The first atelier opened above a milliner's shop in 1910
The first atelier opened above a milliner's shop in 1910. Gabrielle Chanel sold hats to women who could afford to care what sat on their heads. She had no formal training. She had worked in a tailor's shop as a girl, learned to sew by watching, and understood that most women spent their days dressed like upholstered furniture. The hats were plain. They sold.
By 1913, she had moved to Deauville and begun making clothes. Jersey, mostly — a fabric mills used for men's underwear. It was cheap, it moved, and it didn't need boning. The seaside clientele wanted something they could actually walk in. Chanel gave them straight skirts, soft cardigans, and sailor stripes. It was not revolutionary in the sense that it upended structure. It was revolutionary because it worked.
The silhouette we associate with the house — the boxy jacket, the chain-weighted hem, the gilt button — came later, in the 1950s, after Chanel had closed the business during the war and reopened to a Paris that had moved on. Dior's New Look was everywhere: nipped waists, wide skirts, an idea of femininity that required scaffolding. Chanel's response was the suit. Collarless, unstructured through the body, cut to skim rather than sculpt. The jacket hung from the shoulder. The skirt sat just below the knee. You could sit down in it. You could raise your arm to hail a taxi.
The construction was deceptive. The jacket's interior was a grid of chain sewn into the hem and along the front edges, weighting the cloth so it fell cleanly and stayed put. The armhole was cut high and tight, which sounds restrictive but isn't — it keeps the sleeve from pulling when you move. The lining was silk. The buttons were often false, there for balance rather than function. It looked simple. It required a fitter who understood geometry.
What remains of that approach is harder to measure. Karl Lagerfeld ran the house for thirty-five years and turned it into a machine that produced twelve collections annually. He kept the codes — tweed, chain, camellia, black-and-white, gold — and treated them like a vocabulary he could rearrange. A jacket became a bomber, a cardigan, a cropped bolero. The quilted bag, which Chanel introduced in 1955 with a chain strap so women could keep their hands free, was reissued in python, denim, plexiglass, Lego. Lagerfeld understood that a house this old survives by deciding which parts are inviolable and which are fair game.
Virginie Viard, who took over after Lagerfeld's death in 2019, has kept that logic but pulled back the volume. The shows are quieter. The tweeds are softer, often mixed with jersey or knit into cardigans that sit closer to what Chanel was actually making in the 1920s. Viard worked alongside Lagerfeld for thirty years, first in embroidery, then as his right hand. She knows the vocabulary. Her instinct has been to strip it back rather than add.
The question is whether that's enough. Chanel is still the most profitable couture house in the world, but its cultural position has shifted. The tweed jacket no longer reads as modern the way it did in 1954, or even in 2004. It reads as Chanel. The bag, the shoe, the logo — they function as signs of the house more than as expressions of an idea. Viard has said in interviews that she wants the clothes to feel easy, that she designs for women who move. But ease, in 2025, looks different than it did when Gabrielle Chanel was wrapping actresses in jersey. Ease now is a Lemaire shirt, a Totême coat, a Khaite knit. It is not a tweed jacket that costs eight thousand euros and requires dry cleaning.
What Chanel understood, and what the house has occasionally forgotten, is that luxury is only useful if it makes your life better. The jersey dress made sense because it didn't wrinkle and you could pull it over your head. The quilted bag made sense because it didn't fall off your shoulder. The flat shoe made sense because you could walk in it for more than ten minutes. These were not theoretical improvements. They were practical.
The house still makes those things. The 2.55 bag, named for the month and year of its creation, is still in production. The slingback, the two-tone shoe Chanel introduced in 1957, is still cut the same way: beige body, black toe, a design that visually shortens the foot and lengthens the leg. The little black dress, which Chanel did not invent but certainly popularised, remains a cornerstone of the ready-to-wear line. These are objects with a clear purpose. They solve problems.
The risk, for any heritage house, is that purpose calcifies into formula. Chanel has been trading on its own history for long enough that the history has started to feel like the product. The interlocking Cs are more recognisable than the clothes. The brand's value is tied not to what it makes now, but to what it made seventy years ago. Viard has tried to address this by focusing on craft — the ateliers, the embroiderers, the hands that actually construct the garments. Her collections often feel like love letters to the workrooms. But craft, on its own, is not a vision. It is a method.
There is a version of Chanel that could matter again, but it would require deciding what the house is actually for. Gabrielle Chanel built a business by looking at how women lived and making clothes that fit that life. Lagerfeld built a business by understanding that fashion is a language and you can say new things with old words. Viard has inherited both of those instincts, but she is working within a structure that prioritises continuity over risk. The shows are beautiful. The craft is impeccable. The question is whether beauty and craft, without a animating idea beneath them, are enough to carry a house that once changed how women dressed.
The atelier is still there, above the rue Cambon boutique. The mirrored staircase is still there. The tweed is still woven in Scotland, the buttons still cast in the same workshops. What is missing is not the method. It is the reason.
