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The star designer, who heated up Bottega Veneta to the boiling point, is moving to Rue Cambon.

PARIS — At a time when luxury brands are cycling through designers at increasing speed, Chanel hopes to have found a long-term match in Matthieu Blazy.

The French house said on Thursday it has selected the former Bottega Veneta creative director as its new artistic director of fashion activities, putting an end to months of speculation around the position described as the most coveted job in fashion.

This follows a report on WWD.com on Nov. 14 that Blazy had emerged as a leading contender for the plum Paris post.

Blazy will be responsible for all haute couture, ready-to-wear and accessories collections and will report to Bruno Pavlovsky, president of fashion and president of Chanel SAS.

The 40-year-old designer is due to join the house in the first half of 2025, most likely in April, and will show his first collection in October, Pavlovsky told WWD in an interview.

Chanel views it as a serious commitment.

“We hope to be together for 10, 15 years or more. We’re just at the start of our story,” the executive said. “Together we’ll be able to write a new chapter for the brand.”

Blazy succeeds Virginie Viard, who exited Chanel last June after an uneven five-year tenure. He becomes only the fourth official creative director in the history of the 114-year-old brand, known for its tweed suits, quilted handbags and No.5 perfume.

A number of lesser-known designers, including Ramon Esparza, an acolyte of Cristóbal Balenciaga, and Philippe Guibourgé, best known for designing the Miss Dior line, created its collections between the death of founder Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel in 1971 and the arrival of Karl Lagerfeld in 1983.

“I am thrilled and honored to join the wonderful house of Chanel. I look forward to meeting all the teams and writing this new chapter together,” Blazy said in a statement provided to WWD.

With Blazy’s appointment, the Rue Cambon house is definitively turning the page on the era of Lagerfeld, who was its creative director for 36 years, with Viard as his right-hand woman.

But the honeymoon will have to wait, as Blazy has to sit out the noncompete clause of his contract with his previous employer, Kering, which confirmed his departure on Thursday and named Louise Trotter his successor.

In his three years leading Bottega Veneta, Blazy made the brand’s show one of the hottest tickets in Milan, attracting the likes of Jacob Elordi, Julianne Moore, A$AP Rocky, Michelle Yeoh and Kendall Jenner to his latest display.

He was appointed creative director of Bottega Veneta in November 2021, when he rose from ready-to-wear designer to succeed Daniel Lee at the design helm, marking his ascension to the top rungs of fashion after a career in the shadows with brands including Raf Simons, Maison Margiela and Celine.

The French Belgian designer has won consistent acclaim for collections hinged on sophisticated, grown-up chic, and haute craftsmanship.

He’s also been gaining renown as a fashion showman capable of pulse-pounding runway action and imaginative sets, which for spring 2025 consisted of leather beanbag chairs in 15 animal shapes.

“Matthieu Blazy is one of the most gifted designers of his generation,” Alain Wertheimer, global executive chairman, and Leena Nair, global chief executive officer of Chanel, said in a joint statement.

“His vision and talent will reinforce the energy of the brand and our position as a leader in luxury. Under Bruno Pavlovsky’s leadership, we are confident that Matthieu Blazy will continue to shape what’s next and write a new page in Chanel’s creation,” they added.

Pavlovsky revealed that Blazy edged out two other finalists to snag the post, following an exhaustive search that considered not just top-tier designers but “number twos, number threes and number fours” across the industry.

In the last six months, the rumor mill has churned out potential candidates including Hedi Slimane, Simon Porte Jacquemus and Pieter Mulier. Pavlovsky declined to confirm any names but said the talent pool was thriving.

“Genuinely, all the people we met were great and I understand why luxury and fashion have such energy,” he said.

“Very quickly, we narrowed it down to three people with whom we spoke, but Matthieu stood out immediately because he has a track record, a vision of Chanel and a modernity that seduced us,” he continued.

“We chose the person whose values, talent and vision of women, of our clients, were the best fit for us. And a key point for me was that I sensed great admiration and respect for the heritage and the work done by Mademoiselle Chanel, by Karl and by Virginie,” Pavlovsky said.

“That was important to me, because it wasn’t about a kind of competition over image and size. It was about the depth of what the brand stands for, and how we could build on that to continue telling our story,” he noted.

It marks the first time the privately owned company has recruited an external candidate for the top fashion creative post since Lagerfeld was appointed in 1983. Viard was seen as his natural successor after the legendary designer’s death in 2019.

The legendary German designer had engineered one of the modern fashion industry’s first and most successful brand rejuvenations and propelled the fabled French name from near obscurity to the summit of international luxury.

Viard gave the brand a more feminine bent and sought to appeal to a younger and more diverse demographic with her athletic-inspired clothes, multiplying Chanel’s ready-to-wear business by 2.5 during her tenure. But online commenters skewered her last collections and the brand felt the time had come for a change.

Born in Paris in 1984, Blazy is a graduate of famed visual arts school La Cambre in Brussels, and he started his fashion career as men’s designer for Raf Simons.

From 2016 to 2019, Blazy worked at Calvin Klein as part of the team Simons brought to New York, working on the men’s and women’s collections as design director.

Before Calvin Klein, Blazy worked in the studio of Celine under then-creative director Phoebe Philo, becoming senior designer in 2014, and for four years at Maison Margiela.

Chanel took its time to plot its next move even though the creative transition coincided with a period of stalled demand in China, where it staged its recent Métiers d’Art show, and a drop in spending among aspirational customers in Western markets.

This reflects the strength the brand, a key point for Chanel’s management team led by Nair.

“We defined the criteria that were essential for Chanel, and among these criteria, there is obviously the brand before the personality,” Pavlovsky said.

“I won’t name names, but some people have shown they can move from brand to brand and their style remains fairly identical, and the brand has to adapt,” he said.

“Our brand is strong and has stood the test of time. It stands for values that we want to nurture. It’s not about carrying someone else’s vision. We believe that Matthieu’s talent and power lies in the fact that he has the capacity to come into the brand and drive it forward,” he added.

The stakes are high. Chanel again delivered record revenues in 2023, with sales up 16 percent at comparable rates to $19.7 billion, although price increases alone accounted for a 9 percent progression.

In the last decade the company has more than doubled its revenues and headcount, and now ranks as the world’s second-largest luxury brand behind Louis Vuitton, with 36,500 employees at the end of 2023.

Blazy will be expected to churn out 10 collections a year, including two haute couture collections, six ready-to-wear collections, including the cruise and Métiers d’Art shows, and two “tactical” lines, Coco Beach and Coco Neige.

His remit does not extend to the fragrance and cosmetics, or jewelry and watches divisions, which have different business models, said Pavlovsky, who emphasized that teamwork was key to Chanel’s continued success.

“Chanel’s fashion business has become huge. After all, we’re 10 or 15 times the size of Bottega Veneta or some emerging brands,” he said.

“You can’t have one person doing everything. It’s the product of a strong and experienced collective working in tandem with a person who sets the tone with a collection or a show,” Pavlovsky insisted.

Revenues at Bottega Veneta totaled 1.6 billion euros in 2023 and the brand posted 4 percent organic growth in the first nine months of 2024, bucking the overall negative trend at Kering.

While Chanel dwarfs his previous employers in scale, Blazy has some key qualifications. He comes with experience in haute couture, having designed Margiela’s Artisanal line.

“It’s something he finds very inspiring, and no doubt a big part of what makes Chanel so enticing,” Pavlovsky said. “With haute couture, designers experience moments of pure joy.”

Crucially, Blazy has a track record of delivering desirable handbags at Bottega Veneta, including his hit Kalimero, Andiamo and Sardine styles.

“Chanel is first and foremost about the product,” Pavlovsky said. “Matthieu is passionate about it, and it shows. The way he did such an exceptional job of reenergizing the product at Bottega Veneta, over a very short period of time, demonstrates that this is truly his signature.”

His appointment is the latest step in a long-term succession plan set in motion with Nair’s arrival in 2021. The former Unilever executive assumed a title previously held by Wertheimer, who then became global executive chair of the company.

However, Wertheimer remains a key decision-maker and is said to have personally informed Viard of his decision to bring in a new designer.

“There is a generational handover underway, and that generational change has to reflect the times. It’s part of a process that is essential to ensure the future strength of the brand,” Pavlovsky said.

“Today, we are a large, powerful corporation with several business models and our organization needs to reflect the size and requirements of this company,” he added. “Matthieu’s arrival fits perfectly into this dynamic.”

Like Lagerfeld before him, Blazy has signed a renewable contract for his services, the executive said. While he did not give a duration for the initial term, he said Blazy would have two years to find his bearings at Chanel, in keeping with his “authentic” approach.

“Matthieu has a deep vision of the brand that will allow us to go even further than with a more show-off approach that goes fast. I think that on the contrary, he’s someone who has to move at his own pace,” Pavlovsky said.

“We have a very good feeling about it, but we’ve given ourselves two years, which is the time it takes to get a feel for the brand. I’m super confident, but now we have to do the work,” he added.

Advisers asked potential nominees whether Trump could abolish the FDIC

The Trump transition team has started to explore pathways to dramatically shrink, consolidate or even eliminate the top bank watchdogs in Washington.

In recent interviews with potential nominees to lead bank regulatory agencies, Trump advisers and officials from his newfound Department of Government Efficiency have, for example, asked whether the president-elect could abolish the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., people familiar with the matter said.

Advisers have asked the nominees under consideration for the FDIC, as well as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, if deposit insurance could then be absorbed into the Treasury Department, some of the people said.

Any proposal to eliminate the FDIC or any agency would require congressional action. While past presidents have reorganized and rebranded departments, Washington has never shut down a major cabinet-level agency and rarely closed other agencies like the FDIC that are not.

Bank executives are optimistic President-elect Donald Trump will ease a host of regulations on capital cushions and consumer protections, as well as scrutiny of consolidation in the industry. But FDIC deposit insurance is considered near sacred. Any move that threatened to undermine even the perception of deposit insurance could quickly ripple through banks and in a crisis might compound customer fears.

After several banks failed last year, customers panicked about whether their deposits were safe at smaller banks. Many fled to the biggest of big banks who are perceived to be so important that the government would never let them fail. Since then, banks have been calling for wider deposit insurance protections to keep smaller banks competitive.

The DOGE interview round

The discussions underscore the drastic approach Trump could take in his attempt to slash the size of the government and ease oversight, including for the highly-regulated financial industry.

Potential bank regulator nominees have interviewed with Treasury Secretary pick Scott Bessent and the new DOGE department, the outside advisory group co-chaired by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, some of the people said.

Musk last month also called for the elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency Republicans have long hated. “There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies,” Musk said.

Trump advisers and potential nominees have also discussed plans to either combine or otherwise restructure the main federal bank regulators: the FDIC, OCC and the Federal Reserve, the people said.

Project 2025, a policy document drawn up by the Heritage Foundation and former Trump officials, calls for the merging of the FDIC, OCC and nonmonetary policy parts of the Fed, along with the National Credit Union Administration. (Trump has said he had nothing to do with Project 2025.)

Rep. Andy Barr, a Republican from Kentucky and Trump ally on the House Financial Services Committee, has backed the plan to eliminate or drastically alter the CFPB and said he wants to get rid of what he calls “one-size-fits-all” regulation for banks.

‘Really hard to get done’

Banks have a love-hate relationship when it comes to the oversight of multiple regulators. Some like it to the extent it can allow them to shop between regulators for a lighter touch. But they often complain about mixed messages and contradictory rulings.

“We could use some streamlining on financial regulation,” said former FDIC Chair Sheila Bair. “But it is really hard to get done.”

A proposal to eliminate a bank regulator would struggle to gain the support of Congress and the industry, she said.

“Banks may complain, but at the end of the day, they like to have their own regulator they have a relationship with,” Bair said. “They like the status quo.”

Frank Sorrentino III, chief executive at ConnectOne Bank in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., said there needs to be more alignment among the regulators. But it is helpful for the system to have multiple regulators that understand the “size, complexity and future challenges” of different banks, he said.

With technology such as artificial intelligence, for example, “you need a different set of regulators to be able to manage the banks that utilize these things at full force than others that have a more simplistic business model,” he said.

In a separate plan that has been floated with the transition team, the FDIC, OCC and parts of the Fed wouldn’t merge but only one of them would continue to regulate banks, one of the people said. The other agencies would keep only nonregulatory staff.

At the CFPB, consumer-education jobs could replace regulatory and supervisory jobs, another person said.

In any plan, significant job cuts are likely. Trump is expected to reinstate an executive order that made some federal workers easier to dismiss, known as Schedule F. Stricter return-to-office policies that could prompt workers to leave are also being discussed, the people said.

Major bank-regulation changes are uncommon outside of financial crisis. Most banking rules today were implemented after the Great Depression or the 2008-09 financial crisis, when bipartisan groups and popular opinion called for stricter bank protections. Republicans will hold thin majorities in both the Senate and the House next year, but are unlikely to find any Democratic support for dramatic changes.

Democrats were the party after the 2008 crisis to close one banking regulator. Many of the worst offending lenders in that crisis were supervised by the Office of Thrift Supervision, which wasn’t a Cabinet-level agency. The 2010 Dodd-Frank law abolished the agency by folding it into the OCC.

Advisers to the president-elect, concerned economic pressure isn’t enough to contain Tehran, are considering military action

President-elect Donald Trump is weighing options for stopping Iran from being able to build a nuclear weapon, including the possibility of preventive airstrikes, a move that would break with the longstanding policy of containing Tehran with diplomacy and sanctions.

The military-strike option against nuclear facilities is now under more serious review by some members of his transition team, who are weighing the fall of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad—Tehran’s ally—in Syria, the future of U.S. troops in the region, and Israel’s decimation of regime proxy militias Hezbollah and Hamas. Iran’s weakened regional position and recent revelations of Tehran’s burgeoning nuclear work have turbocharged sensitive internal discussions, transition officials said. All deliberation on the issue, however, remains in the early stages.

Trump has told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in recent calls that he is concerned about an Iranian nuclear breakout on his watch, two people familiar with their conversations said, signaling he is looking for proposals to prevent that outcome. The president-elect wants plans that stop short of igniting a new war, particularly one that could pull in the U.S. military, as strikes on Tehran’s nuclear facilities have the potential put the U.S. and Iran on a collision course.

Iran has enough highly enriched uranium alone to build four nuclear bombs, making it the only nonnuclear-weapon country to be producing 60% near-weapons-grade fissile material. It would take just a few days to convert that stockpile into weapons-grade nuclear fuel.

U.S. officials have previously said it could take Iran several months to field a nuclear weapon.

The president-elect’s transition team is devising what it calls a “maximum pressure 2.0” strategy against the regime, people familiar with the planning said, the sequel to his first-term approach centering on strict economic sanctions. This time, the president-elect and his aides are fleshing out military steps that could be central to its anti-Tehran campaign, though still paired with tighter financial penalties.

Two broad options have come up in discussions, including in some talks that have taken place with Trump, four people familiar with the planning said.

One path, described by two people familiar with the plan, involves augmenting military pressure by sending more U.S. forces, warplanes, and ships to the Middle East. The U.S. could also sell advanced weapons to Israel, such as bunker-busting bombs, strengthening its offensive firepower to take Iranian nuclear facilities offline.

The threat of military force, especially if paired with U.S.-imposed sanctions that manage to cripple Iran’s economy, may convince Tehran that there is no choice but to diplomatically resolve the crisis.

The alternative path is to seek to use the threat of military force, especially if paired with U.S.-imposed sanctions, to drive Tehran into accepting a diplomatic resolution. That is the strategy Trump employed with North Korea in his first term, although the diplomacy eventually faltered.

It isn’t clear which option Trump, who has talked about avoiding a third World War and brokering deals with Tehran, would choose. While Trump has insisted that he seeks to avoid massive escalation in the Middle East, he told Time in an interview published Thursday that there is a chance the U.S. could go to war with Iran, partly because Tehran plotted to assassinate him.

“Anything can happen,” he said. “It’s a very volatile situation.”

Some incoming administration officials have yet to fully weigh in on the issue, and Iran-related proposals could shift as cabinet officials get into place, classified information becomes available, and discussions are held with regional allies like Israel. Crucially, Trump rarely delves deep into details about foreign-policy matters until he is presented with finalized options and a decision needs to be made, former Trump administration officials say.

Iran’s United Nations mission didn’t respond to requests for comment. Leaders in Tehran have long denied that they seek to acquire a nuclear weapon.

The Israeli government also didn’t respond to requests for comment about whether it would pre-emptively attack Iran during the Trump administration. But in November, after holding three calls with Trump, Netanyahu said he and Trump “see eye to eye on the Iranian threat in all its components, and the danger posed by it.”

Trump weighed the idea of pre-emptive strikes on Iran’s nuclear program toward the end of his first term, former officials said, shortly after international inspectors revealed Iran’s stockpile of nuclear material had grown. But Trump, after he left office, has since disputed he ever considered military action seriously, claiming senior defense aides developed war plans and pushed him to authorize a strike.

Fracking expertise has potential to unlock geothermal energy, says IEA

Investment of estimated $2.8tn combined with advanced drilling techniques could open up deeper energy sources

Techniques pioneered in fracking for oil and gas have unlocked a potential source of renewable energy from the earth’s crust that could rival the cost of producing wind and solar energy within a decade, the International Energy Agency said on Friday. 

The ability to drill more than 3km into the earth, and to drill horizontally, could make geothermal energy — now only practical in a few regions around the world — available to “nearly all countries”, the IEA said in a new report. 

Geothermal energy presently only meets less than 1 per cent of global demand. 

But the IEA, one of the world’s most respected sources of energy data and analysis, said that if governments and businesses invested the $2.8tn required to develop full geothermal potential, it could provide up to 8 per cent of the global electricity supply by 2050.

“New technologies are offering the possibility of meeting a significant portion of the world’s rapidly growing demand for electricity securely and cleanly,” said Fatih Birol, head of the IEA. He added that it was a “major opportunity to draw on the expertise of the oil and gas industry”.

The idea of drilling wells to draw heat from underground reservoirs to the surface is more than a century old, but is now used at scale in only a handful of countries that have suitable sources close to the surface, notably the US, Indonesia, Turkey, the Philippines, Kenya, Iceland and New Zealand.

Two new technologies were offering to transform the sector, said the IEA. One involves artificially fracking rocks to create the conditions needed to inject and heat water. The other is a closed-loop system where water is contained within pipes that are built deep into the earth. 

The IEA said that “with the right support, costs for next-generation geothermal could fall by 80 per cent by 2035”. Reaching this would require the overcoming of hurdles such as the speeding up of project approvals and achieving significant corporate investment.

At that point, it estimated that geothermal plants could generate electricity for around $50 per megawatt-hour, making them “one of the cheapest dispatchable sources of low-emissions electricity, on a par or below hydro, nuclear and bioenergy”. The IEA added that geothermal would also be “highly competitive” with solar and wind power paired with battery storage. 

In the past year, Big Tech companies searching for clean sources of power for their data centres have started to invest in geothermal projects.

In May, Microsoft said it would work with G42, the UAE-based artificial intelligence company, to build a data centre that runs entirely on geothermal energy in Kenya.

The following month, Google said it had signed a deal to buy 115MW of capacity from a plant pioneered by Fervo Energy in the US state of Nevada. Fervo, which is backed by Macquarie, BHP and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, said it had used its experience in oil and gas drilling to create horizontal tunnels inside geothermal reservoirs. 

In August, Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said it had partnered with Sage Geosystems to explore the use of geothermal energy for datacentres, with a first project due online in 2027 and providing up to 150MW of geothermal baseload power.

Reform UK calls for Thames Water to be renationalised

Populist party’s deputy leader says heavily indebted utility should ‘be put out of its misery’

Thames Water should be “put out of its misery” and renationalised, according to the deputy leader of Reform UK, in a sign that the backlash against water privatisation has become an increasingly populist issue.

Richard Tice told the Financial Times that the situation at the heavily indebted UK utility was “completely untenable” and that City financiers were trying to “rip off consumers even more” with high interest loans and millions in fees.

“It is essentially bust, capital projects are being delayed and it should be put out of its misery now,” he said. “There has to be moral hazard. Let it go into special administration for £1 and reorganise it to the benefit of taxpayers and consumers.”

The comments by the deputy leader of the rightwing populist party came days after Thames Water — which provides water and sewerage services for 16mn households but is struggling under a £19bn debt mountain — warned that it risks running out of cash in the new year.

Unless it can obtain a £3bn loan from creditors, Britain’s largest privatised water utility risks being temporarily renationalised under the government’s special administration procedure.

The 2.5-year loan on offer from creditors, which requires approval in court next week, comes at a 9.75 per cent interest rate, with fees taking the real interest cost much higher. 

Reform’s call for renationalisation reflects a shift by populist parties around the world to focus on what they see as the extractive vices of global capitalism, including private equity investors, and their call for policies that have historically been more aligned with the left.

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party has reversed unpopular and costly water privatisations in Pécs and Budapest. In the US, meanwhile, vice-president elect JD Vance has called for more unionisation of workers in the private sector to protect jobs and drive up wages. 

The UK Labour government has said it favours a private-sector solution to the crisis at Thames over special administration, under which the state temporarily takes control of a company to ensure it remains in operation.

This is in part because it is concerned that, if Thames Water entered the special administration regime, leftwing MPs inside the governing party would call for all water companies to be permanently renationalised.

In response to a growing public outcry over executive pay and sewage discharges, the UK Green party has called for public ownership of all water companies. The Liberal Democrats, Britain’s third-biggest party, has said Thames Water should be brought under special administration.

Tice, formerly chief executive of property investment group CLS Holdings, said that, at present “water is not a competitive market, it’s a monopoly”. 

Reform’s general election manifesto included a pledge to bring 50 per cent of all utilities into public ownership, with the other half to be purchased by British pension funds.

David Hall, visiting professor at the University of Greenwich, said there was a global trend towards the return of water services to full public ownership and operation.

Thames Water said it had maintained high levels of capital investment in its ageing assets and to improve network resilience for the benefit of customers and the environment.

“We continue to believe a market-led solution is the best financial and operational outcome for customers, the environment, UK taxpayers and the UK economy,” a spokesperson said.

Thames Water’s creditors declined to comment.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “The company remains stable and the government is closely monitoring the situation.”   

FT : Ken Moelis predicts the death of the M&A banker

Death of the M&A banker

Who doesn’t love a good freewheeling vibe check from Ken Moelis.

At Goldman Sachs’ annual financial conference this week, the founder of the eponymous boutique bank didn’t disappoint in his hot takes on Wall Street.

Moelis, who cut his teeth at Drexel, weighed in on how the blow-up of big banks in 2008 not only created fertile ground for the golden age of private credit, but why he thinks firms like his are going to clean up as a result.

In case you’re not familiar with Moelis’s background: he went to Wharton in the early 1980s and came up through the House of Milken alongside Apollo Global Management chief executive Marc Rowan.

He’s been around the block on Wall Street. Before he started his own boutique bank, Moelis had stints at Drexel, DLJ, Credit Suisse and UBS. He started his own shop at the beginning of the financial crisis — which turned out to be fortuitous timing.

His comments at the Goldman conference were such a gold mine that our friends at FT Alphaville teamed up with DD’s Sujeet Indap to publish an unedited, annotated transcript. But it’s just so good we decided to distil some of the highlights ourselves, too.

Point #1: Private equity is passé. The big alternative investment managers know that their real future is in private debt.

If you go to the big managers like KKR and Blackstone, “none of them are talking about private equity”.

Point #2: Huge fees can be made brokering non-M&A deals, especially in private credit.

Take the $1.5bn preferred debt in a deal Moelis just sourced for a direct lender (which has yet to be announced, so he didn’t name the deal). Moelis is being paid about $30mn in fees for that transaction.

“So it’s M&A type fees for coming up with capital for the other parts of the firm,” he said. “So again, I think people are underestimating these large chunks of capital.”

Point #3: The next generation of rainmakers could specialise in capital markets. That’s at least how Moelis — the bank — is positioning itself.

“I’ve been very much pushing our capital markets [coverage] to make sure [our bankers are] in that market,” he said. “I think it’s going to explode and it’s not going to be easy to get the talent.”

He added: “Some of them just want to be M&A advisers.” But they might be poorer for it.