In State of the Art, a column for Highsnobiety, Chris Erik Thomas untangles the crossover between fashion and art.
If a completely free, 300-page Chanel print magazine falls into a bookstore and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Inconceivably, the answer appears to be “no.”
At least that was my experience waltzing into a local stockist over the weekend to pick up the second volume of Chanel Arts & Culture. The little-known print publication is an oddity within the French luxury house’s vast world: launched in June 2025 as part of the Chanel Culture Fund, it’s entirely overseen not by fashion’s favorite creative director, Matthieu Blazy, but by the brand’s President of Arts, Culture, & Heritage, Yana Peele — who, not for nothing, got profiled earlier this year.
This may explain the muted response. My own request for “the Chanel magazine” at the bookstore earned a confused stare from the salesperson, even though a stack of issues sat less than a foot away. Friends filtering in for their own copy got roughly the same reaction. And three days later, copies are still available.
To be clear, this is no flimsy catalog. This issue’s cover star is superstar artist Cindy Sherman, who did a 16-page spread of her signature self-portraits (wearing pieces from the Chanel Patrimoine archive, naturally). The issue includes original lyrics by Patti Smith for recipients of Chanel’s Next Prize, plus artist profiles, essays, and conversations with major contemporary artists. Last year’s inaugural issue, which celebrated five years of Chanel’s partnerships with artists and cultural institutions, featured everyone from Tilda Swinton to Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Yet for all the star power in its pages (plus the flex of giving away a beefy 300-page magazine for free), this magazine exists almost in a vacuum. Made for the kind of sicko print purists like myself who froth over this kind of thing. But Chanel isn’t alone in quietly extending its marketing muscle to printed matter.
The world of fashion-backed magazines is vast and, in some cases, stretches back more than half a century. Hermès has printed its free, biannual Le Monde d’Hermès magazine since 1973 — in 11 languages, no less — and Acne Studios has published Acne Paper on and off since 2005. (It also has a permanent gallery space in Paris, Acne Paper Palais Royal, and a publishing arm for artist books.) More recently, during Blazy’s tenure at Bottega Veneta, the brand helped fund the 2022 relaunch of the influential gay magazine Butt as its sole advertiser and still releases free “fanzines” to coincide with runway collections. And at Dior, Jonathan Anderson oversees the brand’s quarterly Dior Magazine, a melange of original photography, campaign shots, and archival pulls that launched in 2012.
A well-made but subdued magazine release, like a whisper, may feel wasteful, but something like Art & Culture is just one tool in the arsenal fashion brands are using to establish cultural dominance beyond clothes. In the past year alone, Chanel signed a three-year deal to extend its sponsorship of Hong Kong’s M+ museum; Louis Vuitton signed a three-year deal to fund New York’s Frick Collection; Bulgari announced an official partnership with the Venice Biennale through its next three editions.
It’s all a kind of culturemogging, as we’ve come to call it. Major labels are redefining luxury beyond the seasonal collections they sell, worldbuilding their way toward becoming not just brands but tastemakers across all aspects of culture. Some might call this insidious, but there’s a benefit to having fashion brands put their money where the art is.
Only a select few can afford a piece of Blazy-era Chanel, but its Arts & Culture publication has value that can’t be measured with money alone. Call it Chanelified print propaganda if you must, but honestly? I’ll take as many issues as I can get.
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