Coronavirus prompted many designers to rethink their fashion presentations during the last few months. The latest prominent house that had to reinvent its runway show was Chanel.
The fashion house had planned to have around 200 guests at its Métiers d'Art 2021 collection, the first show by creative director Virginie Viard scheduled to take place outside Paris. But with a second Coronavirus wave over Europe and a second lockdown in France, the runway show at the Château de Chenonceau, located in France's Loire Valley, had to be reinvented and was eventually transformed into a digital event.
The show was filmed in the gallery of the Château without any member of the audience and with one famous guest, Kristen Stewart (Chanel's ambassador; Juergen Teller photographed her for the collection campaign) and then unveiled online on Thursday evening.
Also dubbed the Chateau des Femmes (Women's Castle), the fairytale-like 16th-century Château de Chenonceau was donated by King Henri II in 1547 to his favourite mistress, Diane de Poitiers, renowned for her beauty, intelligence and sense of business. She created spectacular gardens and built a bridge on the River Cher.
When Henri II died, his widow Catherine de' Medici evicted her, then she proceeded to make the gardens more magnificent and pursued architectural works, introducing Italian sumptuousness in Chenonceau.
Louise of Lorraine was an almost invisible presence at the Chateau: after her husband Henri III died she withdrew here. Splendor came back in the 18th century, when Louise Dupin started a salon of intellectuals.
In the 19th century, Marguerite Pelouze, from the industrial bourgeoisie, transformed the monument and its gardens according to her taste. During the First World War, a hospital was instead installed in the château's two galleries and Simone Menier, the matron, was in charge of the château-hospital, transformed and equipped at her family's expense.
Different elements from the building impressed Viard: from the stories of the women who lived here to some remarkable spaces like the vast kitchens or architectural details like the intertwined Cs of Catherine de' Medici on the ceiling of the guard's room and Green Study, remarkably similar to the intertwined letters in Chanel's logo.
Viard was also impressed by the gallery of the Château: commissioned by Catherine de’ Medici to Jean Bullant in 1576, and built upon Diane de Poitier's bridge, the gallery is a magnificent ballroom with a black and white checkerboard floor.
This architectural element, a motif that often appears in Renaissance paintings portraying refined element, was reinterpreted as a sequinned chequered motif on miniskirts and purses.
The gardens of the Château inspired instead flower printed denim dresses, tweed suits with black trellisses on which delicate flowers bloomed and intarsia sweaters - one of them replicating an aerial map of the Château garden, with its five lawns, grouped around an elegant circular pond - by Barrie.
The Hawick-based cashmere mill was added in 2012 to Chanel's portfolio of luxury ateliers (that also features glove maker Causse, embroidery makers Montex and Lesage, gold and silversmith Goossens, shoemaker Massaro, hatmaker Michel, feather house Lemarié, button and costume jewellery specialist Desrues and flower house Guillet).
The main aim of the Métiers d’Art collection remains to showcase the artisanal skills of the 38 suppliers Chanel acquired throughout the years and there were plenty of skills to admire here, from the woven tweed ball skirts to the gauntlets, the knee-high boots and embroidered evening sweaters or the architectural details such as the decorative gold sequinned leaf embroidery (from the archives at Lesage) on a jacket, reminiscent of the swirls on the Renaissance fireplace in Louis XIV's drawing room of the Château.
Montex also translated the silhouette of the building into a pixellated geometric castle motif in colorful rhinestones and replicated it on evening handbags and cummerbund belts.
Quite a few details were borrowed from the Renaissance, from the ruffles and quilting to the abundance of white pearls of all sizes (a reference to Coco Chanel, but also to Catherine de' Medici and to other Renaissance ladies, often portrayed wearing pearl jewelry).
Rhomboid patterns forming trellises on dresses also evoked motifs that often appear in Renaissance paintings (such as Alessandro Allori's painting of Lorenzo de' Medici's daughter Lucrezia), but that also called to mind the geometries of the wooden coffered ceiling of Catherine de' Medici's bedroom at the Château. Viard tried to create a dialogue between different eras and Renaissance and modern women, but at times this exchange didn't work as well as she had hoped and there was no sense of rebirth behind her Renaissance.
Some designs lacked the youthful edge Chanel has been aiming for in the last few years (even though there were dynamic moments in the knitwear offer and in particular in the practical sleeveless sweaters matched with wide black trousers), while the cone-shaped veiled turret and hennin headdresses that accessorised two of the looks took back the collection to a merely fantasy realm in which Viard indulged with random references (black coats and jackets with ruff collars, quilted leather vests with bouffant sleeves) that called to mind Rosine Delamare's costumes for super kitsch 1964 film "Angélique, Marquise des Anges" by Bernard Borderie (the first from the Angélique saga, from Anne and Serge Golon's novels).
Bruno Pavlovsky, president of fashion and president of Chanel SAS commented about the event saying that it was the same of a live runway show. Yet there was definitely less interest about it, especially on social media, proving that if you don't have your cohort of influencers pampered with a free trip, free hotel stay and gifts, media revenue will suffer a decline.
At the same time, maybe the lack of impact of the show wasn't caused by the missing front row, but by the rather heavy and costumy designs. Dreaming is a great way to escape from reality and find the strength to get on with life, especially in the dark and uncertain historical moment we are living in right now, but the show felt somehow disconnected from the life of most modern women and from the reality of a global health emergency.
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