Matthieu Blazy planted Chanel’s flag in New York City, and he did not choose the quiet parts. The Métiers d’art 2026 campaign, shot by Craig McDean, unfolds across the city’s most recognizable surfaces: a teal-tiled diner kitchen, a newsstand stacked with Superman comics, the Hudson River waterfront with One World Trade rising behind it. The friction is obvious. It is also entirely deliberate.
- Chanel‘s Métiers d’art 2026 is creative director Matthieu Blazy’s first pre-fall collection for the House, shot entirely across New York City by photographer Craig McDean.
- The collection matters because it marks a deliberate shift in how Chanel presents its artisanal savoir-faire: not in a rarefied atelier setting, but against yellow cabs, diner kitchens, and neon-lit storefronts.
- It is built for a woman who moves through the world at full speed, wearing a feather-trimmed leopard-print skirt or a belted camel-quilted coat without breaking stride.
- Culturally, it reflects a broader appetite for luxury that earns its place in real life rather than asking real life to pause for it.
- The campaign, also accompanied by a film directed by Rahim Fortune, is out now as part of Chanel’s pre-fall 2026 season.
This is Blazy’s first Métiers d’art collection for Chanel, and the choice of New York as its stage says something about where he intends to take the House. The Métiers d’art line has always existed to showcase the work of Chanel’s Maisons d’art artisans, the specialist ateliers whose craft underpins what makes the House what it is. Blazy is not abandoning that. He is relocating it, asking what happens when that level of savoir-faire walks into a city that has no patience for preciousness.
The answer, it turns out, is that it holds. The craft does not shrink against the noise. It sharpens.
What the Chanel Métiers d’Art 2026 Collection Actually Looks Like
The silhouettes are not minimal. A glittering tiger-stripe dress registers against the Manhattan skyline with the kind of confidence that reads from across a street. A feather-trimmed leopard print skirt moves past neon storefronts. The belted camel quilted coat, worn through a diner kitchen, channels the House’s most enduring codes while feeling entirely present-tense.
Campaign imagery suggests Blazy is working with a deliberately eclectic visual register, one that layers animal prints, tartan, sequins, and plaid within a single collection without any of it feeling accidental. A voluminous tartan piece fills the frame of a taxi roof while a model poses barefoot, the scale of the fabric playing against the smallness of the moment. A Superman knit layered under a plaid blazer reads as a quiet joke that only lands if you know how seriously the House takes its craft.
The detailing reframes what Chanel’s artisanal vocabulary can absorb. Feather trim on a leopard print skirt is not a new idea in luxury fashion, but the way it is placed here, moving through a city rather than posed in a studio, asks you to see the construction differently. The quilted coat, belted and camel-toned, is the collection’s most wearable proposition and probably its most quietly radical one.
Why Blazy’s New York Move Resonates Beyond the Campaign Imagery
There is a particular kind of luxury fatigue that has been building for several seasons now. The aspirational remove that once defined how major Houses presented their work, the empty atelier, the pristine setting, the suggestion that the clothes existed outside of time, has started to feel less like authority and more like avoidance. Blazy appears to have read that shift clearly.
By placing Chanel’s most craft-intensive line within the texture of New York life, against yellow cabs, diners, and a newsstand selling Superman comics, he is making an argument about what luxury is actually for. The woman wearing the feather-trimmed skirt has somewhere to be. She is not standing still for anyone. Models Anok Yai, Julia Nobis, and Anne Vyalitsyna, alongside a cast that includes Josephen Akuei, Riley Lusher, Feng Jiao Long, Penelope Ternes, Bhavitha Mandava, and Jesi Evans, carry the clothes with exactly that kind of momentum.
The aesthetic alignment here is less quiet luxury and more something that might be called loud precision: clothes made with extraordinary care that are not shy about it. The tiger-stripe glitter dress and the leopard-print skirt belong to a different cultural conversation from the muted tailoring that dominated recent seasons. They ask to be seen. They are built to last the scrutiny.
Blazy’s first Métiers d’art collection for Chanel does not try to ease you in. It places the House’s most considered craft inside one of the world’s least forgiving cities and lets the tension do the work. The result, as captured by Craig McDean and filtered through Rahim Fortune’s accompanying film, is a collection that feels grounded in the present without being captive to it. Chanel’s artisanal codes are not being preserved here. They are being used.
Images Courtesy of Chanel
In other campaign news: Mytheresa x Dolce & Gabbana Porto Cervo Capsule Collection
