Chanel brings Matthieu Blazy’s Métiers d’Art reset to Seoul

Matthieu Blazy’s first Métiers d’Art collection for Chanel looked most persuasive in Seoul, where the house traded the hard-charged drama of a subway platform for the softer authority of a museum setting. Staged at Centre Pompidou Hanwha before the venue’s public opening, the presentation gave Blazy’s debut a lighter, more intimate feel, and made the clothes read as pieces meant to live beyond the runway.

That mattered because this was not a new collection so much as a recalibration of how Chanel wants Blazy’s work to travel. The line first appeared in New York on Dec. 2, 2025, inside the decommissioned Bowery subway station platform, a setting built for impact. In Seoul, the same Métiers d’Art collection felt less theatrical and more legible commercially: the museum backdrop sharpened the craft, let the fabrics breathe and placed the emphasis on wearability rather than stunt casting or set design.

The choice of venue also said plenty about Chanel’s regional strategy. Centre Pompidou Hanwha is scheduled to open to the public on June 4, 2026, in Yeouido, Seoul’s financial district, the same year France and Korea mark the 140th anniversary of diplomatic relations. The museum is part of a four-year partnership between Centre Pompidou and Hanwha Foundation of Culture, and the Chanel presentation took place in a space designed by Jean-Michel Wilmotte that spans 3,000 square meters, with two exhibition halls across four floors in the former aquarium annex of the 63 Building. For a house that has long treated Métiers d’Art as a way to project craft prestige abroad, the museum context made the collection feel less like a grand tour stop and more like a targeted conversation with a sophisticated Asian audience.

Chanel has done this before in Seoul, and that history deepens the point. The house previously repeated major destination shows in the city with its 2012 cruise presentation and its 2018 “Paris-New York” Métiers d’Art collection. This latest stop landed with a different emphasis: less on scale, more on intimacy; less on spectacle, more on the quiet authority of construction and finish. The front row reflected the same balance of local influence and global cachet, with Jennie, G-Dragon and Tilda Swinton among the guests, alongside Kim Go-eun, Go Youn-jung and Lee Jung-jae. In Seoul, Blazy’s Chanel did not shout its reset. It let the setting, and the clothes, do the persuading.