Leena Nair speaks onstage during the Forbes Power Women’s Summit 2026 at Jazz at Lincoln Center on September 10, 2026 in New York City. ” width=”970″ height=”718″ data-caption=’Leena Nair speaks onstage during the Forbes Power Women’s Summit 2026 at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Sept. 10, 2026 in New York City. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Taylor Hill/Getty Images</span>’>
As A.I. reshapes how many luxury fashion houses operate, Chanel Global CEO Leena Nair is betting that the lasting competitive advantage will be something technology cannot replicate: human connection.
Nair’s people-first approach reflects three decades spent at Unilever, most recently as the consumer goods giant’s chief human resources officer. It also helped persuade Chanel’s chairman and co-owner, Alain Wertheimer, to recruit an executive with no previous fashion experience. After a nine-month courtship, Nair joined the privately held luxury house as global CEO in January 2022.
“I feel in a world of A.I., human sense, human experience [and] human relationships are going to matter more than ever,” Nair said during an onstage interview with Forbes Executive Vice President Moira Forbes at the Forbes Power Women’s Summit in New York on Sept. 10.
“For me, everything we do in A.I. is about enhancing human skills—relentlessly protecting that which is human, and prioritizing people in this journey,” she added.
That conviction has informed her management style. Nair said she set out to visit Chanel’s factories, meet employees and learn their names. “It’s really important to me. I would know not just about the names, I want to know who they are, what makes them passionate,” she said. “It’s really putting them at the center of my efforts. If you care about the people, they will care about the business.”
In April, Nair shared during an interview with Stanford’s View From the Top podcast that she’d met about 20,000 employees so far. Chanel employed about 38,000 people globally at the end of 2025, including about 700 artisans at its Paris-based le19M complex, according to company disclosure.
Raised in Kolhapur, India, Nair studied engineering in college and began her career as a management trainee at Hindustan Unilever in 1992. Her early career included factory and personnel roles in India. At a time when women were scarce in such roles, Nair became the first woman to work on a Hindustan Unilever factory floor and to work a night shift. She later moved through senior HR positions, becoming executive director of human resources at Hindustan Unilever in 2007 and taking on Unilever’s global senior vice president role for leadership and organization development in 2013.
In 2016, Nair became Unilever’s chief human resources officer (CHRO) and joined its executive leadership team. She was the company’s first woman and first Asian CHRO, and its youngest person to hold the position at 47. During her decade-long tenure, Unilever increased women’s representation in management from 38 percent in 2010 to 50 percent in 2020.
Under her leadership, women also dominate Chanel’s workforce. More than 76 of Chanel’s employees and 60 percent of the leadership are women, Nair said.
She also increased annual funding for Fondation Chanel, its independent charitable foundation focused on women and girls, to $100 million from $20 million. Chanel’s latest results say the company maintained a $125 million annual commitment to the foundation in 2025.
Last year, Chanel reported $19.3 billion in revenue and $4.7 billion in operating profit. When asked about reaching the younger generation of luxury consumers, Nair invoked industrial designer Dieter Rams’s maxim to “buy less, but better.” She said Gen Z already accounts for 30 percent of Chanel’s customers.
“I always say, buy beautiful things, but buy less of them,” Nair said. “Because I want this to be not just for the product, I want it to be about the memories you cherish.”
Chanel has faced scrutiny over the handling of unsold products. Recent litigation in Hong Kong alleged that the company had destroyed significant quantities of unsold luxury goods, though Chanel disputed that the figures reflected an outdated approach. The company has said that, under its sustainability commitments, unsold products are to be managed through recycling and circularity initiatives, including L’Atelier des Matières.
Last year, Chanel published its first climate plan, with a goal of reaching net-zero emissions across its value chain by 2040. Its rival, Kering, has a 2050 net-zero goal.