Seaside Chanel, Louis Vuitton pussyhats at Paris Fashion Week
The last day of Paris Fashion Week on Tuesday saw Chanel take a trip back to its seaside origins, while Louis Vuitton looked to a space-age future that also included a luxury take on the ‘pussyhat’.
Chanel’s show was dedicated to the northern French seaside town of Deauville where its founder Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel opened her first boutique in 1912.
It began with a short film starring Brad Pitt and Penelope Cruz — a tribute to classic 1960s French classic ‘A Man and a Woman’ — set in Deauville.
On the catwalk, the stars of the show were, fittingly, some hugebrimmed beach hats.
The collection had a palette of bright pastel tones across a range designed for winter walks on the beach, including pea coats, tweed suits, 1920s-style pant suits and turtlenecks.
Creative director Virginie Viard, who took over from Karl Lagerfeld when he died in 2019, has occasionally faced criticism for a lack of daring. But that has “the merit of not losing people along the way,” said actress and model Arielle Dombasle, a regular muse for Lagerfeld, speaking on the sidelines of the show.
“It’s not gratuitously spectacular, it’s graceful and always successful,” she told AFP.
The ninth and final day of Paris Fashion Week’s women’s readyto-wear shows also included big names such as Miu Miu and Lacoste.
Lacoste, known for its ties to tennis, finally held a catwalk show at the sport’s French home of Rolland Garros.
The brand is seeking to expand into a broader luxury sportswear market, and offered new takes on its familiar preppy vibe with more hip-hop-inspired items such as big puffer jackets.
The final show was Louis Vuitton, whose creative director Nicolas Ghesquieres marked 10 years at the helm by having a giant Death Star-like globe of lights and wires suspended over the Louvre courtyard.
There were extravagant spaceage costumes that have been his marker.
Padded white jackets with big furry gloves, dresses that looked like they were made out of the brand’s well-known luggage, and sculpted female suits that looked like the uniform of some interplanetary stewardess.
The collection also included a number of bejewelled gold, silver and midnight blue jackets -- no “quiet luxury” here -- as well as coats with huge fur shoulders.
These were topped with luxury versions of the “pussyhat” -- the makeshift headwear that became a symbol of women-led protests against Donald Trump and the anti-abortion movement in the United States a few years ago.
Though that marked the end of the official line-up, Saint Laurent was set to hold a surprise lastminute menswear show later in the evening.