Chanel returns to growth as Matthieu Blazy refreshes house classics

Chanel’s rebound in 2025 came from a familiar but powerful luxury trick: make the classics feel newly covetable, and the room fills with first-time buyers. Matthieu Blazy, who took over from Virginie Viard and showed his first Chanel collection in October 2025, reached stores in March 2026 with the kind of refreshed house codes that Chanel has always understood best. A slouchy leather maxi flapbag at $8,500, mint-green-and-black two-tone pumps at $1,450 and multicoloured tweed jackets gave the brand’s old signatures a softer, more modern pulse without stripping away the polish that keeps Chanel in the old-money conversation.

That formula helped lift revenue 2% in currency-adjusted terms to $19.3 billion in 2025, after a 4.3% drop to $18.7 billion the year before. Operating profit also recovered, rising 5% to $4.7 billion after falling 30% in 2024 to $4.479 billion. Leena Nair said Chanel saw “creative momentum across all our business activities,” and argued that the company’s heavy spending in 2024 laid the groundwork for the turnaround. For a house that lives and dies by its codes, the message was clear: luxury did not need a reset, only better timing and sharper execution.

The strongest sign of momentum was not just sales, but who was buying. Simon Longland, the fashion buyer at Harrods, said the recruitment of new clients who had never bought Chanel before was “phenomenal,” adding that demand far outstripped supply. That matters more than a simple revenue bounce. When a brand as guarded as Chanel starts pulling in first-time customers without flooding the market, it strengthens the signal of quiet authority rather than diluting it.

The regional picture was uneven, which only makes the growth more interesting. The Americas led the way with sales up 7.2%, Europe rose 2.5%, and Asia-Pacific, Chanel’s biggest market, slipped 0.8%. Chanel also raised prices by 3% overall and 2% for fashion products in 2025, with similar increases planned for 2026. The balance is delicate: too much accessibility and the cachet softens; too little and the house risks feeling frozen in its own archive.

Chanel’s 2024 spending spree helps explain how it protected that balance. Capital expenditure reached a record $1.755 billion, up 43% from 2023, while brand investment hit $2.445 billion across client events and support for the house’s image. New boutiques opened on Fifth Avenue in New York, in Nanjing, Chengdu and Tokyo, and Chanel plans 30 more stores, including nine fashion boutiques, in 2026, with further expansion into India and Mexico. Blazy’s task is the one every great heritage house faces: refresh the codes just enough to tempt new money, while keeping the exclusivity that makes the brand worth chasing in the first place.