The Chanel tower on Ginza, inaugurated on 4 December 2004, was at its opening the largest Chanel boutique in the world — spread across ten levels with a concert hall, a restaurant and exclusive retail spaces. The glass and aluminium façade in a black and white tweed pattern is the most direct architectural translation a House has ever made of its own fabric. Tweed is Chanel's founding material since 1924 — Gabrielle Chanel borrowed it from the Scottish male wardrobe, gave it ease, made it the sign of the free woman. Peter Marino translated it into three dimensions and seven hundred thousand diodes. At night, the tower comes alive on the Chuo-dori as an object of light whose programme changes with the seasons. The interior — white granite floors, gold leaf panels, lacquered tweed furniture, black marble staircase in a four-storey atrium — is the interior continuation of this logic: every material is a reference to the House.

The Namiki tower, opened in 2018 on the site of Chanel's first Tokyo boutique of 1994 — demolished because it did not meet earthquake resistance standards — is a slender nine-storey structure with a single room per floor. The intentionally irregular windows make the building a sculptural object whose reading shifts with the angle. The artist Shuji Mukai, a figure of the Gutai movement founded in Osaka in 1954 — one of Japan's most radical post-war art movements, founded on the direct contact between the artist and the material — created abstract panels for the façade during the first two months. The ninth-floor VIP salon is the space where Chanel presents its fine jewellery collections in Tokyo.

Chanel fine jewellery rests on six founding motifs — the Lion, N°5, the Comet, the Ribbon, the Feather and the Camellia — reinterpreted season after season by the Jewellery Creation Studio. Each motif carries a precise history. The Lion is Gabrielle Chanel's totemic animal, born under that sign. The Comet comes from the 1932 collection — the open necklace that streams around the neck. The Camellia, the flower without fragrance that Coco Chanel prized precisely for that reason: she wanted the jewel to shine, not to smell. Chanel is one of the rare fashion Houses to have a dedicated studio and ateliers for fine jewellery with its own address on the Place Vendôme. What Ginza receives comes directly from those ateliers.

Virginie Viard left the artistic direction of Chanel in June 2024 after five years in the role. The House had not yet officially confirmed her successor at the time of publication of this text. The House's fine jewellery — whose Creation Studio operates independently from the fashion collections — continues under the direction of Patrice Leguéreau, whose work rests on the six founding motifs. The Japanese clientele, which follows with particular attention the changes of creative direction at the great Houses, awaits the next appointment with the interest it accords to all the moments when a House must redefine itself without effacing itself.

The 19M is the Aubervilliers campus where eleven of Chanel's Houses of art and nearly seven hundred expert artisans have been brought together since 2022 — feather workers, embroiderers, glovers, tailors, bootmakers. A travelling version of its gallery was presented in Tokyo, conceived around the crafts of the hand and a collaboration between French and Japanese creators. The retrospective dedicated to Maison Lesage, Chanel's embroiderer for decades, celebrates a century of embroideries. This displacement of the 19M to Tokyo continues the logic inaugurated by the first Métiers d'art exhibition outside France on Ginza in 2004: to treat Tokyo with the same density of content as Paris, because its clientele knows how to read that density.

Chanel showed in Tokyo in 1978 — the very year Louis Vuitton opened its first stores in Japan. This is not a commercial coincidence: 1978 is the year when the great Parisian Houses understood that Japan deserved a personal visit. The first Chanel Métiers d'art exhibition outside France was held on Ginza in 2004 — the same year as the inauguration of Peter Marino's main tower. These two simultaneous events say something about the way Chanel thinks of Tokyo: not as an export market but as a reference address, at the same level as Paris. Forty-five years of continuous presence. Two towers. Six motifs. And the 1932 collection still shining.