“I get energy from people,” says Yana Peel, Chanel’s dynamic global head of arts and culture. She brings plenty of her own energy too, treating everyone who meets her to an invigorating, life-affirming dose of her big, bold, positive vibes.

There’s not a hint of the late night she spent at the Fashion Awards (lots of champagne but not a canapé in sight) as the Russian-born Canadian strides into the rooftop restaurant at the National Portrait Gallery. Cutting a striking figure in elegant navy trousers and a Chanel knit, with a flick of her long brown hair she settles into her seat to tell me more about her extraordinary job. The best one in the world? It must come close. After a career in banking with Goldman Sachs, she became CEO of the Serpentine Galleries in 2016 and joined Chanel in 2020 in a role created especially for her by Alain Wertheimer, its global executive chairman. “It felt not like a departure but the combination of a life’s worth of work,” she says of her Chanel move. “I’ve always been a bridge between the finance and the resources and culture.”

Peel has always believed that to be truly effective, arts funding and philanthropy have to be long term. “As a CEO, I knew that so much of the support was often very short term, not very sustainable. It was about a gala, it was about a benefit, it was about an exhibition. It was very quick and hurried and finite.” Wertheimer agreed. His brief was not to go down the arts foundation route of other luxury players (LVMH, Prada Group and Gucci’s owner François Pinault all have art foundations or museums). Neither was she charged with finding artists for the brand’s creative directors to collaborate with, nor focusing on short-term sponsorship of exhibitions and galas. Instead, Peel was asked to approach Chanel’s philanthropy in a different, deeper way, building on the approach she’s been practicing for more than 25 years. She reports directly to Chanel CEO Leena Nair, whose compassionate, inclusive and innovative approach to leadership chimes with Peel’s philanthropic mission.

For her wide-ranging brief, Peel is directly inspired by Coco Chanel herself. The designer maintained an artistic circle of friends that included Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. She designed costumes for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company and secretly sponsored a 1920 performances of Stravinsky’s radical ballet, The Rite of Spring. The composer and his family even stayed at her country house after they fled the Russian Revolution. (The two were also rumoured to be lovers, but that’s another story.) “She was so entrepreneurial,” says Peel “I always found that interesting and very modern: you’re an entrepreneur, you’re financially resourceful, and then you take that funding and put it back into supporting those artists who don’t have the time and space and funding to do what needs to be done.”

Peel’s five years in the role have been a masterclass in soft power – deeply collaborative and built on long-term thinking, her aim is to produce transformational results. The scale and breadth of her brief is awe-inspiring. With the Chanel Culture Fund, she works closely with 40 arts institutions across the globe. Projects include a partnership with The Power Station of Art in Shanghai and includes the first public contemporary arts library in China. This will include funding a rebuild of the third floor, which will be renamed Espace Gabrielle Chanel. Peel is also working with Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art to appoint six Chanel Curatorial Fellows on multi-year research on the diverse artists represented in their collections and tell the stories that live within the museum’s permanent holdings (approx. 3,300 objects). At Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art, the fund has partnered on a long-term public programme of symposiums, film screenings and reading seminars that reflect the institution’s core themes of DEI and access. Most recently it featured Tomás Saraceno’s Aerocene project of spectacular, large-scale floating sculptures made from reused plastic bags – created to encourage eco-social discourse.

Closer to home, at the National Portrait Gallery we are sitting in, there are many strands to Peel’s involvement. She worked closely with the museum as they planned the 2023 reopening of the museum. “The need was to think about how we make sure that women are represented in the collection,” she says. The intention was to create “a real gallery of women artists so that we could get to 50 per cent [as] the number of women represented in the 20th- and 21st-century galleries, which was double where we had started,” says Peel. Chanel supercharged the NPG’s significant commissioning remit to make their collections more diverse and deliver a more dynamic and representative visiting experience for the public including a mural of 130 influential extraordinary women, which takes pride of place in the foyer and aims to redress the balance of power in the institution. Called Work in Progress, it was created by artists Liberty Blake and her mother Jann Haworth, who was married to pop art pioneer Peter Blake. He has often been given the credit for their cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, on which this mural is based, when Haworth was its co-creator. Now, almost half (48%) of the total portraits on display made after 1900 now feature women, up from a third in 2020.

With all her projects, Peel works, “case by case, thinking how can we as Chanel approach this in a way that was non-transactional, long term, very global? Sitting here almost five years on it’s exciting to think of nearly 50 projects. I think it’s five continents, 15 countries, 20 cities,” she says.

One of her proudest initiatives is the Chanel Culture Pass, which gives Chanel employees privileged access to 10 cultural institutions across London (it will soon be rolled out across the world). It underlines her mission to bring more people into art institutions and broaden the spectrum of what they see. Add to that the Chanel Connects podcast, which she started during Covid, bringing creatives together from film, art, dance and music to explore fresh ideas – everyone from Pharrell Williams and Tilda Swinton to Julien Creuzet and Sadie Coles.

“It’s not focusing on marketing. And not just focusing on Paris but being global in terms of thinking from the bottom up, how there’s so much micro influence and local insight and intelligence and impact in [other] countries. It’s being very local in our work and then very global when it scales up into the network of impact.”

That network is truly impressive. One of Peel’s great talents is building strong connections between people and institutions (her Instagram tagline is “Only Connect!”), something she credits to being an only child. “If you didn’t make connections, you’d be lonely,” she says. Over the years, she’s pulled into the Chanel orbit an impressive, international roll call of eminent thinkers, curators, museum directors and creatives including Nicholas Cullinan, director of the British Museum, Alvin Li, curator of international art at Tate Modern, Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, and Indhu Rubasingham, director of the National Theatre, among many others. This summer, Peel hosted 20 such institutional leaders in partnership with the Aspen Institute. “We bring them together so they can work through their issues and also seek opportunities,” she says.

For the Chanel Next Prize, which gives talented artists across many mediums resources and mentorship, she has built a 70-strong global network of nominators that reads like a who’s who of the brightest minds in the cultural spectrum. Peel is rightly proud of the platform she’s given to up-and-coming talent, support which, she explains, “is not transactional”. The only expectation is that recipients flourish in their artistic practice. Two past winners have been digital game designers, a sign of the breadth of her outlook on creativity.

Her eye is fixed on the future, an approach informed by the future-thinking Coco, who stated that she wanted to be part of what happens next (“Je veux être de ce qui va arriver”). Peel is comfortable breaking new ground. The Serpentine under Peel was the first major contemporary arts institution to employ a CTO (chief tech officer) and while there she formed a strong connection with digital artist Ian Cheng. “We brought the first AI work into a museum [in his 2018 shows BOB and Emissaries],” she says, recalling how Cheng’s work spontaneously came to life one night and scared the life out of the gallery’s security guard. She’s continued to pioneer with tech at Chanel, championing digital artists with a dedicated window on Bond Street, which showcases their work. It currently features Coded Nature II by Dutch artist duo DRIFT. Inspired by ever-changing natural patterns, and using AI to simulate evolution, the mesmerising artwork raises questions about our relationship to nature, beauty and tragedy. Having started as a one-off event, The Window has established itself as an important showcase for digital creatives such as Jacolby Satterwhite, Refik Anadol, Cao Fei and Sarah Meyohas. “We’re now 10 artists in,” says Peel.

Reflecting on the anxieties around technology and art, she says there’s so much to learn from this new generation of digital artists. “It means that the artists are driving the technology and not surrendering their authorship to it. I think that’s an exciting moment for us. We can make sure that artists assert their power through technology rather than living in the fear that we all do in our industries that something will take over.”

One Window project with Chinese artist Lu Yang (“the most extraordinary digital artist, using his body as a canvas”) has become an example of the longterm relationship Chanel nurtured. After Yang’s work Doku, described as a post-human dance party, was displayed in Bond Street, it was shown in Times Square, “and before we knew it, it was at the Pompidou,” says Peel. Chanel has also supported Chine – Une nouvelle génération d’artistes exhibition and its related acquisition programme, which will see 21 works enter the Centre Pompidou’s permanent collection. This marks a significant addition to the museum’s contemporary Chinese collections, which now number around 150 works, collecting since 1976. “It’s gate-opening, not gatekeeping,” says Peel of her desire to open the art world up to new talents, aesthetics and audiences.

In 2025, following several projects in Asia and Europe, Peel will turn her attention to Mexico, India and the United States by focusing on projects which enrich culture through technology. “There’s a lot of opportunity in America. There’s so much shift and transgenerational shift. It’s an opportunity for art to bring people closer together,” she says, revealing she’ll announce more details in the new year. The future will also see her focus on the house’s archive, Patrimoine (she oversees the house’s overall archives in Pantin, just outside Paris) and Chanel heritage sites like La Pausa, Coco’s modernist villa in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, which was bought by the brand in 2015. Whatever the project, Peel will approach it with her trademark can-do positivity.

Photography courtesy of Chanel.

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