Chanel Launches Arts & Culture Magazine in Indie Book Stores

Over a century after Coco Chanel founded her label in Paris, the French fashion house is making a foray into the boutique print media sphere by starting its first glossy arts magazine.

Chanel’s new annual tome, Arts & Culture, was released this week, with the first issue devoted to chronicling the practice and lives of contemporary artists (alongside plenty of promotional Chanel editorial content). It features cultural essays about artists like Tracey Emin, Lu Yang and Tomás Saraceno. There’s an interview with the photographer Stephen Shore and a report on A.I. art by the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. The cover depicts a bust of Ms. Chanel that was made by the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz in 1921.

“This is Chanel’s first arts and culture magazine and you can feel Gabrielle Chanel’s legacy in its pages,” said Yana Peel, the brand’s president of arts, culture and heritage, using Ms. Chanel’s birth name. “She was a voracious reader and was known for surrounding herself with a network of audacious creatives. We’re trying to extend that legacy through physical print media.”

“We’re seeing a resurgence of interest in independent magazines and in independent bookstores,” Ms. Peel added. “We want to give this moment the amplification that we can through the global stage Chanel has.”

The magazine also unabashedly promotes the Chanel universe. It features figures who have professionally collaborated with the brand, like the actress Tilda Swinton and the architect Peter Marino, alongside stories that celebrate Chanel’s history. Among them is an essay by the art historian RoseLee Goldberg titled “A Life of Performance: Gabrielle Chanel and the Avant-Garde,” and a lengthy visual essay by the photographer Roe Ethridge, who captured an array of Ms. Chanel’s personal belongings, like selections of her jewelry and a handwritten letter to her from Jean Cocteau.