The tweed jacket in the window at 31 rue Cambon has no buttons

The tweed jacket in the window at 31 rue Cambon has no buttons. The sample, pinned at the waist, shows a raw edge where the braid should lie. It is April, the atelier is preparing for cruise, and the jacket will be finished by June. But for now it hangs incomplete, which is how Chanel has looked for the better part of five years.

The house has not had a named creative director since February 2019, when Karl Lagerfeld died. Virginie Viard, his longtime deputy, was appointed to lead the studio. She has shown twenty-two collections. She does not give interviews. She does not appear for a bow. The clothes arrive, the shows happen, and Chanel continues to post revenue figures that most heritage houses would consider structural impossibilities.

In 2023, the maison reported $19.7 billion in sales. That is more than Hermès. It is nearly as much as Louis Vuitton. Chanel is the second-largest luxury brand in the world, and it has achieved that position without a single monogram bag, without a men's division, and without a creative director willing to play the part in public. The dissonance is total.

The inheritance

Gabrielle Chanel opened her first shop in 1910. She made hats, then sportswear, then the kind of daywear that let women move without a maid's assistance. The jersey cardigan suit arrived in the twenties. The quilted handbag with a chain strap came in 1955. The two-tone slingback, designed so the beige toe would lengthen the leg and the black heel would shorten the foot, appeared in 1957. She worked until she died, in 1983, at the Ritz.

What she left behind was not a design language so much as a set of physical principles. Ease over constriction. Pockets that actually held things. Jewellery worn in multiples, during the day, with wool. The Chanel suit, as it is understood now, was a tool. It was not precious. Coco herself wore the same tweed jacket until the cuffs frayed, then had the atelier turn the cloth and recut it.

Lagerfeld understood this completely. When he arrived in 1983, five months after her death, he did not attempt to preserve her work in amber. He turned the braided jacket into a cropped bolero, then a floor-length coat, then a knit with no structure at all. He put the interlocking Cs on everything from earrings to surfboards. He cast Claudia Schiffer in a tweed bikini. He made Chanel the most famous fashion house in the world by treating it as if it had no fixed form.

He stayed for thirty-six years. By the end, he was showing eight collections annually, designing Fendi on the side, and photographing every campaign himself. The output was relentless. Some of it was extraordinary. Some of it was filler. All of it was signed.

The Viard era, if you can call it that

Virginie Viard joined Chanel in 1987. She worked in embroidery, then in the studio alongside Lagerfeld. When he died, she was the obvious successor, not because she had a distinct vision, but because she knew how the house functioned at the level of stitches and toiles.

Her first collection, for cruise 2020, was shown at the Grand Palais three months after Lagerfeld's death. It was gentle, full of whites and pastels, noticeably quieter than anything he would have sent out. The tweeds were softer. The silhouettes were looser. Critics called it a palate cleanser.

Five years later, the collections have not sharpened. Viard's Chanel is relentlessly wearable, almost determinedly so. The suits are cut with a dropped shoulder and a relaxed sleeve. The skirts sit at mid-thigh or just below the knee. There are flats in every show. The fabrics—often denim, sometimes jersey, occasionally a lightweight tweed—feel like something you could pull on for a lunch rather than an event requiring strategy.

This is, depending on your perspective, either a return to Coco's original pragmatism or a failure to produce anything that couldn't have been designed by a very competent in-house team. Viard does not do spectacle. She does not court controversy. She does not appear to be interested in fashion as a form of communication beyond the immediate question of what a woman might want to wear on a Tuesday.

The shows themselves have scaled back. Lagerfeld built a rocket ship inside the Grand Palais for one collection, an iceberg for another, a full-scale Parisian street for a third. Viard's sets are quieter: a beach, a library, a garden. The most ambitious recent production was a faux metro station. It looked like a metro station.

The clothes sell anyway. Chanel's revenue has grown every year under Viard's tenure, even through the pandemic. The classic flap bag now starts at $10,200, nearly double what it cost in 2019. The price increases come twice a year, sometimes more. Customers continue to queue.

What Chanel is now

The paradox of Chanel is that it has become more profitable as it has become less visible. Viard does not court celebrity. She does not seed bags to influencers. There are no viral runway moments, no campaigns that stop the internet. The house operates as if it is simply too large to require that kind of attention.

And perhaps it is. Chanel's dominance rests not on newness but on a kind of material lock-in. The quilted bag, the tweed jacket, the camellia, the two-tone shoe—these are objects with multi-decade demand curves. A customer does not buy a classic flap because Virginie Viard designed something surprising last season. She buys it because it is a Chanel bag, and Chanel bags have meant something specific for seventy years.

The risk, of course, is that meaning is not static. Lagerfeld kept the house legible by constantly reshaping it. He made sure that Chanel was always in the conversation, even when the conversation was about whether he had gone too far. Viard has opted out of that entirely. Her Chanel is quiet, expensive, and eerily stable.

Whether that is sustainable is another question. The house has not named her creative director outright—her title remains head of fashion design—and there are persistent rumours that Chanel is quietly looking for a successor. The business does not require a star. But it may, eventually, require a point of view.

For now, the jacket in the window is still unfinished. The atelier will complete it. Someone will buy it. And Chanel will continue, as it has for more than a century, to produce beautiful, expensive things for women who do not need to be convinced.