Alain Wertheimer, who co-owns Chanel with his brother Gérard, invited Virginie Viard to lunch in early June, 2024. “This is not going to be easy,” he told her. Her contract was being terminated. She signed a document after dessert, said goodbye to her staff, then went home, where her belongings were delivered the next day in boxes.

That’s one story Viard shares in her new book, Un Regard. Une Vie chez Chanel ("A Look: A Life at Chanel"), out in French, timed to Paris Fashion Week. (My French isn’t good enough to read it, so I'm relying on articles like Le Monde's until I can read the English edition.) Viard writes that she was shocked, because “the [sales] numbers [were] never better.”

She has a point. In 2023, Chanel’s revenue rose 16 percent to a record $19.7 billion. When it announced results (the company is private but makes some financial information public), the company praised Viard explicitly. Clients loved her work, too, as did the sales associates who sold to them.

Viard’s book raises the question of whether or not she deserved what happened to her. She didn’t. But her sin wasn’t chiefly bad skirt suits. It was failing to become a myth, a cult of personality figure the fashion world loves. Chanel invested 35 years in building up her predecessor, Karl Lagerfeld. And it sounds like little effort was expended on doing the same for her.

Were some of her runway looks unappealing? Sure. Some fashion followers are still haunted by her Bermuda shorts, ombré jorts, and matronly dresses. But Lagerfeld showed plenty of ugly clothes, too, and the industry knew it. One big difference was that Lagerfeld made himself into a character, from the Chrome Hearts rings, low ponytail, and three-piece suits, to his cat Choupette, who traveled by private plane with bodyguards, chefs, and assistants.

He also knew how to give the press soundbites. When I was a tadpole reporter at The Cut, I went with a camera person to an exhibition of Karl Lagerfeld’s photography in midtown Manhattan. We waited for hours for him to show up, but once he did and noticed our camera and light, he came right over to us, prepared with sassy quips. He knew exactly what he was doing when he said things like, “Sweatpants are a sign of defeat.”

John Galliano did something similar with his homeless-inspired couture and pirate-like personal style when he designed Dior. The industry is so worshipful of these god-like figures that it is willing to forgive nearly anything: virulent antisemitism (Galliano, who landed a residency at Oscar de la Renta 22 months after Dior fired him) and hating on sexual assault victims (Lagerfeld, who got a Costume Institute retrospective; Anna wanted one for Galliano, too). Viard has been out of a job for longer than Galliano was (she writes that she wants to design again), and her worst offense was unflattering dresses.

Viard never dressed or acted like a caricature of herself. She rarely talked to the media. In this industry, the persona is the job, and she either didn’t see this or chose not to play along. But it’s worth asking why the men got so much help with theirs. Lagerfeld had Chanel behind him even at his regular moments of controversy. Both he and Galliano had Anna’s patronage.

Viard, meanwhile, spent decades as Lagerfeld’s right hand. She makes him sound cruel. She says he would step away “for five minutes” but leave someone waiting for five hours; that he, per Le Monde, “fomented jealousies”; and that, when her mother died, he failed to send flowers or offer condolences (and he loved sending a fabulous floral arrangement, according to the 2023 biography by William Middleton). He bought her a Nissan and fine wines instead. She even prepared his protein shakes when he was on that crazy diet that led to his loss of more than 90 pounds in the early 2000s (he wanted to wear Hedi Slimane’s skinny suits).

When she finally stepped into Lagerfeld’s role, Viard writes, she never found a right hand. It’s not clear what Chanel did to help her build a team or public image.

Meanwhile, Monday night in Paris, Matthieu Blazy showed another adored collection, including suiting fabric that looks like tweed but stretches like athleisure (“We all look at Nike,” he said), a coat that turns into a caped dress, and 95 birds suspended over the runway. He’s not a nepobaby or a media-hungry eccentric. But his reception has been aided by a savior narrative, and the online peanut gallery that came out swinging against Viard has been invited in to swoon over his work. Chanel’s 2025 revenue, $19.3 billion, was still below the $19.7 billion under Viard.

Chanel clients told me earlier this year they feel like they have to comply with unspoken rules to even be able to shop there. If that’s how the brand treats paying customers, Viard’s book offers a rare glimpse at what it’s like to work there.

Here’s Sam Altman on the cover of Vanity Fair’s “New Establishment” issue.

The “New Establishment” is Vanity Fair’s big listicle of “newsmakers of the moment,” aka an excuse to photograph Gavin Newsom in an office and Taylor Sheridan with a horse for the same package. Altman represents so much of American rage right now — over data centers, Big Tech, inequality, Trump, AI’s theft of creative work. Vanity Fair can't have been blind to this, so either the cover is ragebait (Condé Nast’s ever-growing archive includes Galliano’s failed Met retrospective, Vogue’s two Lauren Sánchez puff pieces, and the robots at Vogue World). Or Vanity Fair needs a sponsor for its Oscars party, and OpenAI — which funded Vogue World and the Met Gala — seems like an easy target. Or maybe this was Altman’s reward for writing the checks?

Playwright Jeremy O. Harris also features in the “New Establishment” issue. In a widely viewed clip from his podcast recording, he told Vanity Fair’s Global Editorial Director Mark Guiducci that he and Anna Wintour shouldn’t feature people like Altman and Elon Musk in their magazines or at the Met Gala or Vanity Fair Oscar party. Guiducci pushed back and said they were doing journalism, and Harris pointed out that sitting for photos for either magazine results in “advertising.”

Vanity Fair is in the access business, so I’d agree with Harris’s point. The unflattering Trump cabinet photos were a journalistic feat, as Guiducci points out, but also the outlier, rather than the norm.

Bad news for friendless Bernard Arnault: his net worth no longer ranks him on the list of the ten richest people. It dropped to around $177 billion in late September, laying waste to that brief period in the spring when he was the world’s richest person.

Arnault has previously said he won’t be happy unless he’s the richest person in the world. Today, Forbes ranks him at number 15, right behind Walmart heiress Alice Walton.

Hope he can find way through this difficult time.

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