CHANEL Announces New Photography Curator Role in Partnership with the National Portrait Gallery

Fresh from announcing a major new partnership with Paris’Centre Pompidou Centre, CHANEL Culture Fund is now strengthening its relationship with London’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) by creating a new Curator of Photography role.

The appointment, due this autumn, marks the next phase of a partnership now in its sixth year. The curator will oversee photography acquisitions, exhibitions and collection displays, giving the medium a dedicated voice within one of Britain’s best-known portrait collections.

The move reflects the reach of the brand’s cultural ambitions. Since launching in 2021, the Culture Fund has developed more than 50 projects and partnerships across 15 countries, spanning acquisitions, research, artist commissions, curatorial appointments and public art.

Its activities also include the CHANEL Next Prize, which awards €100,000 to ten artists every two years, and CHANEL Connects, a podcast bringing together artists and cultural figures to discuss ideas shaping the future.

Trojan and Leigh Bowery (1983). Photo: David Gwinnutt, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery and CHANEL

CHANEL is not the first luxury house delving into culture. LVMH has the Fondation Louis Vuitton, François Pinault established major exhibition spaces in Venice and Paris, and Prada built its own foundation in Milan, among others.

But rather than creating another destination with its name above the door, the brand has chosen to invest in existing institutions, building relationships with museums that have their own collections, audiences and cultural identities.

This decentralised model is arguably more agile, allowing partnerships to respond to individual institutions while connecting them through a global network. CHANEL is striving to build a presence in the art world by facilitating relationships that help shape contemporary culture.

The approach also chimes with the outlook of CHANEL founder Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, a supporter of the avant-garde who formed friendships with artists including Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Diaghilev, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí. She helped finance Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes production of The Rite of Spring in 1920. That tradition has found a new expression under Yana Peel, who joined CHANEL in 2020 and leads its arts, culture and heritage activities.

The CHANEL-National Portrait Gallery partnership previously supported Reframing Narratives: Women in Portraiture, a three-year project that concluded in 2023. Since then, the number of works by female artists in the museum’s post-1900 displays has nearly doubled, while women now feature in almost half of the portraits on view, compared with around a third in 2020.

CHANEL also supported Yevonde: Life and Colour, the NPG’s first exhibition following its reopening in 2023. The show drew on research, cataloguing and digitisation of the pioneering photographer’s tricolour separation negative archive. Last year, the partnership supported Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives on Portraiture, bringing eight contemporary artists into dialogue with the permanent collection.

The Spice Girls (1996). Photo: Harry Borden, courtesy of CHANEL

Photography is already an established part of the NPG’s holdings. The significance of the appointment is therefore less about introducing the medium than giving it sustained curatorial attention and investing in the expertise needed to develop the collection.

“This newly-created position, the CHANEL curator of photography, builds on the foundations of our long-term partnership,” says Peel. “A role devoted to photography gives the medium the sustained focus it deserves — essential for an art form that continually evolves alongside new technologies and tools.”

In the announcement, NPG director Victoria Siddall describes CHANEL’s support as “transformative”, saying the next phase will enable the Gallery to “build our photography collection, develop ambitious exhibitions and bring new audiences into conversation with one of the most powerful and influential art forms”.

The partnership is part of a wider network of institutional relationships. At the Pompidou Centre, CHANEL has supported projects including a 2023 collaboration with the architecture and design collective Assemble and a three-year partnership focused on acquiring contemporary Chinese art, with an emphasis on women artists.

Earlier this year, the two announced a further five-year commitment to support the museum’s renovation and its work around access, scholarship and the preservation of public knowledge.

Elsewhere, CHANEL has worked with M+, Leeum Museum of Art and Hamburger Bahnhof. Its support for the Power Station of Art in Shanghai has included developing a contemporary art library and archive, while its partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago has focused on research into artists from the Global Majority. At CalArts, the fund has supported a centre exploring artificial intelligence, machine learning and digital imaging.

Across these projects, CHANEL is investing in research, scholarship and institutional infrastructure, rather than simply funding exhibitions or commissioning work associated with the brand.

Jimi Hendrix (1967). Photo: Gered Mankowitz, courtesy of Gered Mankowitz, Iconic Images and CHANEL

In Chicago, for example, the focus has been on curatorial research into artists from the Global Majority, bringing greater attention to work already held by the museum. Such projects show how cultural philanthropy can address gaps that conventional exhibition sponsorship might overlook.

Museums gain resources and the capacity to pursue projects that might otherwise remain out of reach; CHANEL builds relationships with artists, curators and cultural leaders, gaining a place in conversations shaping contemporary culture. The value lies in a longer-term association with the institutions and people helping to define the cultural landscape.

The NPG relationship is also becoming more visible internationally. From 2 October to 29 November 2026, CHANEL Nexus Hall in Tokyo is hosting Icons and Image Makers: Photographs from the National Portrait Gallery, an exhibition of 59 photographs of British figures from film, music and fashion, including works by Irving Penn, Martin Parr and Juergen Teller. The NPG is the first Art Partner invited to programme the space, with the exhibition launching a regular series of presentations.

Peel says the Gallery was the natural choice for the inaugural show: “For two centuries, its pioneering spirit has championed the ideas and individuals who define Britain, and this is its most exciting era yet.”