The French luxury house’s latest initiatives to support the arts include a €1 million ($1.2 million) prize fund and a new suite of partnerships with cultural institutions aimed at promoting progressive exhibitions as museums and art galleries reopen.

As part of the Chanel Next Prize, 10 artists will receive awards of €100,000 each, intended to fund arts projects and help them access mentorship and networking opportunities that the brand helps facilitate. The Chanel Culture Fund, meanwhile, will work with art and culture institutions — including London’s National Portrait Gallery, The Underground Museum in Los Angeles, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and GES-2 in Moscow — to create new programmes that aim to, for example, enhance the representation of women or promote new ecologies for sustainable cities. The programme will take place over three years, as Chanel’s institutional partners begin to craft their post-pandemic reopening plans.

Luxury brands and parent companies have offered prizes to emerging creatives and collaborated with museums on collections for years, as they tend to help deepen brand awareness and build equity. For example, LVMH enacted its eponymous Prize in 2014 while Gucci created its Changemakers Scholarship to help nurture and support nascent fashion talent in 2020. Rather than focusing singularly on fashion creatives, however, Chanel said it is taking a broader view.

”Rather than having a singular strategy for selecting artists, it’s a very diffused model in terms of going to the expertise globally, harnessing those networks, figuring out how we can make that bridge with our own platforms and those artists and then coming up with this next generation of 10 individuals who we may not even know exist, but will bring into the house to have that kind of curated alumni network and then further knowledge exchange,” Yana Peel, Global Head of Arts & Culture at Chanel, told BoF.