On the occasion of Chanel’s show in Como, the house’s commitment to shoring up the Italian manufacturers in its supply chain—stories and snapshots from the annals of Italian style

Chanel and Italian suppliers: funding innovation, modernizing processes. Lucia Mantero at Villa d’Este

By taking minority stakes, Chanel has entered the capital of several Italian manufacturers among its best suppliers. The investment plan—supporting family-run firms—gives the supply chain greater stability. Chanel helps finance innovation and upgrade processes; in return, it gains the right to study the companies’ management, costs, and revenues. More transparency, healthier balance sheets—a mechanism of mutual benefit.

The other night in Como, on the terrace of Villa d’Este for the runway show, Lucia Mantero recalled her initial worry: would other clients—some of them Chanel’s direct competitors—welcome Chanel’s shareholding in their supplier? The answer has been yes. Chanel is seen more as a benchmark than a rival. It does not belong to a conglomerate; it is not steered by the same hand that controls other labels. Clients can only applaud the financial and managerial solidity of a key supplier. Lucia Mantero, together with her brother Franco, is the fourth generation to helm the silk mill that bears their surname.

The fashion crisis and the gap between fashion and style: from Gucci to Loro Piana, the age of quiet luxury

Fashion is in crisis. Boomers prescribe bolder creativity and sharper commercial moves; meanwhile, financiers are betting everything on sustainable innovation, often ignore the workings of an industry built on image, an industry still determined to leverage brand equity through image rather than substance. Such a snag is a disconnection: in 2025, image alone no longer powers the engine. Prints, loud colors—along with polyesters, nylon, lurex, and sequins—produced some relevance ten years ago, when Instagram was exploding, and everyone’s game was to stand out as much as possible. Flashy clothes were needed—visible from across the street—so amateur photographers could flock.

Gucci’s financial numbers are a headache for the entire sector, not just for Kering. They underscore the distance between fashion—Gucci in retreat, Miu Miu on the rise—and style: Hermès epitomizes style, as does the quiet-luxury ideal of Loro Piana. That gap ought to narrow, not widen: witness Hermès launching haute couture, while Loro Piana forges ahead without a creative director.

Setting the stage for a fashion show in Como—the wait for Matthieu Blazy, the rock spirit of Karl Lagerfeld; Anna Mouglalis and Coco Chanel

Against this backdrop of fashion versus style, Chanel staged its show on Lake Como last week, April 29. It was the penultimate riff on the archives—the final effort comes in July with Couture—on October 7, few dare to say at last, Matthieu Blazy arrives. The hope for Blazy is to restore Chanel’s pivot between fashion and style, as Karl Lagerfeld did when Chanel’s woman was a masculine rebel in tweed, mascara smudged just enough to seem deliberate. Seated at wrought-iron tables on Villa d’Este’s gravel terrace, lake behind and ankle tilting stones in steady rhythm, Anna Mouglalis once more played Mademoiselle Chanel, a role she owned under Lagerfeld and beyond. The term mademoiselle—spinster in older parlance—could grate when applied to an adult woman, yet Mouglalis smiled with a faintly defiant brow, as if she not only knew you, but reading your eyes, she knew exactly how enthralled you were – and she matches your gaze in return. In her day, Coco Chanel shattered every hint of female diminishment, forging pride, vanity, and a streak of rock insouciance—a remind to Lagerfeld—for women’s independence and will.

Chanel and Luchino Visconti on Lake Como

Coco Chanel was a friend of Luchino Visconti, who summered at the family mansion—the oldest building of the Villa Erba complex in Cernobbio. Through one of Visconti’s sisters, the estate passed to the Gastel family and is now managed by Anna Gastel’s son, Guido Taroni. Diaries and eyewitness accounts have Chanel as a guest there. Mademoiselle became a patron of the arts and cinema, lending both creative and financial support to Visconti and, later, to her young beau Franco Zeffirelli, who soon made his own way and never forgot his debt to her.

Chanel and the manufacturers: Roveda, Leo France, Vimar

Bella Italia. Chanel continues to shore up other suppliers and manufacturers with the same approach used for Mantero’s silk mill—first tested with shoemaker Roveda and metal-work specialist Leo France. Triple-A companies all Tuscany is proud of: founders Lorenzo and Franca Pinzauti built Leo France over a lifetime – they were Chanel’s guests that morning in Como. Another example is spinning mill Vimar—worth noting because spinning in Italy is rarer than one might think. Italy abounds in weavers, but most import their yarns, a weakness for the entire textile industry. Innovation and creative prototyping thrive during the process from fiber to yarn. Choice of fiber—research into natural, local materials like hemp, the only fiber that can truly claim sustainability—and yarn construction—a bouclé twist or short-pile chenille—enable creativity in cloth. You can’t write novels if the words never change. Chanel bought into Vimar yet left it free to serve all its clients; meanwhile, the house set up an internal research lab whose spinning breakthroughs go first to Chanel.

Lake Como tales for a Chanel runway: Isola Comacina and the Bishop’s curse

A Chanel show on Lake Como invites stories we refuse to forget—Alessandro Volta’s metallic electricity, Mary Shelley and Lord Byron, emperor Barbarossa—while, like water around a mooring post, Italian actresses of fine visage and scant filmography drift by, the lake scent rising with nostalgia and wonder for our land. Steep cliffs evoke a Romantic painting; lakebed depths hint at prehistoric monsters. At 400 meters, Como is the deepest lake in Europe. We will keep falling in love and getting scratched.

Isola Comacina was cursed by Bishop Anselmo della Torre of Como—yet a local silk baron, Carlo Sacchi, bought the island to be shot dead by his mistress, Countess Bellentani, at Villa d’Este. Perhaps the curse is a safeguard, so the lake’s dark waters continue to cast their light. An older legend says not merely treasure but something far greater lies hidden in the island’s caverns beneath Roman ruins. Let the wind hum, the moisture sing, the water write poetry: for it is here—neither in Jordan nor Camelot, but on a tiny Como isle—that a clay cup, the Holy Grail, is said still to rest.

Carlo Mazzoni