For CHANEL, fashion has never existed in isolation. Literature, cinema, art, and dance have long shaped the world around the brand, with its cultural influence extending far beyond the runway.

Gabrielle Chanel surrounded herself with writers, artists, composers, and filmmakers, setting a precedent that continues to shape the brand today. Now, CHANEL is turning its attention to a new generation of storytellers: five emerging women writers and the novels they have yet to finish.

CHANEL and the Women’s Prize Trust have announced Originators, a new program created to discover and nurture emerging women novelists across the United States. Applications open September 30, with five writers ultimately selected for an individually tailored mentorship, financial support, and access to people across publishing and the wider creative industries.

Courtesy of Chanel

A literary Savoir-Faire. CHANEL’s involvement in literature is not exactly new. The House already supports writers through projects including Literary Rendezvous at Rue Cambon, the Nouvel Obs Literary Prize, the Mot pour Mots festival, and publishing projects through 7L Editions. Literature, in CHANEL’s world, has been treated as another form of creation—one concerned with ideas, freedom, and what gets passed from one generation to the next. Originators now brings that philosophy stateside.

There is something quite beautiful about that idea of transmission. Fashion relies on it too: techniques handed down through ateliers, references rediscovered decades later, an archive becoming the starting point for something entirely new. Writing is not so different. And mentorship, rather than competition alone, sits at the center of Originators.

“Mentoring changes lives,” says novelist Tayari Jones, winner of the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction, reflecting on the women writers who supported her throughout her own career.

The inaugural panel brings together A.M. Homes, Virginia Evans, V.V. Ganeshananthan, Tayari Jones, and Nicole Krauss, who will select five unpublished novelists and work with them as they develop their writing. Each participant will also receive a grant, alongside access to publishing experts and other creatives.

For Homes, that kind of support can be transformative. She recalls the teachers and mentors who “recognized something in me before I could recognize it in myself”—the sort of early vote of confidence that can change the trajectory of a creative career.

Nicole Krauss shares a similar sentiment. “How I wish such a program existed when I was setting out!” she says, describing writing as spending considerable time “in the dark searching for a way.”

There is something distinctly CHANEL about investing in creativity before there is even a finished product to celebrate. Originators does not ask its writers to create something about fashion, luxury, or the House itself. Instead, CHANEL is supporting the process—the time, freedom, confidence, and community required to make something entirely their own.

It also continues a relationship between CHANEL and the written word that feels increasingly integral to the House. Literature is approached not simply as another cultural category, but as a place for ideas to be preserved, challenged, and passed forward. Après tout, fashion and literature have always had more in common than we give them credit for: both document their moment while inevitably imagining what comes next.

Submissions for Originators are open to unpublished novelists across the United States from September 30 through November 30, 2026. The five selected writers will come together in New York in spring 2027 alongside their mentors.

Fashion is always searching for the next name everyone will know. With Originators, CHANEL is looking somewhere else entirely—toward the next voice everyone might be reading.