Virginie Viard finally put her mark on Chanel
on Tuesday with a beautifully restrained Paris haute couture show that
summoned up the convent girl childhood of the fabled French label’s founder.
The discreet designer, Karl Lagerfeld’s righthand woman in his twilight
years, shook the Kaiser’s ghost from her shoulder to produce some of the most
subtle and refined clothes seen on a Chanel catwalk in quite some time.
With white sheets hung on washing lines around the spare set of a convent
cloister evoking the orphanage where Coco Chanel grew up, this was a thorough
spring clean.
Viard quite literally went back to the source, travelling deep into rural
southwest France on a pilgrimage to the abbey at Aubazine where Chanel learned
to sew, and where her little black dress had its genesis in the nuns’ habits.
“It was a very touching and inspiring place. I felt good there,” said Viard
of her time communing with Chanel’s spirit.
While Lagerfeld felled forests, reproduced rockets, ocean liners and the
Eiffel Tower almost to scale inside the vast Grand Palais for his legendary
Paris shows, Viard recreated the convent’s humble little garden gone to wild.
Classic Chanel tweed
Rather than Cecil B DeMille sets, her clothes did the talking.
With models in white ankles socks and sensibly heeled loafers, the early
looks — almost entirely white — had an Edwardian schoolgirl elegance about
them.
Chanel tweed suits in black and white, dresses and pinafores with bertha
collars. All appeared terribly simple, ascetic even, until you looked at the
cut and sparkly sophistication of the flower detailing.
Then there was Gigi Hadid, discipline personified, as a kind of mother
superior enforcer in a killer black buttoned-up habit dress with a claudine
collar.
The American supermodel seemed to lap up the role, having confronted a
gatecrasher who slipped onto the runway at the last Chanel show.
Then came the couture dresses assembled with a rare and restrained ethereal
beauty, with their fine embroidery carrying echoes of stained glass and
filtered ecclesiastical light.
Even the Paris weather seemed to have caught some of the chill of Chanel’s
convent rigour, with Kaia Gerber and other models swaddled in thermal foil
blankets backstage against the biting winter cold.
Viard’s schoolgirl uniforms
“The idea of a boarding school, of schoolgirls, of the children’s clothes
from long ago, pleased me,” Viard said of her spring summer wardrobe.
Gabrielle Chanel — who would later restyle herself Coco — was sent to a
former Cistercian abbey at Aubazine after her mother’s death in 1985.
“In that place outside time, the young Gabrielle was marked for life by a
rigour, a sense of purity and a whole aesthetic that never left her, and was
one of the major sources of her inspiration,” Viard added.
Haute couture shows happen only in Paris and are regarded as the pinnacle
of fashion, with hundreds of hours of work going into every piece
painstakingly handmade.
Only the world’s richest women can usually afford dresses from the little
more than a dozen permanent haute couture houses allowed to use the label
under French law.(AFP)
Photo: Chanel SS20 haute couture, Catwalkpictures
