Key Points
- Chanel is acquiring Charvet, the Paris shirtmaker founded in 1838 and regarded as the world's first.
- The deal follows Charvet making shirts for Matthieu Blazy's debut Chanel show in October 2025.
- Charvet, on Place Vendôme, was family-run by the Colbans, who sought a succession plan.
- Its shirts have dressed Churchill, Proust, JFK, Yves Saint Laurent, and Karl Lagerfeld.
Chanel is buying Charvet, the Place Vendôme shirtmaker founded in 1838 and widely regarded as the world's first dedicated shirtmaker. The deal, announced in early July, folds one of France's oldest surviving craft houses into the privately held luxury group.
Charvet was founded by Joseph-Christophe Charvet, who effectively invented the specialist shirt shop. It stayed in the family until 1965, when it was sold to Denis Colban; his children, Jean-Claude and Anne-Marie Colban, have run it since and had been looking for a succession plan for the business.
They found their answer in Chanel, and the path there ran through the runway. Charvet developed the shirts for Matthieu Blazy's debut Chanel collection in October 2025, and the collaboration turned into an acquisition. It also closes a loop roughly a century old: Coco Chanel borrowed the Charvet shirts of her partner Boy Capel, folding menswear ease into her womenswear.
The move is Chanel doing what its larger rivals have done for years — buying heritage and craft outright rather than licensing it. As a private house, owning a 188-year-old atelier is both a hedge against a dying craft and a story it can sell, the same logic behind OTB taking full ownership of Viktor&Rolf and LVMH's investment arm backing the apparel label Rhoback. The difference is age: Charvet predates almost everything else in the luxury portfolio.
What Chanel is buying is a client ledger as much as an atelier. Charvet has dressed Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Winston Churchill, Jean Cocteau, John F. Kennedy, Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, and David Beckham, and still sells shirts starting around $750 from its Place Vendôme shop. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Source: The National, The Business of Fashion
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