Chanel’s Métiers d’Art collections have always lived in the space between ready-to-wear and haute couture, that liminal, once-a-year moment created purely to honour the artisans behind the clothes. Launched by Karl Lagerfeld in 2002, the project was conceived as a love letter to the maisons d’art, Lesage for embroidery, Lemarié for feathers and camellias, Massaro for shoes, Maison Michel for hats, and the rest of Paraffection’s fiercely protected ateliers dotted around Paris. Each year, Chanel lifts them out of the workroom and onto a travelling stage, from baroque Austrian palaces to Cairo’s desert plateau and, most recently, Hangzhou’s glimmering West Lake, where last year’s collection unfolded like a lacquer screen brought to life.
This winter, that stage moved somewhere altogether less obvious, and much more alive. On 2 December 2025, Matthieu Blazy unveiled his first Métiers d’Art collection for Chanel not in a museum, palace or lakeside dreamscape, but on an inactive subway platform at 168 Bowery in New York City.
It is Chanel’s first New York Métiers d’Art outing since Lagerfeld’s Temple of Dendur spectacle at the Met in 2018, and the first time the house has taken this craft-driven line literally underground. The symbolism is not subtle, with a new artistic director at the helm, the ateliers that usually dress queens of couture are now riding the C line.
Blazy’s appointment in December 2024 already signalled that Chanel was ready for a gear shift. The Belgian designer, whose résumé runs through Raf Simons, Margiela, Céline and a transformative stint at Bottega Veneta, spent much of his first year reorganising Chanel’s ten-collection-a-year machine to give more breathing room to process, research and, crucially, the artisans themselves.
His Paris debut in October 2025 sketched out a new language for the house, Métiers d’Art 2025/26 is where that language is written across a city.
The invitation set the tone with a Chanel La Gazette newspaper screaming “Chanel Comes to New York,” paired with a silver subway-train chain that hinted the city’s underground would be the real runway. Guests were led down a nondescript Bowery staircase and onto a transformed platform, still recognisably MTA but filtered through Chanel’s eye. The tiles and pillars remained, but the space was washed in a warm, cinematic glow.
Instead of emerging from backstage, the models arrived by train. Car doors opened and commuters-turned-muses stepped down. Women shrugging coats off their shoulders, men slinging bags cross-body, knits knotted at the waist as if one blast of air-con away from needing another layer. The gestures were staged, but the clothes were not. Garments travelled through the decades, from 1920s-inflected capes to broader-shouldered 1980s tailoring, all refracted through Chanel codes.
Tweed jackets came darker and denser, threaded with metallics that caught the station lights like oncoming trains, cut over narrow skirts or fluid trousers that moved at commuter speed. Clear raincoats slipped over glittering suiting made the point that Chanel can handle bad weather as well as it handles bouclé.
There were sharp jolts of humour too, with an “I ❤ NY” reworked in sequins, animal prints turning the skirt suit into a wry “urban jungle” uniform, knits that felt casually thrown on until you registered the hours of handwork in every stripe. This is where the Métiers show off, embroideries mapped like transit lines, feathers and petals disappearing into tweed, jewellery that sits somewhere between hardware and heirloom.
On the benches, a cast of New York-adjacent faces shared elbow room just like the rest of the city, underlining how close this Métiers d’Art sits to the street. Chanel isn’t keeping craft in a glass box here, it’s letting it brush against metal, graze the edge of the platform, and slip into the rhythm of real life.
At a moment when New York is recalibrating itself as a place for everyday riders rather than just penthouse neighbours, with a mayor-elect whose agenda is anchored in transit, housing and the daily grind of ordinary New Yorkers, are the ateliers that once dressed only couture royalty now, deliberately, riding the C line? We love to see it, anyway.
