A few weeks back, I stopped into Charvet, the 188-year-old shirtmaker with a single store on the Place Vendôme, to pick up a demi-custom order that I had placed in early March, right after Paris Fashion Week. It took several months for the two shirts, which each cost around €600, to be made by the atelier in Saint-Gaultier. The process was incredibly satisfying. Everything is so easily accessible today via the internet and a credit card that I was charmed by the fact that I couldn’t control when the shirts—a faded tangerine with pearl buttons, and a rare windowpane check—would be finished. The whole experience played on the erogenous zones of psychological desire.

I am by no means a Charvet obsessive. Unlike many of my friends and acquaintances, I don’t know the owners. I’ve only been shopping there, off the rack, for a decade or so, when I started buying button-ups, slippers, scarves, socks, belts, and sweaters. A button-up is not such an easy silhouette for me, and yet I found that pretty much every Charvet version looked and felt better than a t-shirt. The prices were also very upper-middle-class. A €1,000 sweater from Charvet costs something like €2,200 at a conglomerate-owned brand. Sure, they’re still incredibly expensive, but not out of the realm of possibility.

Perhaps that’s why Charvet has become trendy among borderline Gen Xers like me—people who seek a bit of depth in the brands they buy and want to believe they’re somehow smarter and unique in their spending habits, all while their inherent cynicism tells them otherwise. Yesterday, about 12 hours before Chanel announced it would acquire Charvet, a friend asked me what I thought of Rubirosa’s, that jewel box of a store on rue de Grenelle founded by Lauren Rubinski and inspired by the Charvets, Schostals, Belgian Shoes, and Vera Persianis of the world—but rendered in an undeniably Millennial, ultra-polished, on-the-nose manufactured way. I said that I admired Rubirosa’s, but it seemed like a place where Emily from Emily in Paris would shop. “Are you a Charvet snob?” she asked. I gave her a thumbs up.

Anyway, I was always waiting for something like this Chanel deal to happen. After all, Charvet is covered ad nauseam in the taste-obsessed press and discussed endlessly by people like me. And after the collaboration with Matthieu Blazy and Chanel for his first ready-to-wear collection, the brand became a growing part of the greater fashion conversation—an emblem, perhaps, of what luxury should be for sophisticated consumers. Charvet is singular, uncompromising, and a little weird. The only head fake was that we assumed those attributes explained why the family would never sell out.

Chanel might be inclined to clean up the wholesale distribution—editors, get your discounted Charvet on Net-a-Porter and Mr Porter while you can!—but otherwise I am confident that the initial changes will merely be on the operations side of the business—H.R., tech, etcetera—as the Wertheimers apply their acumen and economies of scale delicately. Don’t expect the prices to skyrocket (the slippers are already far more expensive than they used to be). The Colbans will also surely get more resources to do the things they’ve likely wanted to for a long time—and also to hire more people: As I learned on my last visit, they are so busy at the moment that there is often no time for lunch.

It would be naive to think that a brand like Charvet would remain independent without a next generation of operators lined up. (That’s why Armani is selling, that’s why Loro Piana sold, etcetera, etcetera.) And, I assume for the Colbans, there were really only two possible acquirers: Chanel and Hermès. (I wonder how the Dumases feel about this.) Today the Colbans have undoubtedly spent hours messaging with clients and friends, ensuring them that they are happy, that it was their decision, and that it was the right one. As a customer, I’m relieved that the bad thing happened and it’s not actually so bad. If this sale teaches us anything, it’s that nothing truly lasts forever.