Hermès vs. Chanel: Two theories of desire

Two women. Two very different experiences of luxury in 2025. The first has spent over €40,000 at Hermès and has never been offered a Birkin. The second walked into a Chanel boutique for the first time, saw herself in what was on the floor, and left with several pieces from Matthieu Blazy’s debut collection. Neither outcome was accidental. Both were entirely by design. These are not just consumer anecdotes. They represent two fundamentally different theories of luxury, and the tension between them is the most instructive strategic story in the industry today. The architecture of distance Hermès built the Birkin into a cultural phenomenon gradually. The bag debuted in 1984 but languished in Chanel’s shadow for years, only catching fire during the it-bag era of the late 1990s. By 2001, when a Sex and the City episode depicted a five-year waitlist as the price of admission, the mythology was set. As demand eventually made those waitlists unmanageable, Hermès replaced them with something even more powerful: an allocation system with no published criteria, where sales associates decide which clients are offered the opportunity to buy. No rules. No appeal. What makes this one of the most sophisticated psychological constructions in luxury is not the scarcity itself — it is what the scarcity implies. When a sales associate decides a client is worthy of a Birkin, the implicit message is that Hermès has standards worth protecting. The gatekeeping feels earned rather than arbitrary because the product genuinely justifies the reverence. The market has repeatedly validated that belief. Jane Birkin’s original bag sold at Sotheby’s Paris in July 2025 for $10.1 million, the most valuable handbag ever sold at auction. That is not the price of a bag. That is the price of a mythology built over four decades of unbroken craft credibility. The risk, however, is real. The client who has spent €40,000 and still has not been offered a bag is someone whose sense of self has become tied to an institution that keeps withholding validation. For a very specific kind of consumer, that dynamic is the point. For others, it is starting to feel like something else entirely. The Blazy calculation Chanel’s position has always been more ambiguous than Hermès. It never had the same hard barriers to entry. What it had instead was heritage weight — and, under its previous creative leadership, a creeping sense that the house was speaking to a narrowing audience. Matthieu Blazy, only the fourth designer to lead Chanel since its founding in 1910, understood something about the current moment that most creative directors are still working out: in 2025, recognition, not evaluation, builds desire. The first-time customer who walked out of a Chanel boutique with multiple pieces from his debut collection did so because, for the first time, she saw herself in the brand. That is a deliberate reorientation. Hermès tells the consumer to prove herself worthy. Blazy’s Chanel says it already sees her. His logic is rooted in Gabrielle Chanel’s original founding vision: the emancipation of the woman. Trousers at a time when they were considered radical. A crossbody bag that freed women’s hands. Clothes that allowed movement rather than requiring decoration. Blazy reframes that legacy for the present moment. His answer runs through his Spring 2026 collection and campaign, which stars Margot Robbie in jeans and a tweed jacket, looking like a woman who wears Chanel rather than a woman dressed by it. Some longtime loyalists called it too casual. Viewed through the lens of Gabrielle’s founding codes, however, it is among the most faithful readings of the house in years. Chanel reported difficult trading conditions in 2024, followed by revenue of $19.3 billion in 2025, up 2% YoY. The momentum Blazy has generated — from the queues in London with longtime clients and first-time buyers side by side, to the commercial uptake of pieces from his first collection — points to a strategic shift that is already being confirmed in the numbers. Industry takeaways Hermès posted 9% revenue growth at constant exchange rates in 2025, reaching €16 billion ($18.6 billion) at a moment when much of the luxury sector was contracting. The distance model still works. But it works for Hermès because of an almost unrepeatable combination of scarcity, craft heritage, and mythology that took decades to construct. Advising any other house to replicate it is, as brand strategist Matteo Azzolini has noted, genuinely dangerous. The risk of alienating an entire generation of high-potential clients is real, and most houses lack the equity to absorb that bet. The pure openness model carries its own risks. Desire requires some friction. If everything is available to everyone immediately, the object loses the weight that made it worth wanting. The more durable model — and the one luxury executives should be building toward — is what I call “earned intimacy”: brands that make consumers feel genuinely seen and genuinely challenged at the same time. Not gatekept by wealth or social connection, but held to a standard of curiosity, cultural engagement, and real appreciation for what is being made and why. That is harder to build than an allocation system or a democratic queue. It requires creative courage and the patience to let meaning accumulate, rather than manufacture it through scarcity or spectacle. Blazy’s Chanel is the most serious attempt at that third model happening in luxury right now. Whether the house gives him the time and trust to fully build it is the question worth watching. Whether the rest of the industry is paying close enough attention to what he is demonstrating is the other one. Carlota Rodben is a luxury innovation specialist and author of “Beyond Luxury: The Promise of Emotion.” She previously led innovation at Chanel and now advises luxury brands on strategy and transformation.

Hermès vs. Chanel: Two theories of desire

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Hermès vs. Chanel: Two theories of desire

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag