The New York City subway has always been a theatre of the everyday, a moving cross-section of humanity where students, statesmen, game-changers, dreamers, and icons share the same fluorescent-lit corridors. “The New York subway belongs to all. Everyone uses it… a place full of enigmatic yet wonderful encounters,” Matthieu Blazy reflects. It is precisely here, in this democratic urban underworld, that Blazy chose to stage his first Métiers d’art collection as Chanel’s Artistic Director of Fashion Activities, transforming the subway into a cinematic runway where the mundane becomes magical.
The 2026 Métiers d’art collection is a celebration of Chanel’s new “sub(way)-culture”: a joyful convergence of stories, archetypes, and eras. Blazy assembles a whirlwind cast of personalities, the ladies who lunch, the mothers on the go, the showgirls, the teens, the superheroes, and even Coco Chanel herself, all refracted through a filmic lens. It is the glitter and the grit of New York, its realities and its fantasies, transported into Chanel’s universe of exceptional craft.
Like a film shifting through time, the collection jumps from the Art Deco grandeur of the 1920s to the laid-back silks of the 2020s. Savoir-faire from the Maisons d’art meets pop exuberance in a series of playful, highly crafted hybrids: lingerie denim embellished with intricate embroideries that suggest a new frontier of western wear; an archival dress revived by Lesage with fringe feathers from Lemarié, now worn with illusion chinos; and the humble men’s flannel re-imagined in sumptuous wool bouclé tweed weighted with the unmistakable Chanel chain.
Accessories are equally rich in storytelling. Minaudières hide personal delights, an oyster containing a pearl, enamel monkey nuts and apples elevated into objets d’art, while Goossens’ goldsmiths craft jewellery shimmering with ice-cube glass cabochons and hummingbirds. Even the silk linings, hand-painted with New York motifs, nod to a cinematic Coco walking her dog against the city skyline.
This urban jungle is a world of characters: a cat lady (or perhaps a cat woman?) in slubbed leopard tweed woven by Lesage; a sharply tailored woman in a black suit carrying a flap bag inlaid with golden scales; a figure in a hand-painted leopard tulip skirt whose fringing alone took artisans days; or the woman in a bias-cut slip embroidered by Montex with schools of Art Deco fish. At their feet, Massaro’s handcrafted slingbacks, in kidskin or spotted shearling, anchor the narrative in Chanel’s timeless codes.
Blazy draws inspiration from Gabrielle Chanel’s own journeys through New York in 1931, when Hollywood’s pull first connected her to American cinema. But it was downtown, not in the studios, that she rediscovered the power of her own design language, worn, interpreted, and celebrated by New Yorkers long before she returned to Paris. This Métiers d’art collection honours that legacy: a love story between Paris and New York, between elevated craft and urban pop, between Chanel’s heritage and the city that embraced it.
Chanel loves New York and in 2026, that love story rides the subway.
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