Magic, at Chanel, starts from a thread. The proof is in a tweed that reads as an almost photographic leopard pelt – and which is, in fact, patiently engineered from yarn alone. From that point, everything else – the flicker of light across fur, the sense that a jacket might at any moment bare its teeth – is woven into being. For the Métiers d’art collection, that alchemy is the intention. Conceived in 2002 by Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel’s annual pre-autumn outing is a travelling hymn to the specialist houses that underpin the brand’s legend: the embroiderers, feather-workers, goldsmiths, milliners and weavers who contribute to the whole. Every year, in a different city, the collection attempts to make the invisible visible, to show how a couture-level ecosystem can be folded into elevated ready-to-wear. Under Matthieu Blazy, overseeing his first Métiers d’art show, that brief has taken on a new clarity.

Olya Psyarenko, one of the lead textile creators at Maison Lesage, sits at that origin point. She joined the house 22 years ago, brought into the textile department by Monsieur Lesage himself, and never left. “I have never been bored,” she says. “Every time there are new ideas, new materials, new challenges, and it is always very inspiring to work here.” The leopard textile that became the centrepiece of look four in Blazy’s Métiers d’art collection is the latest in that long line of challenges: a tweed that reads, from across a New York subway platform where he chose to show the collection, as a very realistic pelt, but which, up close, dissolves into slubbed yarns, watercolour grounds and irregular spots that never repeat.

Blazy’s studio began with a feeling rather than a technical brief. They asked Lesage to interpret “the leopard’s coat in movement, as preparing to hunt” – the sense of muscles shifting under skin, the gradation from the dark back to the lighter belly. Psyarenko’s task was to translate that into textile. “We had to interpret all of that in 3D,” she explains. “Visually, the fabric itself needed to give the impression of movement.” Her starting point was not a sketch but a fibre. “Everything starts from the yarn,” she says. Blazy’s team are “very focused on the yarn”, arriving with ideas not just about motif but about handle, depth and reflection. Working with a spinner inside Chanel’s own ecosystem, Lesage was able to develop entirely new yarns, thick-and-thin slubs, and tiny bouclé “buttons” that did not exist before this fabric. The ground of the textile is almost entirely matt, like a washed paper or a faded animal hide. Onto this ground, Psyarenko scattered the slub and bouclé yarns at irregular intervals. “What wakes up the base are tiny shimmering points of bouclé yarn,” she says. “Everything is about movement and irregularity in the fabric, to make it richer and closer to something animal.”

The leopard fabric for look four was designed on an unusually large scale, roughly 1.2 metres in height and almost the full loom width. The effect is subtle but radical: “You do not find matching parts, just as on the animal,” Laura Arguelles, director of textiles at Lesage explains. “That is what gives its technical and visual beauty.” Because the slub yarns land differently each time the fabric is woven, two jackets cut from the same roll will never be identical: each client, she says, will have something truly unique.

The process of getting to the completed jacket, once a colour palette was agreed, was smooth. The first hand-woven sample, made in the Lesage workroom, took about a day and a half. It was approved almost immediately. “Sometimes they approve something straight away, sometimes you have to redo, redo, redo,” she says. “For this one, we made two samples and it was validated quickly.” From there, a technical sheet and fabric ID were drawn up and sent to the mill, where the semi-industrial weaving process began, under the watchful eye of the person who had made the original. Between the hand and the loom there are always adjustments. The point, Psyarenko insists, is not to erase but to control the unpredictability.

Research, for her, is as sensory as the final cloth. She watched videos of leopards hunting and at rest, but also turned to Chinese animal prints and paintings, where no two spots are alike and every patch of fur seems to contain its own story. “All the spots are different, there is a lot of life in them,” she says. The textile carries that same restlessness: an almost painted ground, a field of spots that swell and thin, a flicker of shine that suggests a flank catching sunlight as it moves.

Her advice to apprentices now is disarmingly simple. “The fundamental thing is to dare,” she says. “Anyone can learn to weave. It’s like driving: anyone can learn to drive a car. The question is whether you can drive a Porsche or not.” The difference, she suggests, lies in curiosity and generosity: in reading art books, going to exhibitions, watching what happens on the street; in not calculating every move for promotion, but pouring yourself into the work. “If I can touch it, I can weave it. I just have to work out how,” she says.

In Blazy’s Métiers d’art, a leopard print that starts as a thought in a studio becomes a yarn on a cone, a hand-woven sample on a worktable, a tweed suit in a New York subway and, finally, a one-off in a collector’s wardrobe. The magic is not that it looks like a leopard. The magic is that, thread by thread, someone like Olya has worked out how to make movement, light and fear sit quietly inside the cloth, waiting for the next woman who dares to wear it. .