Chanel

Of the eight luxury houses with a dedicated publishing imprint in 2026, only one — Louis Vuitton — has run one continuously for more than two decades, starting with a seven-volume City Guides boxed set in a handmade leather sleeve in 1998. Every other operation on the map below — Hermès Éditeur, Chanel via Steidl, Dior via Assouline and Rizzoli, Prada, Bottega Veneta, Saint Laurent Rive Droite, Miu Miu, Burberry and now Coach — is younger, in most cases by fifteen years or more. The story of luxury publishing imprints in 2026 is how an industry that spent the 2010s collapsing into Instagram squares spent the 2020s rebuilding itself around printed objects: monographs, magazines, literary salons, micro-books on bag charms. ...

Matthieu Blazy’s eighteen-month walk from Bottega Veneta to Chanel produced a USD 19.3 billion house’s first “high single-digit” growth quarter — and three Margiela-Margiela-Simons stops on a single CV that Leena Nair calls “one of the most talented designers in the world.” The Matthieu Blazy career, traced strictly by appointment date, runs through six houses in nineteen years: Raf Simons’s independent label in 2007, Maison Margiela couture from 2010, Celine under Phoebe Philo from 2014, Calvin Klein 205W39NYC under Simons again from 2016, Bottega Veneta from 2020, and Chanel from December 2024. The pattern matters because almost no other working creative director has been inside that many of the houses now defining 2026 womenswear — and none of them sits, today, on Chanel’s revenue. ...

Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel debut on the Grande Plage in Biarritz on 28 April 2026 was the first cruise show in the Lagerfeld-era format to refuse a global destination — and one week later the house entered the Lyst Index at #1, the first time in the ranking’s history Chanel had appeared on it at all. Read in isolation, the blazy chanel biarritz collection is a 79-look show staged at the 1929 Casino Municipal for two audiences totalling more than 900 guests, with Nicole Kidman in the front row and A$AP Rocky performing at the after-party. Read together with the September 2025 acquisition of 23 Rue Cambon for €118 million ($133 million) and the Q1 2026 Lyst recalibration, it is something else: the most coherent brand-strategy moment any European fashion house has produced in this cycle, and the clearest argument yet that Chanel — privately held, debt-free, and unconstrained by the quarterly drumbeat that governs LVMH and Kering — intends to spend the next decade behaving differently from the conglomerates around it. ...