After a six-month search to fill one of the top creative jobs on the planet, Chanel confirmed late yesterday afternoon that it had finally found The One: 40-year-old French-Belgian Matthieu Blazy who until this week headed up Bottega Veneta in Milan.

Unless you follow fashion closely, you won't have heard of Blazy. He's not one of fashion's stuntmen. But this news is hugely significant. Chanel is fashion's second-biggest luxury brand in terms of revenue (£15.6 billion in 2023 compared with £71.4 billion at LVMH, the parent company of Louis Vuitton) but far more prestigious. It's also a brand that for all its mystique, is relevant to a vast and disparate customer base, even if some of them don't realise the knock-off quilted gilt chain bags they're buying in Walmart or M&S had their origins in the 2.55 prototype that Chanel first launched in February 1955.

Despite (or because of) its eye-wateringly expensive prices (£10,000 for the 2.55; £8,000 upwards for a tweed jacket, ) Chanel remains one of the most relevant sources of design and style inspiration in history. There's barely a fashion label in the world that hasn't borrowed from Chanel's playbook: little black dresses, slingback shoes with black tips, Breton stripes as a fashion statement, jersey, twinsets, pearls with everything. Glance at the queues outside some Chanel boutiques and it's hard not to conclude that owning a tiny piece of the brand is the 21st-century equivalent of having a religious reliquary.

You can bet your bottom crypto-coins that the rest of the fashion industry will be watching closely to see how this pans out, not least because this is such a different appointment from the last major one. Louis Vuitton's hiring of Pharrell Williams to head up its menswear in 2023 was at once seen as profoundly cynical (Williams is a very famous musician with no formal fashion training) and a sign of things to come, not least for the amount of global cut-through Williams's first show, in the summer of 2023, grabbed. Celebrity signings seemed to be the way forward for an industry that was becoming increasingly jittery thanks to the soberingly unspectacular performances at its box office.

Blazy, a designer's designer who obsesses about product and subtle innovation, upends that. Now that he's in place, other houses who are officially or rumoured to be looking for new design directions can take their next step. Bottega Veneta has already announced its replacement for Blazy - Louise Trotter, a Brit, who previously worked at Joseph and Lacoste and someone who, like Blazy, focuses on making clothes women will wear. That still leaves Dior menswear, Fendi and possibly Gucci to declare their hands, and for Hedi Slimane, who, over the past seven years, recreated Celine in Chanel's image and was thought to be a major contender for the job there, to make his next move...

No pressure on Blazy, then. Just the six collections a year, including two haute couture and the Metiers d'Art, red carpet projects, oversight of jewellery and the marketing and advertising campaigns - plus everyone who professes to know anything about style, having a view on how he's doing. His immediate predecessor at Chanel, Virginie Viard abruptly left last summer, barely five years into the role. Before that, it was Karl Lagerfeld, a larger-than-life polymath who brought Chanel back from the dusty dead, presided there at the top for four decades, until his death in 2019 and survived post-mortem attempts in some quarters to get him cancelled for his robustly un-PC views.

Neither are examples Blazy would - or could - precisely wish to emulate.

So what will he bring? Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel's shortly-to-retire President of Fashion, and Leena Nair, its British CEO will be hoping for some sparkling design integrity. The retail climate is exceptionally tough across the globe, even for the seemingly invincible Chanel, which has seen its revenues since 2022 flatline or even dip in some markets. Pavlovsky has played this down, but acknowledges it's a wake up call: "We've seen a limit to what people will buy - and actually that's good. We have to be more focussed than ever on our fundamentals," he told me a fortnight ago.

In other words, Chanel, with one of the finest archives of ideas on which to riff, cannot afford to coast. Since Viard's departure there have been four collections produced without a creative figurehead. The Chanel Studio, as its design team are called in-house, is a secretive set-up. The house won't confirm its size although educated guesses estimate it at around 20 people. Unlike at some other houses the team is not brought onto the catwalk at the end of the show. Yet it has done a stellar job in keeping the show on the road. The most recent Metiers d'Art collection which was staged on a sea-sized lake in Hangzhou, China, last week, was rammed with classic Chanel crowd pleasers."A lot of clients are still extremely passionate about the brand," observed Pavlovsky to the Business of Fashion afterward. That will have been a relief - the show must have cost at least £12 million to stage.

But while Chanel can mine its library of hits seemingly to the end of time, it clearly needs some new creative perspective to guarantee its position at the top of the status tree.

Pavlovsky and Nair have understandably taken their time over this appointment. The fashion world has thrown its hat into the ring - everyone from Marc Jacobs to Hedi Simane and a roster of smaller names, some of them spending big money and reportedly hiring big teams to help them round out their applications. This is an opportunity that comes around once in a decade - less if Chanel has its way.

"We're looking for someone who will stay 10 years or more," Pavlovksy told me in our conversation. "The most important thing is to find someone who can take Chanel to the next level" and, he added, in an oblique reference to the egos and demands of some contenders, "someone who cares about Chanel and the brand above themselves. There's a real depth to what Matthieu does, from the shows to the products, to his way of talking about them".

At Bottega Veneta which he joined in 2020, under its British Creative Director Daniel Lee (now at Burberry), Blazy headed up Bottega's womenswear, which was initially eclipsed by the stellar success of the bags. But once he became Creative Director, Blazy consistently produced collections that placed as much emphasis on the ready to wear as the accessories and thoroughly stretched the skills and ingenuity of Bottega Veneta's formidable craftspeople. Lumberjack shirts and jeans that looked as though they were made from wool and denim but were the softest, most pliable leathers, asymmetric wrap skirts worn with the ultimate classic-but interestingly-proportioned stripy cotton shirts - he looks to be that excessively rare magician who can combine "designers' designer" conceptual ideas with everyday wearability.

Will he do the Karl thing of living the life of an 18th-century emperor (this job will pay double digit millions, plus, conceivably, royalties on successful bag designs) and espousing eminently quotable views on every subject under the sun, or be a publicity refusenik like Virginie Viard?

Blazy may well opt for somewhere in the middle. And it might not matter. The days of household name founder - designers like Ralph Lauren or Giorgio Armani are coming to an end. Even Coco Chanel, one of the most famous fashion designers of all, turned out not to be quite as universally known as fashion fans had always imagined. Not every visitor who made the pilgrimage to last year's blockbuster Chanel exhibition at the V&A realised that Coco and Gabrielle Chanel were one and the same person - or that she'd founded the brand they'd come to see.