Blazy's First Chanel Métiers d'Art Goes to Rome

December 2, 2026. Matthieu Blazy will present his first Métiers d'art collection for Chanel in Rome. The house announced the date and city Thursday morning. No venue yet.

The Rome choice tracks to Gabrielle Chanel's own Rome shows in the late fifties and sixties. She returned to Italy regularly, staged runway presentations there, built friendships with Italian aristocracy. The house is framing this as homage, not novelty. Blazy takes over a format Karl Lagerfeld turned into a traveling annual event, touching down in cities with historical ties to the house or to craft traditions Chanel collaborates with.

Blazy joined Chanel in January after a long run at Bottega Veneta, where his work leaned heavily on artisan partnerships and fabrication detail. The Métiers d'art format plays to that strength. The collection spotlights Chanel's network of specialized ateliers: featherwork, pleating, embroidery, millinery, shoemaking. Each house operates independently but stages one joint show per year under the Chanel umbrella. It's the loudest articulation of the atelier system the brand still funds.

Rome in early December is off the fashion calendar. No competing shows, no week-long circuit. The city becomes the backdrop without the distraction. Chanel has done this before: Dallas in 2013, Salzburg in 2014, New York in 2018. The format works when the location justifies itself through archive or craft geography. Rome does both.

The collection drops at retail roughly four months after the show, late spring 2027. Métiers pieces typically land at higher price points than mainline ready-to-wear because of the atelier hours embedded in each garment. Last year's collection, shown in Hangzhou, featured pieces running north of $15,000 for embroidered jackets. Expect similar range.

Blazy's Bottega showed a preference for muted tones, heavy wools, and silhouettes that moved slowly across seasons rather than resetting every six months. Whether that translates to Chanel's brighter, more decorative house codes is the open question. December will answer it.