Chanel ♥︎s New York

Above and underground, Bowery is a threshold—hectic, a little seedy, and a circuit to the electric undercurrents of the Lower East Side. Sitting below its corners at Bowery and Delancey, the J train platform feels like an echo chamber of the neighborhood’s pulse, always abuzz with movement and mood, from the hurried morning commute to the equally alive evening hours. It’s also where Matthieu Blazy staged his second show for Chanel, debuting his take on the Métiers d’Art.

 

Ahead of the presentation, house ambassadors A$AP Rocky and Margaret Qualley starred in a teaser campaign film directed by Michel Gondry, collapsing the space between the ordinary and the whimsical in a moment that captured the unmistakably cinematic nature of New York.

And in a moment where art imitated life, the ambassadors took their seats in the front row. As the train pulled in, a cast of characters stepped off, channeling the archetypes of a traveling city and draped in the evocative looks of the Métiers d’Art 2026 collection. Bold youth clad in expressive graphics, gallery girls in painterly gowns, business honchos in dramatic tailoring, and Upper East Side socialites in tweed suits who somehow made their way downtown.

In a mix of the casual and fantastical that Chanel has been exploring in recent collections, the city served as the thematic focal point, interpreted through cinematic moments as a rush of models cascaded through the platform. Here, the subway is the great equalizer—a transference of energy as much as it is a means of moving bodies. In the words of Blazy, “It is a place full of enigmatic yet wonderful encounters, a clash of pop archetypes, where everyone has somewhere to go and each is unique in what they wear.”

As a fashion capital, clothing takes on an armor-like capacity in New York. Art Deco references culminated in archival silhouettes reimagined (while an actual flapper emerged in incandescent fringe), leopard-printed tweeds nodded cleverly to the concept of an urban jungle, and irreverent animal motifs struck an idiosyncratic chord characteristic of the average mélange of New Yorkers.

Tourist trinkets transcended their kitsch forms across miniaudières depicting enameled apples and an elevated redux of the “I Love New York” tee. Everyone—hailing from all eras of New York—converged here in a clashing of space and time.

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Discover the full collection at chanel.com.