From 30 September to 20 October 2025, the 19M — the campus founded by Chanel in 2021 in Aubervilliers, bringing together eleven Houses of art and nearly seven hundred artisans specialised in the crafts of fashion — travelled from Paris to take up temporary residence on the fifty-second floor of the Mori Tower at Roppongi Hills. The Beyond Our Horizons exhibition was not a showcase for the House. It was a demonstration of the way in which the savoir-faire of the French ateliers — Lesage embroidery, Lemarié featherwork, Goossens goldsmithing, Lognon pleating — enters into dialogue with artists and artisans from across Japan, transcending linguistic, technical and generational difference to produce something that neither tradition would have produced alone. This is the most precise expression of what Chanel has always sought in Japan — not to export French luxury, but to find in Japanese rigour a mirror that reflects back what it is, more clearly defined.

Matthieu Blazy took the artistic direction of Chanel in 2025 — the first director to succeed Virginie Viard after Karl Lagerfeld's thirty-six years at the head of the House. His reading of Chanel — noble materials worn on direct silhouettes, luxury that allows itself to be forgotten so that the person wearing it can exist — finds in Tokyo a particular resonance. The Japanese clientele has always held a relationship with clothing founded on the quality of the material and the precision of the construction rather than the visibility of the logo or the volume of the decoration. Tweed, knitwear, jersey — Chanel's historic materials — read in this context as a declaration of seriousness rather than a concession to classicism. The suit that Mademoiselle invented in the nineteen-fifties in response to the rigidity of the couture of her era remains in Japan the most deeply understood Chanel object — the one whose construction, lining, ease of wear and durability say something that Japanese clients know how to read before they have even touched it.

Chanel fashion is present in Tokyo according to a geography that reflects the very structure of luxury in the city — the Ginza flagship as the sovereign address, and spaces within the prestigious department stores of Isetan Shinjuku, Odakyu Shinjuku and Takashimaya Shinjuku as neighbourhood presences. This double distribution — the dedicated boutique and the shop-in-shop within the great department stores — is specific to Japan, where department stores have historically been the first points of entry for imported luxury in the country. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, foreign luxury goods were sold on the upper floors of department stores under the designation Hakuraihin — imported articles — at prices three to four times higher than those in France. It is this history of distribution that gives Chanel's presences within Tokyo department stores a depth that boutiques in other cities do not quite possess.

What makes Chanel's relationship with Tokyo singular within the House's geography is not the turnover — though Japan has been one of Chanel's most significant markets for decades. It is the reciprocity. Japan did not simply adopt Chanel. It contributed to defining how Chanel understands itself — through a clientele that demands the quality of construction as much as the beauty of the silhouette, that keeps its garments for decades, that knows the difference between first-quality tweed and second, and that does not need to be told why Mademoiselle's suit is still relevant seventy years after it was conceived. The House that showed in Tokyo for the first time in 1978, that installed its first Métiers d'art exhibition abroad in 2004, and that brought the 19M to the summit of the Mori Tower in 2025, is not conquering a market. It is continuing a conversation that began well before — at Haneda Airport, one morning in 1954, with a line nobody had asked for.