On the evening of 5 November 2024, roughly 2,000 guests ascended a 197-foot escalator at the Hong Kong Design Institute in Tseung Kwan O to witness Chanel restage its Cruise 2024–2025 collection – the first fashion show the house had staged in the city since 2006. Penélope Cruz sat front row beside Chow Yun-Fat. G-Dragon, freshly returned to public life, drew camera flashes from every angle. The collection, designed by Virginie Viard and first shown in Marseille five months earlier, drifted down a two-floor runway set against the building’s diagonal white beams: soft green tweed over hooded sweatshirts, white swimsuits with bulbous pearl earrings, sequinned dresses that caught the fluorescent light of a design school turned cathedral.
At the time, the event read as a celebration. Today, it reads as an inflection point. Within seven months, Viard would be gone – her departure announced, as WWD reported, in the middle of the night, weeks before the couture show, with her team stepping in to handle the presentation. Matthieu Blazy, the 40-year-old Franco-Belgian designer who had spent four years at Bottega Veneta, would be named her successor on 12 December 2024 – a move covered in depth by Creativity’s UK – becoming only the fourth artistic director in Chanel’s 114-year history. And Chanel, having weathered a 4.3 per cent revenue decline in 2024, would post $19.3 billion in comparable sales for 2025 – returning to growth, driven by a 7.2 per cent rise in the Americas and stabilising trends in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
The Hong Kong show, in other words, was not merely a Cruise restaging. It was the last time Chanel’s creative output would be presented under Viard’s authorship to an Asian audience – and the moment the house staked its claim on a city and a region it intends to court for the next decade.
The Marseille-to-Hong Kong Pipeline
Chanel’s decision to restage the Cruise 2024–2025 collection in Hong Kong was planned in tandem with the Marseille debut. “We made the decision to show in Hong Kong quite a long time ago; this was something that was prepared together with the cruise collection in Marseille,” Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion, told Elle Singapore. “But this is more than a replica. It was something that we wanted to do to create a strong impact.”
That impact was calibrated. Rather than choosing the harbourfront or a skyscraper rooftop – the “usual suspect locations,” as Pavlovsky described them – Chanel selected the HKDI, a neo-modernist campus designed by French firm Coldefy & Associés in the former industrial district of Tseung Kwan O. The choice was deliberate: the building is Hong Kong’s first major French-designed educational facility, and the partnership with HKDI marked the first time Chanel had collaborated with an Asian university. Previous academic alliances – with Politecnico di Milano and the University of Cambridge – had focused on sustainability. The HKDI agreement, a three-year deal, centres on design skills, savoir-faire, and what Pavlovsky called “access to the fashion ecosystem.”
Five HKDI students travelled to France in May 2024 to attend the Marseille show. Upon their return, they produced the “Imagine an Elsewhere” exhibition – 16 multidisciplinary works exploring sun, wind, and sea – which opened at the HKDI Gallery on 5 November. The runway itself spanned the seventh and eighth floors, with models threading through corridors as the audience followed.
The after-party moved to Shaw Studios, the legendary production facility founded in the 1930s that had hosted Chanel’s 2006 show. The circularity was unmistakable: Chanel was not simply returning to Hong Kong. It was returning to a specific cultural infrastructure, one it had helped build and now intended to reinforce.
Viard’s Exit and the Question of Legacy
The Cruise 2024–2025 collection, now viewed through the prism of Viard’s departure, carries a weight it did not originally possess. Viard, who had been Karl Lagerfeld’s closest collaborator for over three decades, assumed creative control after his death in February 2019. Her tenure was defined by a quieter, more intimate vision – less spectacle, more interiority. Revenues grew steadily, reaching $19.7 billion in 2023, with an 11 per cent rise in operating profits.
Yet the critical reception was uneven. As WWD noted, “critics often cited her collections as lacking the theatrical flair of Lagerfeld’s era.” When her exit came – abrupt, announced without the choreographed fanfare typical of Chanel – it left a vacuum. Her team oversaw the interim collections while the house searched for a successor – a transitional period that included the Métiers d’Art show in Manchester.
At HKDI, however, Viard’s work found its most sympathetic setting. The collection’s aquatic references – “underwater reverie,” as Chanel described it – translated effortlessly into the open, light-filled spaces of the design institute. The opening look, a soft green tweed jacket paired with a casual hooded sweatshirt, captured the relaxed elegance that Viard championed throughout her tenure. The pearl earrings, the sleek white swimsuits, the sequinned pieces that shimmered against the building’s stark geometry – these were Viard’s Chanel distilled: feminine without force, luxurious without excess. It was, in retrospect, a fitting valediction.
Blazy and the Architecture of Renewal
Matthieu Blazy’s appointment in December 2024 closed one chapter and opened another. His career – encompassing stints at Maison Margiela, Céline under Phoebe Philo, Raf Simons at Calvin Klein, and four years at Bottega Veneta – gave him a reputation for what the Financial Times described as “trompe l’oeil” craft. A flannel shirt made of nappa leather. A denim jean rendered in silk. “I’m Belgian,” Blazy told AnOther Magazine in February 2026. “‘This is not a pipe’ – you know, this kind of Magritte thing. I think it engages people and I like the idea of the second look.”
Chanel gave Blazy something rare in contemporary fashion: time. He was named in December 2024, entered the building in April 2025, and showed his first collection in October – five months of immersion before a single garment hit the runway. “I think a lot of designers – and it was really problematic over the last season – they were expected to set a vision within a year, or a year and a half,” Blazy said. “To get to the culture of the company, bring them with you. It’s not just the vision. It takes time.”
The house restructured its design studio for the first time since Lagerfeld’s arrival in 1983. Previously, a single studio produced 10 collections a year. Under Blazy, 30 additional staff were hired and three dedicated teams created: one for haute couture, one for ready-to-wear, and one for Métiers d’Art and Cruise. “He’s in charge, and there’s a small army behind him to transform each collection into billions of dollars in revenue,” Pavlovsky told WWD.
Blazy’s first collections have generated what industry observers have dubbed “Blazy mania.” Products began landing in stores in the second half of March 2026. Chanel’s sales accelerated in the second half of 2025 to “high single digit growth,” the company disclosed in May 2026, and that momentum has carried into 2026. CEO Leena Nair said she was “really struck” by the enthusiasm she witnessed during a recent visit to China. “You can see that encouraging sign of vibrancy.”
Hong Kong, Revisited
The HKDI partnership continues. Chanel’s commitment to the three-year agreement signals a longer horizon than a single show. The house opened a new boutique in Hong Kong in 2025 as part of a broader retail expansion – 41 locations added globally, including 26 fragrance and beauty boutiques, seven fashion stores, and eight watch and jewellery units. Plans for 2026 include 30 further openings.
Hong Kong’s position within Chanel’s Asia-Pacific strategy is nuanced. The region accounted for 49.4 per cent of total revenue in 2024 – $9.2 billion – making it the brand’s largest market by geography. But the Chinese mainland remains underserved: Chanel operates approximately 20 fashion boutiques in China, compared with an average of 45 for some competitors. Nair has signalled plans for “selective” expansion, including a second private salon for top clients in Shanghai. The Hong Kong show, and the HKDI partnership, function as cultural ballast – investments in education, community, and brand affinity that precede and support retail growth.
“We believe it’s a market that is an important market for us long term,” Nair said. “We see the potential. We have confidence in what we do in China.”
The Cruise show at HKDI, eighteen years after Chanel’s last Hong Kong appearance, was not an isolated event but a node in a longer narrative – the house re-establishing its presence in a city that had endured political upheaval and pandemic-era disruption. The presence of ambassadors Cruz, G-Dragon, Chow Yun-Fat, and Angela Yuen mapped Chanel’s celebrity network across European, Korean, and local Hong Kong talent. The three-year HKDI agreement linked luxury commerce to educational infrastructure.
The Second Look
What the November 2024 show ultimately demonstrated was Chanel’s capacity for what Blazy calls “the second look” – the ability to see one thing and discover another beneath it. On the surface, a Cruise restaging: the same collection, the same garments, a different city. Beneath it, a transfer of creative authority, a strategic bet on Asia, and the beginning of a new definition of what Chanel’s creative engine looks like under new leadership.
Blazy’s task is to honour Gabrielle Chanel’s paradox – a house built on the tension between discipline and freedom – while writing a chapter that belongs to him. The HKDI show, Viard’s last major presentation to an Asian audience, established the terms: reverence for craft, engagement with education, and a willingness to embed the house within the cultural fabric of the cities it visits. Whether Blazy sustains that model, or diverges from it, will become visible over the coming seasons. For now, the second look reveals a house in motion – not merely returning to places it has been, but recalibrating why it goes there.
Chanel’s Cruise 2024–2025 collection is available in select Hong Kong boutiques. Matthieu Blazy’s first ready-to-wear collection for Chanel will arrive in stores from autumn 2026.
