Last Saturday, Taylor Swift arrived at Arrowhead Stadium for the Chiefs-Texans game wearing a head-to-toe Chanel look from Virginie Viard’s final, derided collection, as dreary as the rainy day in Marseille last May, when it was first shown. The outfit itself, a little black romper topped with a brocade anorak and decorated with a jangly pearl belt, was inoffensive. (It was Swift’s own additions—in particular, tights and a pair of knee-high black boots—that took it from okay to tacky.) But enough about the Blake Lively-inspired look. What’s Chanel’s strategy here? Whether or not Chanel loaned Swift the garments—the collection is available in stores now, and there’s a big, probable chance that Swift bought the outfit, estimated at $22,650, herself—there’s clearly a short-term gain for the French fashion house, even as an increasing minority of Swifties acknowledge that their fearless leader has bad taste. After all, a much larger segment continues to worship her personal style, and a subset of that group can also afford Chanel. And the media impressions keep Chanel in the conversation during this period of limbo, as the brand waits for new womenswear designer Matthieu Blazy to make his debut in October. Chanel isn’t waiting to make other changes in the interregnum. This past week, the company quietly laid off about 70 people, I’m told, and about 2.5 percent of the U.S. workforce was impacted. While the cuts are pretty small for a global company with 32,000 employees (most of them retail), Chanel is certainly trimming across all regions, prepping for both new executives and new creatives. A rep for Chanel sent me a thoughtful comment about the layoffs, explaining that the “challenging” decision was made after “careful deliberation,” but had to be done after “previous various steps to protect the business and limit spending.” The rep also said that the company is doing what it can to make the exits as painless as possible. The years-long restructuring can be traced as far back as 2018, before Karl Lagerfeld died, when Chanel moved its corporate headquarters from New York to London. Leena Nair, who was appointed C.E.O. in 2021, has since pursued a two-fold strategy—streamlining the business cross-functionally (beauty, jewelry, and fashion divisions once operated seemingly independently) while decentralizing decision-making power, particularly on the creative side. In many ways, this strategy has been no different from the management philosophy that has descended on other creative industries, from book publishing to Hollywood. It’s not dissimilar, either, to the structure of Hermès, where Pierre-Alexis Dumas is the artistic director but individual designers lead each maison, working in unison. The idea is to make the brand the center of attention, thereby eliminating the vulnerability of key man risk. After the Kaiser, the Chanel brand was king.