalty over operational excellence and performance management. There are exceptions—look at what Bernard Arnault has built, even if it’s still both a large-cap public company and family-controlled; Domenico De Sole and Pierre-Yves Roussel come to mind, too.

But the Wertheimer family’s appointment of Nair, in 2022, signaled the dawn of a transition. Like Luca de Meo at Kering, Nair was a fashion outsider armed with global public company expertise alongside a fetish for discipline. This was probably inevitable. Fashion is no longer a cloistered sector but rather a massive business that drives a large swath of the global economy. The market for personal luxury goods alone will reach €358 billion in 2025. It’s also increasingly an industry under duress and in search of new ideas.

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Blazy of Glory​

I’ll admit that I wasn’t so impressed when the Wertheimers hired Nair. I really liked her predecessor, Gap and L’Oréal alum Maureen Chiquet, who reportedly clashed with the family over the succession plan for Karl Lagerfeld—the company’s creative director for nearly 40 years, until his death in 2019. What would an H.R. exec from Unilever, I wondered, know about running a luxury goods business?
For what it’s worth, Chanel was in pretty good shape when Nair arrived. In the year prior, the brand’s annual revenue had bounced back from its pandemic low and was up 23 percent from 2019. But it was also becoming clear that the tremendous growth of the luxury goods market was unsustainable for all the obvious reasons—the speedy rise of the online secondhand market, the lack of design innovation, closet capacity, sheer boredom, and a latent recession in China.
From Nair’s earliest days in the job, I heard stories about her steady efforts to manage around the challenge—focusing on steady, non-trend-driven business units like accessories, while creating a professional culture within a private family business.
She reorganized the company to matrix the once heavily siloed fashion, beauty, watches, and jewelry units without impacting quality.
She also had to manage—and in some cases, manage out—consigliere-type execs who had stuck around for decades, sometimes by doing good work, other times by playing politics. Nair also possessed an uncanny ability to remember pretty much everyone’s name; she said hi to people in the bathroom; in a nasty industry, she was exceedingly approachable.

Revenues were up 17 percent year-over-year in 2022, and 16 percent in 2023, to almost $20 billion, making Chanel second only to Louis Vuitton in terms of single-brand scale.
After the departure of stopgap creative director Virginie Viard in June 2024, there was a question of whether Chanel was truly set up for the future.
The idea, I heard from people inside the organization, was to hire a creative director who would be woven into the fabric of Chanel, à la Hermès, rather than the image of Chanel being woven by them.

The appointment of Matthieu Blazy at the end of 2024, nearly six months after Viard’s exit, showed that the company was interested in the future, not the past. Blazy had been influential behind the scenes—designing Margiela, working for Raf Simons and Pieter Mulier—but this level of spotlight was still new. It was a risk.
The only way someone like Blazy gets hired is if the people doing the hiring are thoughtful about it, and don’t let their own egos get in the way.
Would he have been the choice if Nair hadn’t set the tone at the top? Who knows? In the end, Blazy delivered far more than what was expected of him. He reset the expectation of what a fashion show should be, calling back to a time when collections were not simply merchandising vehicles but rather something to appreciate and relish. Dopamine is a powerful hormone, and fashion’s levels have been plummeting for a while.
I would love to believe that we are on the precipice of a major rebound in luxury spending, but fashion’s place in the culture has shifted.

People now spend their time and capital on other avocations, and the most successful executives in the industry are the ones who understand this transition. Nair didn’t by any means save Chanel, but I’m not sure where the company would be without her.

 

[Caffeine]

without impacting quality

 

[FashionPower]

Go tell that to the customers who spent 5k to get glued sequins CC logo jackets from a Metiers D'art collection (they even dared to disguise the production cost cutting method as "innovative") and CHANEL22 bags with edges that started to peel after 30 minutes of wearing

 

[Frederic01]

In the end, Blazy delivered far more than what was expected of him.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

This opinion piece has to be satire! Never laughed so hard in my entire life than I did reading this!

She is usually so spot on and on the ball with her pieces, it’s so sad. She was obviously paid by Chanel to write this fluff piece, or given some kind of perks behind the scenes.

Shame on you Lauren Sherman! Total loss of respect for you after reading this!

 

[RosesAreRed]

Puck was my secret source, then became my hate read, and now it's kind of jumping the shark. It's giving propaganda. In 2025, in order to hit, you need to have all things aligned – press, social media, clients – they all need to be on your side. Just having press blasting the positivity would not change one simple fact – we all have our own eyes.

 

[RosesAreRed]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

This opinion piece has to be satire! Never laughed so hard in my entire life than I did reading this!

She is usually so spot on and on the ball with her pieces, it’s so sad. She was obviously paid by Chanel to write this fluff piece, or given some kind of perks behind the scenes.

Shame on you Lauren Sherman! Total loss of respect for you after reading this!

Remember when she said that Hearst would do magic at Chanel (post Chloe)? Spot on

 

[Grets]

Under Leena Nair the Chanel price increases continued, the quality declined, the packaging cheapened, she ousted many women who worked at the company for decades, including VV, she hired one of the most mediocre designers of this generation to lead the brand - bLAzy, who is turning Chanel into a fast fashion copy-&-paste brand with no vision, a luxury Zara.

 

[style_expert]

Puck was my secret source, then became my hate read, and now it's kind of jumping the shark. It's giving propaganda. In 2025, in order to hit, you need to have all things aligned – press, social media, clients – they all need to be on your side. Just having press blasting the positivity would not change one simple fact – we all have our own eyes.

Same, really! Try listening to Lauren’s podcast if you need a cringe moment.
She’s a columnist at best, but as I recently already posted somewhere she’s too much of a fangirl to be a true journalist.
I don’t know, maybe she never claimed to be one.

Also, I have reasons to think she’s closely reading here, because some of the “scoops” or rumors were first reported by (valued!) TFS members and then appeared in her pieces a few days later…