Chanel acquires Charvet after Matthieu Blazy runway collaboration

Chanel has turned a runway flirtation into a full acquisition, buying Charvet and putting France’s oldest shirtmaker under its umbrella after Matthieu Blazy helped bring the house back into focus. Chanel announced the deal on July 2, 2026, and did not disclose financial terms. Charvet, founded in 1838, had spent 188 years in independent hands before this move.

The appeal was never just nostalgia. Blazy’s first Chanel collection for Spring/Summer 2026 used Charvet to make white shirts, including a tuxedo shirt detailed with Chanel’s signature chain and pearl-button finish. Chanel’s own product copy makes the point plainly: the shirt was the first garment Gabrielle Chanel borrowed from menswear, and Charvet’s disciplined shirting gave that idea a sharper, more exacting shape. The shirts also linked Chanel’s heritage codes to a maker whose production is concentrated in workshops in Saint-Gaultier, in France’s Indre department.

Charvet had been owned by the Colban family since 1965, and the family’s long stewardship gave the house a rare continuity in a sector where specialist craft is increasingly vulnerable to consolidation. The label has long carried elite menswear cachet, and in Chanel lore it also recalls Arthur “Boy” Capel, Gabrielle Chanel’s partner and a Charvet client. That kind of history is not decorative in luxury; it is currency, and Chanel has now paid to keep it in the family’s orbit.

Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion, began discussions with the Colban family after Blazy’s arrival in late 2024 and the Charvet collaboration that followed. Chanel said the acquisition is meant to preserve Charvet’s expertise and creative independence while securing the shirtmaker’s long-term future. That wording matters: the point is not to flatten Charvet into a logo, but to hold onto the making itself.

The move sits neatly beside Chanel’s Métiers d’art program, which the house says has celebrated exceptional savoir-faire since 2002. Taken together, the acquisition and the collaboration show the direction luxury is heading: less borrowing from specialist ateliers, more ownership of them. For Chanel, Charvet is both a pristine shirtmaker and a strategic safeguard, the kind of craft asset that protects a house’s language as much as its supply chain.