A Heritage Essay · No. 05

Coco ChanelThe House & Its Designers

An orphan from a Loire-valley poorhouse, a hat shop on the rue Cambon, the perfume that built an empire, and the German designer who kept the house in motion for thirty-six years.

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An Introduction

The most famous proper noun in twentieth-century fashion belonged, for most of its first decade, to a woman the French press refused to acknowledge.

Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was born on the nineteenth of August, 1883, in a Loire-valley poorhouse in the town of Saumur, the second of five children of an unmarried itinerant peddler and a laundrywoman who died of bronchitis when Gabrielle was eleven. Her father, who never claimed any of the children as his own, left them at the door of a Cistercian convent called Aubazine, and never came back. Gabrielle spent the next seven years of her life being raised by nuns inside the abbey's high stone walls, learning to sew, learning to keep her head down, and looking — every Sunday — at the black-and-white tiled floor of the chapel, and the rose-window stained glass that, fifty years later, every fashion historian would notice in her bag clasps, her brooches, her jewellery, and the interlocking C's that became the most famous logo in twentieth-century luxury.

What followed, across the next eighty-eight years of her life, is among the most operatic stories any woman in the modern luxury industry has ever lived: a cabaret-singing chapter as "Coco," a hat shop financed by a wealthy lover, a Belle Époque liberation of the female body from corsetry, a perfume that became the financial bedrock of the entire enterprise, a partnership with a Jewish industrialist named Pierre Wertheimer that lasted a hundred and one years and is still in place today, a wartime collaboration that was hushed up by a Churchill phone call, a comeback at the age of seventy-one, a quilted black bag launched the following winter, and a death — in a small suite at the Hôtel Ritz — on a Sunday afternoon in January 1971, with the next collection unfinished on the rail outside her room.

What follows is the story in two chapters: the house she built, and the designers who, after she was gone, were asked to translate it for the rest of the century.

An editorial feature

— Chapter One —

The House

A peddler's daughter, a perfume, a war, a quilted bag, and the family that has owned the company for one hundred and one years.

Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel · 1883 – 1971 · Saumur poorhouse to the rue Cambon

1883

Aubazine.

Gabrielle Chanel arrived in this world owing nothing to anyone. Her mother, Jeanne Devolle, was an unmarried laundrywoman. Her father, Albert Chanel, was a market-stall peddler who travelled the Auvergne selling work shirts and corsets out of the back of a cart and was absent for the births of all five of his children. When Jeanne died in February 1895, in a single rented room in Brive-la-Gaillarde, Albert took the three boys to a farm and put them to work as labourers, and took the two girls — Gabrielle, eleven, and her younger sister Antoinette, eight — to the Cistercian convent at Aubazine, signed them in, and rode out of their lives.

The convent was an austere medieval foundation high above the Corrèze valley, run by nuns who taught the orphans to sew and to keep their hair short and their habits clean. The architecture was the first design language Gabrielle absorbed: black and white floors, white plastered walls, geometric stained glass, the rosary's interlocking circles. Every Chanel scholar — Edmonde Charles-Roux, Justine Picardie, Hal Vaughan, the Acquired hosts — has read these walls into the later clothes. Whether or not Chanel ever spoke openly about Aubazine (she barely did; she invented an entirely different childhood for the press, full of wealthy aunts in the South), the geometry of the orphanage is the geometry of the brand.

At eighteen, she left Aubazine for a finishing school in Moulins. At twenty-one, she was a shop assistant in a tailor's by day and a cabaret singer by night, where the regulars taught her a song called Qui qu'a vu Coco? and gave her the nickname that, eventually, was painted on the door at 31 rue Cambon.

Aubazine convent · Moulins · the name "Coco" · 1883 – 1909

21 rue Cambon · Paris · the first hat shop

1910

A hat shop, financed by a lover.

The man who put up the money for the first shop was Étienne Balsan, a wealthy young textile-heir-turned-cavalry-officer who Gabrielle had met at a horse-racing track in Vichy. She moved into Balsan's country house, the Château de Royallieu near Compiègne, in 1906, and lived there for three years as something between a kept woman and a guest, designing hats for Balsan's hunting friends in her spare time. The hats — small, severe, with single feathers — were strikingly different from the ostrich-plumed Belle Époque confections of the period. They sold.

In 1909, Balsan let her use his Paris apartment at 160 Boulevard Malesherbes to start a millinery business on the side. It was at Balsan's apartment that she met Arthur "Boy" Capel, an English polo-playing coal merchant who would become the single most important person in her adult life. Capel — wealthy, well-connected, a man Chanel later said she had truly loved — financed the lease on a small ground-floor shop at 21 rue Cambon, in the first arrondissement of Paris, in 1910. The sign read Chanel Modes. Two years later she opened a boutique in Deauville. By 1915, with the First World War in its second year and Paris women already shifting to functional clothing because their husbands were dead at the front, Chanel had a third boutique in Biarritz selling jersey sportswear that no proper couture house would have manufactured the year before.

Boy Capel died in a car crash in the South of France on the twenty-second of December, 1919. The papers reported it as an accident with a tyre on a road outside Cannes. Chanel had a black-painted bedroom installed in her Paris apartment as mourning. She wore black for the rest of her life. She never married anyone.

Étienne Balsan · Boy Capel · 21 rue Cambon · 1909 – 1919

1921

The number five.

In the spring of 1920, Chanel was introduced through her Russian aristocratic connections to a Franco-Russian perfumer named Ernest Beaux who had previously worked for the Tsars at the perfume house A. Rallet & Co. in Moscow. Beaux, exiled by the revolution, was working in Grasse. Chanel told him she wanted a perfume that did not smell like any single flower — she wanted, she said, "a woman's perfume, with the scent of a woman." Beaux composed ten samples and laid them out in a row. Chanel chose the fifth. She named it Chanel No. 5 and launched it in 1921 in a chemist's-bottle of squared-off glass at her boutique in Cannes, at a deliberately high price point.

The fragrance was an immediate phenomenon. The combination of aldehydes — a new class of synthetic compounds that gave the perfume its abstract, non-floral signature — made it unlike anything on the market. Within five years it was the bestselling fragrance in France. Within a decade it was generating revenue at multiples of the couture business. Within forty years Marilyn Monroe would tell Life magazine that the only thing she wore to bed was a few drops of it, and that single quote would extend the fragrance's commercial life by another half century.

Chanel No. 5 has, by every credible account, been the most lucrative single product in the history of the modern fashion industry. It is also, structurally, the financial bedrock on which everything else at the house has been built — the dresses, the bags, the comeback, the Wertheimer family's billion-dollar fortune. Without No. 5, there is no modern Chanel.

Ernest Beaux · the fifth sample · Cannes · 1921

Chanel No. 5 · the chemist's-bottle silhouette · 1921

May 19, 1924 · Hippodrome de Saint-Cloud

The horse race where Chanel met its hundred-year partner.

Pierre Wertheimer · the man who took No. 5 global · 1924

1924

The deal Coco would spend the next thirty years regretting.

By 1924, No. 5 was selling faster than Chanel's small bottling operation could keep up with. She was introduced — at the Longchamp racetrack, by her friend Théophile Bader, who founded Galeries Lafayette — to a man named Pierre Wertheimer, the head of Bourjois, then France's largest cosmetics company. Wertheimer proposed a deal: Bourjois would take over the manufacturing, distribution, and marketing of Chanel No. 5 globally, in exchange for seventy percent of the profits. Bader would receive twenty percent as a finder's fee. Chanel would receive ten percent and the use of her name on the product.

She signed. The deal was, by the standards of the moment, a fair one — Wertheimer's organisation was vastly larger and better-capitalised than anything Chanel could have built herself, and the partnership turned No. 5 into a global commercial juggernaut within a decade. But as the perfume's profits exploded across the 1930s and into the 1950s, Chanel grew increasingly resentful that the family who controlled the perfume — wealthy, urbane, and (a fact that mattered, in interwar Paris) Jewish — were earning the lion's share of the money her own name was generating.

She would spend the next thirty years trying, through every legal and personal channel available, to break the deal. None of the attempts worked. The Wertheimers, even today, still own the house. Pierre's grandsons — Alain and Gérard Wertheimer, both in their seventies, both based in New York — are, between them, the controlling shareholders of Chanel S.A. and consistently rank among the twenty wealthiest people in the world. The 1924 deal that Coco signed at a Paris racetrack is the single most important commercial event in the history of the house.

Théophile Bader · Pierre Wertheimer · Bourjois · seventy/twenty/ten · 1924

1926

The Little Black Dress.

In October 1926, the American edition of Vogue published a small line drawing of a simple, knee-length, long-sleeved black crêpe-de-Chine dress designed by Chanel. The accompanying caption was almost casual: the editors compared the dress to a Ford automobile, suggested it was a uniform any modern woman could wear, and predicted it would become "a sort of uniform for all women of taste." The dress had no decoration, no pleats, no embellishment. It was knee-length. It was black. It was, before Chanel, a colour traditionally reserved in Western fashion for funerals and servants. After Chanel — after that one Vogue sketch — it became the most quietly radical garment of the twentieth century.

The cumulative effect of Chanel's 1920s output was an unwinding of the corseted, ornamented, hourglass-silhouetted Belle Époque body. She used jersey — a fabric previously thought too cheap and athletic for couture. She cut her dresses straight. She put pockets in them, so women could carry things. She invented the matching jacket-and-skirt suit. She popularised costume jewellery and made it acceptable to wear pearls during the day. She bobbed her own hair, and within months the modern hairdressing industry of Paris bobbed every wealthy woman in it. She borrowed from menswear — the cardigan, the sailor's striped jersey, the wristwatch. The cumulative effect was the modern wardrobe: practical, monochromatic, jersey-based, and made for a body that was no longer expected to faint inside a corset.

By 1935, Chanel employed four thousand workers across her Paris ateliers. The British Vogue editor, Madge Garland, called her, simply, "the inventor of the way modern women dress." It was not hyperbole.

Vogue · October 1926 · the Ford-of-fashion · the LBD

Vogue · October 1926 · the dress they compared to a Ford

“ I gave women a sense of freedom; I gave them back their bodies; bodies that were drenched in sweat, due to fashion's finery, lace, corsets, underclothes, padding.

— Gabrielle Chanel

Paris · 1939 – 1945 · the closure, the Ritz, the years no biographer settles

1939

The war years no biographer ever fully settles.

On the second of September, 1939, the day after Germany invaded Poland and one day before France declared war, Coco Chanel closed the rue Cambon couture house. She kept only the perfume boutique and the accessories shop open. The reasons she gave at the time — that there was no demand for couture in wartime, that her workers were better off at home — were, on their face, reasonable. The reasons that later historians, particularly Hal Vaughan in his 2011 book Sleeping with the Enemy, have argued were also operative are darker, and have never been fully resolved.

During the occupation, Chanel moved into the Hôtel Ritz on the Place Vendôme — a hotel that the Nazi high command had also taken over — and lived there with a German officer named Hans Günther von Dincklage, known as "Spatz," a fluent French-speaker and Abwehr intelligence operative who was thirteen years her junior. She used her relationship with Spatz to try to invoke the Nazi anti-Jewish property laws — the so-called Aryanisation statutes — to seize the Parfums Chanel perfume operation back from the Wertheimer family, who had by then fled to the United States. The attempt failed: Pierre Wertheimer had pre-emptively transferred ownership of the perfume company to a Christian French industrialist named Félix Amiot before fleeing, and the Wertheimers reclaimed full control of the company after the war.

French intelligence files later showed that Chanel was given the operational code-name "Westminster" by the Abwehr (a reference to her former lover, the Duke of Westminster) and was sent to Madrid in 1943 on what appears to have been a fringe effort to broker a separate peace between Britain and Germany. The mission, called Operation Modellhut ("Operation Model Hat"), came to nothing. After the liberation of Paris in August 1944, the French resistance briefly detained Chanel. She was released within hours. The widely-circulated explanation, attributed to one of her biographers, is that Winston Churchill — a personal friend, going back to her affair with the Duke of Westminster in the 1920s — intervened on her behalf. The exact mechanism has never been documented.

Chanel relocated to Switzerland and lived in Lausanne for the next nine years. She did not show a collection in Paris between 1939 and 1954. The official archive of the brand has, for most of the eighty years since, declined to expand on this period.

Hôtel Ritz · Operation Modellhut · Hal Vaughan · the unresolved chapter

1954

The comeback at seventy-one.

On the fifth of February, 1954, in the salon on the rue Cambon, Chanel showed her first collection in fifteen years. She was seventy-one years old. The French press was, by every account, brutal — French journalists had not forgotten the war, and reviewed the collection as a tired old woman's nostalgia. The American press, which had less institutional memory of 1940s Paris, was more receptive. Within two years, the look she re-introduced — soft tweed jacket with a chain-weighted hem, knee-length matching skirt, blouse-and-pearls combination, two-tone slingback shoe — was the dominant wardrobe of every well-dressed woman over thirty-five in the United States.

The comeback was financed by Pierre Wertheimer. By 1954, Wertheimer's seventy percent of the perfume business had made him one of the wealthiest men in France. He understood, well before Chanel did, that the couture line did not need to be commercially successful to be commercially valuable: every Chanel runway, every magazine cover, every Jacqueline Kennedy in a pink boucle suit, every Marilyn Monroe quote about No. 5 — was, in the larger picture, an unbroken advertisement for the perfume that paid for everything. He paid the bills at Avenue Montaigne and let Chanel design. She, in turn, never had to look at a balance sheet again. The arrangement worked perfectly until her death.

February 5, 1954 · the tweed suit · the comeback · 71 years old

Coco Chanel · the rue Cambon mirrored staircase · 1954

February 1955 · the 2.55 · the quilted bag with the chain strap

February 1955

2.55.

In February of 1955, twelve months after the comeback collection, Chanel released a small quilted handbag in black lambskin with a long thin chain strap. She gave it no name beyond the date of its release. The Mademoiselle Lock — a small horizontal rectangular clasp on the front — was, according to legend, derived from the latches of the storage cabinets at Aubazine. The quilting was, again according to the brand's later marketing, a memory of the jackets she had seen on stable boys at Étienne Balsan's stud farm forty-five years earlier. The chain strap was the radical part: until that moment, every couture handbag carried by every well-dressed woman in Paris had been carried in the hand, leaving the woman one-handed. Chanel's chain gave the woman both hands back. She lit a cigarette with one of them.

The bag — known forever as the 2.55, for February 1955 — sold for a high price and continued to sell at a high price for the rest of her life. It was, in cumulative dollar terms, the single most successful handbag any house had launched up to that point. It would, three decades later, be re-engineered by Karl Lagerfeld with a double-C clasp instead of the Mademoiselle Lock and re-released as the Chanel Classic Flap — at which point it became, and has remained, the most-resold bag on the modern secondary market.

The original 2.55, with the Mademoiselle Lock, is still made today and is, among collectors, the purer object. The Lagerfeld-re-engineered Classic Flap is the one most modern owners actually own.

The 2.55 · Mademoiselle Lock · the chain · Aubazine

Chanel in her last decade · the mirrored staircase at 31 rue Cambon

January 10, 1971

The Ritz, a Sunday afternoon.

Coco Chanel died on a Sunday afternoon in the small suite on the third floor of the Hôtel Ritz where she had lived, on and off, for the previous three decades. She was eighty-seven. The next collection was on the rail in the workroom one floor below the suite — she had been fitting it the previous morning. She left a fortune of unclear magnitude to her servants and to relatives whose existence she had largely denied. The funeral was held at the Église de la Madeleine. The principal mourners, in the front row, were her models, wearing the suits from the unfinished collection.

For the next twelve years, the house was run by a rotating committee of three of her former assistants — Gaston Berthelot, Yvonne Dudel, and Jean Cazaubon — none of whom were granted the title "creative director" and none of whom were permitted to materially change the silhouette Chanel had established in 1954. The collections were, by every credible report, faithful and dull. The Wertheimers, by then represented by Pierre's grandson Alain — who had assumed control of the family business after his father Jacques's death in 1996 — watched the brand drift into nostalgic irrelevance through the 1970s and quietly began looking for a designer who could re-translate it.

In 1983, after twelve years of declining cultural relevance, Alain Wertheimer hired Karl Lagerfeld. The hire was, in its time, controversial. Lagerfeld was a German, working at Fendi in Rome and at Chloé in Paris. He had never worked at Chanel. He was, by 1983, fifty years old and had never been the lead designer at a heritage Paris house. He stayed for thirty-six years.

Hôtel Ritz · January 10, 1971 · the suite on the third floor · the Madeleine

1983

Karl arrives. He will stay for thirty-six years and re-make the house in his own image.

1983

Karl Lagerfeld reinvents an estate brand.

Karl Lagerfeld was, when he arrived at the rue Cambon in 1983, a working designer in the Paris fashion industry with a German accent, a high white ponytail, a starched collar, and a body of work — Fendi, Chloé, Krizia — that no one in the heritage couture world considered serious. He had spent the previous twenty years quietly building an enormous private library and the most rigorous fashion-historical knowledge of anyone of his generation. He understood, the moment he arrived at Chanel, what the previous twelve years of post-Coco committee design had missed: the brand's vocabulary — the tweed, the chains, the camellia, the pearls, the interlocking C's, the Mademoiselle Lock — was a set of trademarks that, properly amplified, would self-perpetuate forever. He spent the next thirty-six years amplifying them.

His first collection, in October 1983, kept every Coco signature and elevated them to operatic scale. He shortened the tweed jacket. He widened the lapel. He doubled the chain on the bag — turning Coco's 2.55 into the bigger, harder, double-C-clasped, leather-and-chain-interwoven Classic Flap that became, almost immediately, the most-resold bag on the global secondary market. He poured the quilted Chanel signature onto belts, boots, ski jackets, surfboards, Walkmans, and (years later) basketballs. He made Inès de la Fressange the house's first salaried muse, then sacked her, then hired Claudia Schiffer and Linda Evangelista, then Vanessa Paradis, then Kate Moss, then Cara Delevingne, then Kristen Stewart, then Lily-Rose Depp. Each was the face of the house for the seven seasons it took for her to age into thirty-three.

Across his thirty-six years, Lagerfeld designed fourteen collections per year for Chanel — two ready-to-wear, two haute couture, two métiers d'art, six pre-collections, plus the resort and cruise shows — while simultaneously running Fendi (where he stayed for fifty-four years, the longest creative-director tenure in fashion history) and his own self-named house. His pace was inhuman. His output was inhuman. The Wertheimers, watching the perfume revenue and the leather-goods revenue go up in lockstep with the runway theatre, paid him whatever he wanted and let him do whatever he wanted forever. He delivered the brand's largest commercial decade — the 2000s — and the second-largest — the 2010s — in the same uninterrupted stretch.

Karl Lagerfeld · 1983 – 2019 · the double-C, the chain, the operatic scale

Karl Lagerfeld · the high white ponytail, the black sunglasses, the starched collar

The Grand Palais · the runway that became an opera house · 2005 – 2019

2005

The Grand Palais theatre.

Beginning in 2005, Lagerfeld moved his Chanel ready-to-wear shows into the soaring iron-and-glass nave of the Grand Palais on the Champs-Élysées and began building runway sets that were, even by Paris fashion standards, ridiculous. He built a Chanel-branded supermarket inside the Grand Palais (Fall 2014). He built a Chanel-branded airport terminal, complete with departure boards and roller bags (Spring 2016). He built a Chanel-branded casino (Fall 2015), a Chanel-branded brasserie, a Chanel-branded protest march (Spring 2015, the most-criticised of the set), a Chanel-branded rocket-launch tower (Fall 2017), a Chanel-branded waterfall (Spring 2018), and a Chanel-branded beach with real sand and real lapping water (Spring 2019, his last).

The shows were, more than the clothes, the cultural product. They sold the front row to celebrities and the back to influencers, they fed Instagram for the entire week of Paris Fashion Week, and they trained an entire generation of consumers to associate the word "Chanel" with cinematic spectacle rather than with the clothes themselves. The clothes, by this point, were almost beside the point. The bags, the small leather goods, the perfumes, and the cosmetics — the products people actually bought — sold in volumes that, by the mid-2010s, made Chanel one of the three or four most valuable privately-held luxury brands in the world.

Across this entire period, the Wertheimer family — Alain in Paris, Gérard in Geneva — never gave a single press interview. They published no investor disclosures. They never put the company up for sale. The financial scale of the business, when it was first voluntarily disclosed in 2018 for the first time in the brand's history, was twelve billion dollars of annual revenue. By 2024, post-pandemic, that figure had grown to roughly twenty billion.

Grand Palais · 2005 – 2019 · supermarket, airport, casino, beach

Jennie of Blackpink in vintage Lagerfeld-era Chanel · Met Gala 2023

February 19, 2019

Karl dies. The house goes quiet.

Karl Lagerfeld died of pancreatic cancer in a Paris hospital on a Tuesday morning, two days before he was scheduled to present the Fall 2019 collection. He was eighty-five. He had told no one outside a small circle of his illness. The Pre-Fall 2019 show, which had taken place in New York three months earlier, had gone on without him on stage — the first show in thirty-six years he had not personally bowed at. The Fall 2019 show went on as planned in his absence, with a minute of silence and Cara Delevingne, David Bowie's Heroes, and a closing tribute by his longtime studio director, a woman named Virginie Viard. Viard had been at his side since 1987, first at Chloé and then at Chanel for thirty-two of the thirty-six years. She had, in practical terms, co-directed the house with him for at least the last decade. Alain Wertheimer named her the creative director within the week of Karl's death.

Viard's five-year tenure (2019 – 2024) was, in many ways, exactly what the brand needed. After the Lagerfeld era's operatic scale, she pulled the volume down by half. The shows got smaller. The sets got simpler. The clothes got more wearable. The 2.55 and the Classic Flap kept selling. The perfume kept selling. The Met Gala still wore Chanel (Jennie of Blackpink, opposite, wore a Lagerfeld-era vintage piece in 2023 — a small artefact of the brand's archive being mined by the K-pop generation that had grown up on it). Viard did the job the Wertheimers had hired her to do: she kept the cash machine running while the company decided what to do next.

In June 2024, the company announced she was leaving. In December 2024, after six months of one of the most-watched creative-director searches in fashion-industry history, the company announced her successor: Matthieu Blazy, who had spent the previous three years rebuilding Bottega Veneta into one of the most-talked-about houses in luxury, and who, before Bottega, had worked under Raf Simons at Maison Margiela, Calvin Klein, and Dior. Blazy debuted his first Chanel collection in October 2025.

Karl's death · Virginie Viard · Matthieu Blazy · the Bottega hire

Today

Two brothers in their seventies, in Paris and Geneva, own the house outright and have never given a press interview.

2024

The Wertheimers, still private, still in control.

Alain Wertheimer is seventy-six. Gérard Wertheimer is seventy-four. Together they own, between them, one hundred percent of Chanel S.A., a privately-held luxury holding company headquartered in London for tax purposes. The Wertheimer family — Pierre's descendants — have held the controlling stake since 1924, weathered the 1940s Aryanisation attempt by passing the company to a Christian intermediary, reclaimed it after the war, financed Coco's comeback in 1954, kept her on a generous salary until her death, ran the house through twelve dull years with a committee of her former assistants, hired Lagerfeld in 1983, kept Lagerfeld for thirty-six years, named Viard within a week of his death, replaced Viard with Blazy in 2024, and along the way built the largest single fortune in French fashion outside of LVMH.

Bloomberg's billionaire index, in early 2026, listed the brothers' combined net worth at roughly seventy billion dollars. Chanel itself, by every credible estimate, would be worth somewhere between one hundred and one hundred and fifty billion dollars if it ever went public. The brothers have repeatedly stated, in the small handful of public communications they have ever issued, that the company will not go public, will not be sold, and will be handed to the next generation of the family intact.

The financial scale is, in many ways, the answer to the question of why Chanel has been able to survive three creative directors in seven years without losing meaningful market share. The perfume — Coco's perfume, the one Pierre Wertheimer bought seventy percent of in 1924 — is still, a century on, the single largest fragrance business in the world. The leather goods, anchored by the Classic Flap that Lagerfeld engineered out of the 2.55 in 1983, is the second-largest. The clothes, the makeup, the watches, the high jewellery — everything else — is the smaller half. The Wertheimers, sitting on top of all of it, have arranged the business so that no individual designer, no single collection, no one season, is allowed to matter quite as much as the brand itself does. It is, plausibly, the most thoroughly architected commercial structure in the history of luxury.

Alain Wertheimer · Gérard Wertheimer · 100% private · still in control

Alain Wertheimer · Gérard Wertheimer · the current owners · still private

— Chapter Two —

The Designers

2 eras, 8 shows, 236 looks. Click any show for the full runway gallery.

Womenswear · 1983 — 2019

Karl Lagerfeld

Lagerfeld inherited a moribund Chanel in 1983 and modernised it without disrespecting its codes. He invented the 11.12 with the CC turnlock, made the Boy bag possible, and turned the maison's ready-to-wear shows into theatrical events — a beach (Spring 2010), a supermarket (Fall 2014), a casino (Resort 2018). Thirty-six years, the longest tenure of any creative director at a major French house.

32 looks

View runway →

Spring 2014 Ready To Wear

32 looks · Vogue Runway

31 looks

View runway →

Fall 2017 Couture

31 looks · Vogue Runway

38 looks

View runway →

Fall 2018 Ready To Wear

38 looks · Vogue Runway

31 looks

View runway →

Fall 2019 Ready To Wear

31 looks · Vogue Runway

Womenswear · 2019 — 2024

Virginie Viard

Viard, Lagerfeld's right hand for thirty years, took over after his death in February 2019. Her tenure was quieter — she designed the 22 Bag (2022), refined the Chanel 19 across seasons, staged Cruise shows in Monte Carlo (2023) and Marseille (2025). Her resignation in June 2024 ended an unbroken 41-year era of internal-promotion creative direction at Chanel.