The Hidden World Behind Chanel's Métiers d'Art Collections

Every year, Chanel presents a collection unlike any other in the fashion calendar. Its Métiers d'Art collection travels to different cities around the world, celebrating the exceptional savoir-faire at the heart of the House. Since Matthieu Blazy took the creative director's chair, these shows have drawn more attention than ever. His arrival brought a new design direction, a fresh perspective on what Chanel could be, and the kind of hype that follows a creative voice the industry had not seen in a while.

Most people who watch know that Métiers d'Art celebrates craftsmanship. What they do not know is that there is a specific and remarkable story behind those two words, a story about a world that is still disappearing, about one house that decided to intervene, and about what it actually takes to make the clothes on that runway.

A Crisis That Is Still Happening

Across the world, craft knowledge that took generations to accumulate is being lost at an accelerating rate. When a master craftsman closes their workshop because there are no apprentices willing to spend years learning a skill before it pays a living wage, that knowledge is gone permanently. It cannot be recreated by a machine or reconstructed from a photograph, and once the workshop closes, that knowledge is gone for good.

In France, this pressure intensified from the 1980s onward, as globalisation introduced strong competition from low-cost manufacturing in Asia, making it increasingly difficult for small, family-run craft workshops to survive. Embroiderers, pleaters, feather workers, hat makers, button makers — workshops with no marketing, no financial safety nets, and no way to compete with industrial production — were closing one by one. The same pattern was unfolding in Italy, in Japan, in every country where traditional craft knowledge had accumulated over centuries and was now being lost faster than it could be passed on.

The luxury industry depends on these skills for its most significant work. And for much of the 20th century, the luxury industry did relatively little at an institutional level to protect them.

What Chanel Did

In 1985, Chanel made a decision that would eventually reshape the economics of French craft preservation. Desrues, the jewellery and button maker that had been Gabrielle Chanel's official supplier, was facing an uncertain future. Chanel bought it, not simply to absorb it into its own production, but as part of a strategy to preserve and cultivate its savoir-faire.

This was the beginning of what would eventually become Paraffection, formalised as a subsidiary in 1997. The name translates as "for the love of". Under Chanel's leadership, with Françoise Montenay as CEO and Alain Wertheimer as Chairman, Paraffection began systematically acquiring workshops at risk of closing — embroiderers, feather workers, shoemakers, pleaters, hatmakers, button makers — providing them with financial stability, legal infrastructure and the breathing room to focus on the work itself.

The rule that defined the entire strategy was its most counterintuitive element. The acquired ateliers were not made exclusive to Chanel. They were actively encouraged to continue working for Chanel's direct competitors: Dior, Valentino, Schiaparelli, Givenchy and any other house that needed them. Chanel understood that the survival of these crafts required the health of the entire industry. A workshop that works for twenty clients is an institution. One that works for only one is simply fragile.

Paraffection did not solve the broader crisis. Many workshops in France and elsewhere closed before anyone intervened, and the structural conditions that created the problem, among them the economics of mass production, the speed of fashion, and the absence of government funding or protection for intangible craft heritage, remain largely unchanged. What Chanel built was a partial answer to a problem that is still larger than any single solution.

Métiers d'Art, the collection, was created to celebrate this savoir-faire. To make visible, once a year, what these workshops are capable of when given complete creative freedom. To remind the industry, and anyone paying attention, that the clothes on that runway were not made by a designer's vision alone. They were made by hands.

Le19M: Where It All Lives

In 2021, Chanel gave this world a physical home. Le19M, designed by architect Rudy Ricciotti and built on the border of Paris and Aubervilliers, brings together the specialist Maisons d'art of the Chanel ecosystem under one roof with nearly 700 artisans working across more than 30 distinct disciplines.

The name carries meaning at every level. The 19 refers simultaneously to the 19th arrondissement of Paris where the building sits and to August 19, Gabrielle Chanel's birth date. The M stands for four words: Mode, Mains, Métiers d'art, Maisons. Fashion, hands, crafts, houses.

The building is not a factory. By bringing the ateliers together under one roof for the first time, Le19M made direct collaboration between workshops possible in a way it had never been before. A pleater can consult with an embroiderer. A feather worker can work alongside a hat maker. The proximity between workshops has already produced techniques that could not have existed before the building opened.

Le19M is also open to the public, and goes considerably further than most cultural institutions. Beyond visits and demonstrations, the building actively welcomes those who want to learn the crafts, both beginners with no prior experience and advanced professionals looking to deepen existing skills. Several of the Maisons offer apprenticeships and training programmes, addressing one of the most urgent challenges facing every craft represented here: finding and forming the next generation of artisans.

The Maisons

Lesage, Massaro and Maison Michel are perhaps the most recognisable names within the Paraffection network. Lesage is best known for designing and developing Chanel's tweeds each season, each one an interpretation of a drawing or idea, woven by hand using between three and fifty different interwoven elements, from silk ribbons and leather to rhinestones and pebbles. Massaro, founded in 1894, is one of the last surviving bespoke shoemakers in Paris, making the iconic two-tone slingback with Gabrielle Chanel in 1957, a design that remains in production today. Uniquely, Massaro is the only Maison that still teaches the craft of last-making: carving the wooden form that serves as the foundation of every shoe from woods such as hornbeam, beech or linden. Maison Michel has been creating exceptional hats and headwear for Haute Couture and ready-to-wear since its founding in 1936. Over 3,000 carefully preserved linden wood forms constitute a living heritage of volumes, crowns and interchangeable brims, enriched with each new collection. The lesser-known Maisons deserve more space here, because what they do is just as extraordinary and far less often described.

Desrues

Desrues was founded in 1929 and became the first atelier to join what would eventually become Paraffection, acquired by Chanel in 1985. Its speciality is jewellery, buttons and accessories for the great fashion houses, and its historic relationship with Chanel was formalised in 1965 when Georges Desrues was named the house's official partner.

What Desrues produces is considerably more significant than the word button suggests. Every season, Chanel commissions entirely new artistic concepts for their buttons from Desrues, making them thematically unique to that collection. While the initial base production leverages modern manufacturing and digital prototyping, each button is hand-finished in limited quantities at the atelier, ensuring they are never produced or repeated again. For those who pay close attention, a Chanel button is a small clin d'oeil from the house to its clients, a detail that rewards attention and that most people who own the garment never fully notice. 

Atelier Montex

Founded in 1949 by Jacques Lemonier, Atelier Montex has been part of the history of Haute Couture since its beginnings, driven by an innovative spirit and creative ambition. The Maison has always cultivated a style of its own, blending traditional techniques with contemporary designs and reimagining the conventions of embroidery in a new light.

Because it has always looked to the future, Atelier Montex stands out for its constant research and its determination to push the boundaries of the craft. For decades, in addition to working with sequins, glass beads and metallic threads, the Maison has explored unexpected materials, paper, feathers, wood and glass, turning them into something the atelier alone could produce. Every project is an opportunity to take hybridisation a step further. A laboratory of ideas and practices, Atelier Montex draws on a collaborative team of 70 artisans with expertise ranging from embroidery and design to computer graphics.

Each creation begins with a precise design drawn on tracing paper. To transfer this pattern onto the fabric, artisans use a two-step method: pricking, where a needle punches a line of tiny holes along the drawing, followed by pouncing, where fine powder is dusted through those holes to leave a dot-to-dot outline on the cloth below.

Embroidery follows, worked with the Lunéville hook, a tool shaped like a miniature, sharp crochet hook on a wooden handle. Working entirely from the underside of the fabric, the artisan uses a thread pre-strung with thousands of beads. Rather than threading each bead individually, the hook stabs through the cloth, catches the thread between beads, and pulls it up in loops, creating a continuous chain-stitch that traps the beads flat against the underside. The entire design is built upside down, at remarkable speed.

For larger structural designs, artisans turn to the Cornely, a century-old, entirely mechanical embroidery machine driven by hand through a steering wheel beneath the table. Using a thin stitching thread, it anchors heavy or stiff materials, leather strips, thick cords, ribbons, onto delicate fabrics like silk, producing combinations of weight and fragility that would be nearly impossible to execute by hand.

Goossens

Robert Goossens founded his atelier in 1950 and became known throughout his career as Monsieur Bijou. He worked directly with Coco Chanel, Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior, developing a philosophy of mixing genuine stones with simulated ones that was radical for its time and remains part of the house's identity today. Since its founding, Goossens has fostered a dialogue between fashion jewellery, fine jewellery and art, a combination that makes it genuinely unlike any other Maison within Le19M.

At the heart of its technical practice is cire perdue, or lost-wax casting. This ancient technique gets its name because a design is first sculpted in wax, which is then melted away and "lost" to create a hollow mould for the molten metal. Within the workshop, this metal then moves through a sequence of hand techniques: sculpted, chiselled, polished, hammered, engraved, gilded and patinated, until the artisan achieves the exact desired shade of shine or matte finish.

But metal is only one of Goossens's materials. Rock crystal, a signature of the house, prized since antiquity for its purity, demands a different kind of mastery: reading the stone's natural internal cracks and veins to prevent it from shattering, anticipating its reflections, and respecting its fragility. And then there is pâte de verre, inherited from an ancient Egyptian technique, in which coloured glass powder is blended into a paste and slowly baked at high temperatures into a material with a velvety transparency, each shade the result of a blend of pigments and metal oxides.

Lemarié

Founded in 1880 and part of Paraffection since 1996, Lemarié is best known as the maker of Chanel's iconic camellias, around 40,000 of which are produced here each year. In the flower workshop, every creation is crafted entirely by hand using an exceptional heritage of tools: die cutting irons, embossing balls, crimping irons and tweezers, among others. To be considered a true flower maker at Lemarié, an artisan must apprentice for five years.

But Lemarié's origins lie in featherwork. Feathers are worked into rosettes, architectural inlays, voluptuous boas and embroidered patterns, a living material that lends itself to endless reinvention and appears in Haute Couture, jewellery and leather goods alike. These techniques are now practised by only a handful of artisans worldwide.

Since 2013, Lemarié has also been home to Atelier Lognon, the pleating specialists whose techniques date to 1853. More than 3,000 cardboard moulds form a unique library of pleating patterns, executed by pairs of artisans working in synchronised rhythm. There is no formal training dedicated to this rare craft anywhere in the world, it is passed from artisan to artisan solely within the walls of the atelier.

Paloma

Founded in 1982, Paloma specialises in what the industry calls flou and grand flou draping: the soft and flowing fabrics and silhouettes that define some of the most technically demanding work in both Haute Couture and ready-to-wear. Its workshops cover textile design, pattern making, assembly and prototype development, with artisans involved at every stage of a garment's construction. Within the ateliers, silk, organza, gauze and fine crêpe are transformed into finished pieces: an embroidered top with ladder-stitch insertion, a smocked skirt, a muslin dress with an impeccable drape. Paloma's pattern-making workshop works directly with fashion house design studios, devising silhouettes and working toiles on dress forms before a collection launches.

Paloma represents the less spectacular but equally essential side of what makes a luxury garment possible: the knowledge of how fabric behaves on a body, how it moves, how to cut and construct it so that it does what the designer imagined. This knowledge accumulates through years of practice and observation, and it disappears when the people who hold it retire without successors.

Why This Matters

The model Chanel built with Paraffection and Le19M is one of the more considered responses to the crisis of disappearing craft knowledge in the luxury industry. But it is a partial answer to a problem that remains much larger than any single solution. Those conditions have not changed, and for every atelier that found a patron willing to invest in its survival, many others closed without anyone noticing. 

What makes this particularly difficult to address is that the value of what these workshops produce is almost impossible to convey at a distance. A Lesage embroidery in a photograph is beautiful. Seen in person, on a garment in motion, with the weight of the beads and the depth of the surface and the way light moves across it, it is something categorically different. A pleated Lognon sleeve on a runway video is impressive. Encountered directly, it communicates a quality of making that no screen can reproduce. The finest work of these ateliers has to be experienced with all the senses to be fully understood, and it is precisely because this work is so difficult to appreciate from a distance that it is so easy to undervalue, and therefore so easy to lose.

Le19M is open to visitors. Going there is the most direct way to understand what is actually at stake.