Chanel’s dreamy Spring-Summer 2021 haute couture show

In the run-up to this show, Chanel’s creative director Virginie Viard entrusted Dutch photographer, filmmaker and graphic designer Anton Corbijn with producing a series of photographs and teasers in the Haute Couture ateliers of the House located at 31 rue Cambon in Paris.

Virginie was hearing wedding bells on the rue Cambon – not her own, she’s been happily partnered to composer Jean-Marc Fyot, the man she describes as “my fiancé,” for a quarter of a century—but instead the bells ringing for a marriage party composed of her haute couture cabine, some 32 models in all.

These are not, as Viard says, the conventional fancy nuptials one might expect from a Parisian couture collection, but instead “more bohemian style – more a wedding or a family celebration in a village than at the Ritz!” complete with “the mother and the aunt, [and] the 15-year-old girl dressing up for the first time” – the latter in a tiny little grown-up black dress of spangled black tulle worn with 1980s opaque white tights.

The mother of the bride has some chic little suits in silvery embroidery and lace to choose from, or a skinny shrunken cardigan jacket embroidered by Vernoux, while more adventurous guests might opt for a lace jumpsuit or a tiny tweed coat dress with a ruffled overskirt to tie on like an apron. There are “a lot of flounces and petticoats,” says Viard.

The silhouettes might be simple – sweaters or sleeveless vests worn with high-waisted pants, skinny cardigan jackets and liquid satin shirts with full romantic ballet skirts – but the beauty is in the detail. This is haute couture, after all, and the sort of garments we may have become familiar with in our work-from-home lives have actually been encrusted with superb embroideries from the houses of Cécile Henri, Hurel, Montex, Emmanuelle Vernoux, and Lesage, or made from custom, hand-painted lace by Solstiss, or scattered with artificial blossoms by Lemarié.

Look closely and you will see, for instance, that the full swirling hem of a flower-scattered chiffon dance dress is edged with individually cut-out and re-embroidered blossoms – a flourish with which Chanel herself used to finish some of her designs in the 1920s and ’30s.

This season, Viard has also worked with photographer Anton Corbijn, whom she met when he shot her for the December 2020 Vogue profile, La Vie de Virginie, and whose music industry credentials – he has shot videos for U2 and Depeche Mode, among many others and directed Control, the magisterial biographical movie about Joy Division’s Ian Curtis – appealed to the rock chick in her.