Leena Nair and Matthieu Blazy on Creativity and the Power of the Human Hand

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This week, Chanel reported its annual results for 2025. Revenue rose 2 percent to $19.3 billion, defying a luxury downturn. But the number that caught the industry's attention wasn't the top line — it was the acceleration. In the second half, Chanel's sales grew by high single digits across every category and region, before designs by new artistic director Matthieu Blazy had arrived in stores. The excitement alone changed the trajectory.The momentum has two sources. One is Blazy, whose runway debut last October sparked "Blazymania" — hour-long queues when his first collection landed this spring, instant sell-outs, and a level of excitement Chanel hasn't seen in years. The other is chief executive officer Leena Nair, who has invested heavily in Chanel's retail network, manufacturing and people, building the foundations that helped a creative spark catch fire.All of which sent me back to BoF VOICES in November 2023, when Nair and Blazy appeared on our stage at Soho Farmhouse on successive days, in separate conversations. They weren't there together. Blazy was still leading Bottega Veneta, while Nair was two years into her tenure at Chanel. Listening back now, what strikes me is how clearly each articulated the values that would define their partnership.Nair, an outsider from Unilever, spoke with me about what surprised her most about fashion: the human hand behind everything. The following day, Blazy, in conversation with Tim Blanks, described craft not as tradition, but as something more radical in his work at Bottega Veneta and Margiela.Two leaders arrived at the same conviction: in an industry reshaped by technology and scale, the most valuable thing to protect is the human hand.Key Insights:Nair brought an outsider's clarity to what makes luxury different from mass-market business. Coming from Unilever, where everything is industrialised and scaled for "physical availability and mental availability everywhere," she describes Chanel's opposite logic: preciousness, scarcity, hand work and objects designed to last