Rethinking The Art World | The Strategy Behind Chanel’s Arts and Culture Push

LONDON — A trio of loin-clothed figures in ritualistic masks pose against an arid landscape in Frank Wang Yefeng’s film “Groundless Flower,” currently screening at the High Line Channel in New York. The work promises to immerse viewers in “imaginary worlds where the boundaries between the human and non-human, virtual and physical, dissolve.”

In Berlin, Klára Hosnedlová has transformed the main hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof with a monumental installation exploring utopianism and shifting politics in the Czech Republic, rendered in flax, embroidery, clay, iron and concrete slabs.

These are just two of the 50-plus projects currently being supported by Chanel’s Arts and Culture programme, which has gathered pace in the last five years, redefining the French couture and beauty giant’s position in the contemporary art world.

Chanel and its owners — the discreet Wertheimer clan — have long been patrons of the arts, quietly supporting dance, music and museums in addition to amassing a personal art collection that’s reported to include works by Picasso, Matisse, Buffet and de Staël.

But since launching the Chanel Culture Fund in 2021, the volume and visibility of the brand’s art initiatives has ramped up. They now include multi-year partnerships with 50 institutions, in addition to distributing €100,000 ($116,000) grants to 10 artists every other year through its Chanel Next Prize and spotlighting creatives through the Chanel Connects podcast series.

By focusing on partnering with top institutions rather than trying to build their own, Chanel has been able to boost its cultural credibility while operating a smaller scale than rivals.

Leading the initiative is Chanel’s president for arts, culture and heritage, Yana Peel. The Russian-born, Canada-educated Londoner is an energetic, deeply informed frontwoman, who rattles off the names of artists, institutions and initiatives at a dizzying pace.

Peel joined Chanel in March 2020 as the dust was still settling on her exit from the Serpentine Gallery, where she served as CEO for three years before resigning after a backlash over her husband’s business interests.

As Covid-19 lockdowns were taking effect across Europe, Peel launched the Chanel Connects podcast while laying the groundwork for the Fund, which quickly grew into a multi-national, multi-dimensional arts programme.

“Everything was shut down,” Peel recalls in an interview at Chanel’s London office. “It was a really interesting moment to launch a podcast series and start to ask artists and cultural leaders what matters most and what’s coming next. Rather than building our own museums, we felt the opportunity was to extend the philanthropy of the house — to become a great partner to leading museums and institutions, in driving real cultural transformation.”

Transformation, Not Temples

In the contemporary art world Chanel is playing catch-up with other luxury fashion firms, whose founding families — including the Arnaults, Pinaults and Prada-Bertellis — have constructed landmark museums to house their collections.

The Arnaults’ Fondation Louis Vuitton, opened in 2014, has hosted blockbuster exhibitions including retrospectives of David Hockney and Mark Rothko; displayed Russia’s Morozov Collection, drawing 1.2 million visitors; and just opened its landmark Gerhard Richter show. The Pinault Collection — the foundation of the family that owns Kering and Christie’s — has transformed the contemporary art landscape in Venice with its Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana spaces, and opened a third location in the centre of Paris in 2021.

In Milan, Prada’s Fondazione — which occupies a sprawling converted distillery and nine-storey concrete tower by Rem Koolhaas, in addition to its palazzo outpost in Venice — has made the city more attractive for both tourists and locals alike, while both leveraging and reinforcing Miuccia Prada’s reputation as a cutting-edge patron and tastemaker.

By contrast, Chanel’s budding arts strategy is intentionally decentralised — spread across 15 countries, at present — and non-proprietary. “We’re not opening our own museums,” Peel says. “We’re partnering with others. … We are very localised in those partnerships and very focused on driving that local impact for global scale.”

Chanel being Chanel, in the space of just a few years, has managed to partner with the crème of existing cultural institutions around the world. In its Paris birthplace, the brand has ramped up support for the Centre Pompidou (to which it was already a low-key donor), notably with a major gift in 2024 that increased the museum’s collection of contemporary Chinese art by nearly 20 percent, with a focus on women artists. Further donations are in the works as part of a three-year partnership.

In London — home to the brand’s legal and financial headquarters since 2018, as well as the Culture Fund — its cornerstone partnership with the National Portrait Gallery has helped fund the museum’s 2023 renovation and launch a programme that aims to boost the share of portraits of and by women, as well as fund a dedicated curator for women in portraiture.

“Because we’re a woman-led, women-founded company — 70 percent of our people are women — we felt we had a responsibility to champion more women artists, leaders and voices,” Peel says. At the NPG, she says, “We asked, how many women do you have in your galleries? 23 percent of works on display. How do we get to 50?”

In Berlin, the brand works with the Hamburger Bahnhof, where it hosted art world notables in May to celebrate the installation by Hosnedlová, recipient of 2025’s “Chanel Commission.” A large-scale work by Lina Lapelytė is scheduled for 2026.

Compared to the landmark museums and ultra-personal collections curated by luxury billionaires behind Kering and Prada, Chanel’s global approach could appear as scattershot, or at least thinly spread. But art insiders see it as a savvy, differentiated path that’s appropriate to the brand’s scale: a global program for a global company.

“While family philanthropy is often linked to a place where they have particular attachment, it often makes more sense in corporate philanthropy to go global,” said András Szántó, whose consultancy has helped shape the cultural strategies of Audemars Piguet and BMW. “You wouldn’t call a global retail strategy scattershot; Chanel is everywhere, so is culture.”

The programme has steadily built awareness. “There are quicker ways to win: They could sponsor an art fair or a gallery and do a big party and get loads of visibility and Instagram hits,” Szántó adds. “But they have chosen to work with institutions, which is a slower, more thoughtful process. They’re going deep as well as wide.”

The US is a new frontier for the fund, but one where it’s moving fast. In addition to a partnership announced in August with New York’s High Line Art initiative, Chanel hosted live podcast recordings at the Guggenheim and commissioned a new series of documentaries from the non-profit art media platform Art21. Meanwhile, in California, Chanel is funding a new centre for artificial intelligence, machine learning and digital imaging at CalArts — the LA art school whose alumni include John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Catherine Opie, Tim Burton and Sofia Coppola — set to open next year.

China is another key focus. At Shanghai’s Power Station of Art museum, the third floor is being renovated to install a 1,700-square-foot library dedicated to contemporary art which will open in November with 20,000 books (and room for 50,000) alongside a design gallery and an archive of Chinese art. The library will be named Espace Gabrielle Chanel.

Value Exchange

While it’s clear how Chanel’s patronage can benefit culture — where artists and institutions are forever in need of resources and space, particularly for challenging, cutting-edge creations — how exactly does the brand’s arts strategy benefit Chanel?

Beyond burnishing its cultural credibility by attaching its name to art projects, Peel says Chanel benefits from building community around its art initiatives. Peel was named president of arts, culture and heritage in June, adding oversight of the brand’s heritage sites like Villa La Pausa, formerly Gabrielle Chanel’s retreat on the Riviera, to her mandate. Drawing on its network of artists and cultural leaders, the Fund attracts a rarefied crowd to events at the villa, providing a front-row perspective on what’s coming down the pipeline of global culture.

Chanel also benefits from an exchange of ideas. The fund partners with the Aspen Institute on a “cultural leaders forum” — a gathering that recalls Peel’s stint leading the debate series Intelligence Squared. “When we convene cultural leaders from around the world … there’s this amazing knowledge exchange,” she says. “Leena [Nair, Chanel’s CEO] and I are able to be in this incredible community of CEOs and cultural leaders from around the world, and they share with us what’s top of mind and how they’re addressing the opportunities and challenges available to them.”

In sum, Chanel’s strategy is less about claiming space with branded temples and more about “being at the heart of culture,” says Peel. “It’s about that proximity to and catalysing all of these moments, and convening people.”