Why Chanel Doesn’t—and Shouldn’t—Do Menswear

They’re scaled up already, why do we need more?

There’s a bizarre insistence on imagining every major fashion house as a machine built to scale, especially lately, after the latest Chanel news on their expansion plans. As if the natural scope for fashion legacy is always more categories, more shows, more collaborations, more demographics. This fantasy oriented to Chanel is not a new request. Should it make menswear? When will it happen? Will Matthieu Blazy do it now? And underneath the speculation, there’s the quiet accusation that by not doing it, Chanel is missing out on a huge market. As if restraint were a missed opportunity.

But if I remember correctly, Chanel was never built to serve everyone. Chanel will even ask you to leave its store if you stay there past their closing time, even if you were planning to buy thousands of euros worth of clothes. From its birth, it was a brand of opposition—first to the Belle Époque, then to Dior’s hyper-femininity, and now to the market logic that says more categories equals better. If you go back to why Coco Chanel started designing in the first place, the answer was women. Not trends, not segments, not "luxury consumers." Just women. And specifically, women who wanted to move, think, work, and be themselves on their own terms. Everything Coco Chanel introduced—jersey knits, sailor stripes, tweed, trousers—was designed to break the codes of a ladylike dressing that used to make men comfortable, and transform them into something sharper, looser, less decorative, and with context. 

Her point wasn’t to dress women like men either, despite purposely borrowing tweed from the Duke of Westminster, it was to let women reclaim the freedom men already had. That part of Chanel’s history matters because it means the gendered identity is the core of everything. And while the world has changed, and gender is now rightly fluid, the brand's core purpose hasn’t shifted in the same way. This doesn’t mean that Chanel is just for women. It is about women. It positions them at the center of the fantasy.

So when people say Chanel should launch menswear, they’re asking it to become something it was never meant to be. Even when Karl Lagerfeld, a man, reinvented the house season after season with his theatrical detours, he never fully crossed the line to design a full menswear collection. There were some male models, yes, but they were moments of campy ambiguity. Some people even claimed it was because he couldn’t, but perhaps the whole point was never to dress men—it was to define how women looked at themselves, and how the world looked at them. 

There’s also the matter of timing. Chanel currently stages six runway shows a year, including two couture presentations. This is clearly not a brand struggling to stay relevant. It’s still one of the most powerful luxury empires in the world, precisely because it knows what not to do. Scarcity is built into its business model—not just in pricing (which now will be taking a break on inflation, according to BOF), but mainly in vision. The idea of Chanel is tightly edited, and its expansion, as stated, will most likely be jumping more into the beauty industry. To expand into menswear would mean diluting their narrative. 

That doesn’t mean men aren’t already part of the story. They buy Chanel. They wear it. They post themselves in tweed jackets, carry the flap bags, and wear the logo jewelry, and they all look great. Pharrell is practically a Chanel muse and has even collaborated with the brand before. But that participation doesn’t require a dedicated menswear line. In fact, its power lies in the opposite. Men wear Chanel the way women wear men’s coats: as a provocation, a style choice that bends rules of gender rather than conforming to them. If you give it structure, a campaign, a line sheet, you lose that thrill.

And the market doesn’t need another luxury menswear line right now. The space is saturated, and most likely male emerging brand need more support. Each one operates with a different posture: intellectualism, athleticism, art-school erotica, executive masculinity, cultural spectacle. Chanel would have to wedge itself into a conversation that has already gone fully three-dimensional. What could it possibly offer that isn’t already being done—louder, riskier, or with more irony? Let’s not forget that Coco once said, “It's probably not just by chance that I'm alone. It would be very hard for a man to live with me, unless he's terribly strong.” 

It’s tempting to assume relevance comes from multidimensional presence; this happens a lot these days, and it’s too overwhelming. But Chanel has built its myth on something different: intentional absence from menswear. And their refusal can feel like the most luxurious gesture of all.