The jacket arrives on a padded hanger, sleeves forward, lining out

The jacket arrives on a padded hanger, sleeves forward, lining out. Mademoiselle Montex — first name withheld, house protocol — turns it once under the atelier's north-facing window, checking the fall of the braid against the light. She has been with Chanel's Rue Cambon workshop for thirty-one years. She will not tell you which seasons were hers, but she will tell you this: the chain inside the hem is lead-wrapped silk, and it weighs exactly what it needs to.

This is how a Chanel jacket is made. Not by one hand, but by many, and most of them have no public name.

The System

Chanel operates on a model that fashion journalism tends to flatten into romance. There is the creative director — currently unannounced, following Virginie Viard's departure in 2024 — and there are the ateliers. Between these two poles sits a structure that has remained unchanged since the 1950s: the premières d'atelier, the petites mains, the brodeurs, the plumassiers, the bottiers. They do not rotate. A woman who joins the tweed atelier at twenty-three does not, as a rule, transfer to evening wear at thirty. She becomes very good at tweed.

Mademoiselle Montex works in flou, the dressmaking side, as opposed to tailleur, which handles tailoring. Flou covers anything that is not a jacket or a coat. She cuts silk by hand, using pinking shears that were made in Lyon in 1963. The house has offered to replace them. She has declined.

Her training began at the École de la Chambre Syndicale, the same school that produced Yves Saint Laurent's first petites mains and the women who assembled Dior's New Look in 1947. The programme runs three years. Students learn to set a sleeve in muslin before they touch silk. They learn to sew a hem that is invisible from both sides, a technique that requires ten stitches per centimetre and a tension light enough that the fabric does not pucker when pressed. Most do not finish. Montex finished second in her year. Chanel hired her the following Monday.

The Jacket

The boucle jacket — let us not call it iconic, let us call it structurally sound — is the product of five sets of hands minimum, more if the buttons are worked in-house.

Lesage handles the braid and any embroidery. The atelier, acquired by Chanel in 2002, operates out of a workshop in Pantin, northeast of Paris. François Lesage, who ran the house until his death in 2011, once said that a single jacket could require forty hours of handwork. That figure has not decreased. The current team, led by Hubert Barrère, works from painted sketches and fabric swatches. They do not receive photographs. The house believes that photographs flatten depth.

The tweed itself comes from multiple sources. Scotland remains the primary supplier, though Chanel has worked with mills in the Pyrenees and, occasionally, Yorkshire. The cloth is woven to the maison's specification: weight, hand, the exact degree of slub. A too-smooth boucle does not hold braid. A too-rough boucle does not drape.

Mademoiselle Ricard — again, first name withheld — cuts the tweed in tailleur. She uses a rotary blade for straight lines and shears for curves. She does not pin the pattern to the cloth. She weights it with sandbags, small linen sacks filled to 200 grams each, and cuts around them. Pins leave marks.

The shoulder is built, not cut. A Chanel jacket does not have a shoulder pad in the traditional sense. It has a crescent of horsehair canvas, stitched in place with silk thread, that sits between the fashion fabric and the lining. The canvas is shaped by steam and pressure. It takes three fittings to get the pitch right. The jacket must sit on the collarbone without gripping. It must allow the arm to move forward — crucial for women who work at desks — without the back hem lifting.

The chain-weighted hem is the final step. The chain is stitched inside the lining at intervals of five centimetres, loose enough to allow movement, tight enough to prevent the jacket from blowing open in wind. Coco Chanel introduced the technique in the 1950s, borrowing from men's waistcoat construction. It works.

The Métiers

Chanel owns eleven métiers d'art, a term that translates poorly. These are not art studios. They are production workshops, each with a specific technical function: Lemarié for feathers, Goossens for jewellery and metalwork, Massaro for shoes, Maison Michel for hats. The maison began acquiring them in 1985, under the direction of Alain Wertheimer, with the stated goal of preserving craft skills that were, at the time, disappearing.

This was not sentiment. It was supply-chain management.

Lemarié, founded in 1880, was on the edge of closure when Chanel bought it. The atelier employed six people. It now employs twenty-four. They work with ostrich, pheasant, and rooster feathers, each of which requires a different preparation method. Ostrich must be steamed. Pheasant must be dyed in small batches to avoid streaking. Rooster feathers, used for the house's signature camellia brooches, are curled by hand over a heated blade.

Goossens, acquired in 2005, casts the buttons. The standard Chanel jacket button is not stamped. It is poured into a mold, cooled, polished, and lacquered. The double-C logo is applied by hand, using a brass die heated to 150 degrees Celsius. The process has not changed since 1953.

Massaro makes the two-tone slingback, a shoe that has been in continuous production since 1957. The beige toe is kidskin. The black heel is grosgrain. The contrast is intentional: it shortens the foot visually and, according to Chanel's original notes, 'makes the leg look longer without adding height'. The heel is 5.5 centimetres. The last is updated every five years to account for shifts in average foot width. European women's feet have widened by half a size since 1980. Massaro adjusts.

What Remains

Virginie Viard's departure in June 2024 left the creative director's chair empty for the first time in decades. The house has not announced a successor. The ateliers continue. Montex is currently working on pre-collection pieces for autumn 2025, though she will not say what they are. Ricard has a fitting scheduled for next Tuesday. Lesage is embroidering something that involves 30,000 sequins and a deadline she describes as 'optimistic'.

The system does not require a single author. It requires people who can set a sleeve in their sleep and who know that a jacket is only as good as its skeleton. Chanel has those people. It has had them for decades. It will, presumably, continue to have them, regardless of who signs the sketches.

Montex's pinking shears are still sharp. She has them serviced every eighteen months by a man in the 11th arrondissement who learned the trade from his father. He is seventy-three. He has no successor. When he retires, she will find someone else, or she will learn to do it herself.

That is how the work continues.