Chanel-ling Lagerfeld
With the death of designer Karl Lagerfeld, his closest collaborator for more than 30 years, Virginie Viard, has stepped into his shoes at the fashion house, writes Amy Verner. Who is Virginie Viard?
If there was any constant to a Chanel runway show, where the set replicates a vast autumnal forest one season and a hulking cruise ship the next, it was the man behind the curtain: Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel’s designer and mastermind since 1983, who died last week at the age of 85.
In January, Virginie Viard, the creative studio director at Chanel, took the bow at the end of the haute couture collection when Lagerfeld was, according to a statement from the house, ‘‘feeling tired’’ and did not appear.
Viard was at Lagerfeld’s side for the finale of several previous shows, including the resort collection in Paris last May, and the extravaganza at the Temple of Dendur in New York in December.
Naturally, speculation ensued. Was this a sign of the house’s imminent succession plan? It was. Viard has been in place for years.
‘‘Karl is the locomotive, and Virginie is the rails of Chanel,’’ said Loic Prigent, the documentary film-maker who shoots the atelier’s craftsmanship before each show.
In the announcement of Lagerfeld’s death, Chanel described Viard as his ‘‘closest collaborator for more than 30 years’’. The announcement also said that Alain Wertheimer, the chief executive of Chanel, entrusted her with the ‘‘creative work for the collections, so that the legacy of Gabrielle Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld can live on’’. Viard, who is in her 50s, grew up in Lyon, France, the eldest of five siblings. Her father is a ski champion turned surgeon, and her maternal grandparents were silk manufacturers.
In a profile in Grazia magazine, Viard credited her notions of fashion to her mother and aunts. Growing up, she thought Chanel was ‘‘old’’.
She lives in Paris with her partner, Jean-Marc Fyot, a composer and music producer, and they have a son, Robinson Fyot, who is in his early 20s. (He walked the runway of the Chanel 2014 show in Singapore, wearing a lace blazer.)
How she got into fashion
Viard studied at Le Cours Georges, a fashion school in Lyon, where she specialised in film and theatrical costume. She spent a year in London at the peak of punk. Later, after a stint at a boutique in Lyon, she became the assistant to the costume designer Dominique Borg in Paris.
Viard was recommended to Lagerfeld for an internship by Prince Rainier of Monaco’s head of protocol, who was a family friend. She joined the designer at Chanel in 1987 and, not long after, was put in charge of embroidery. Next came a five-year stint at Chloe, still under Lagerfeld’s wing. In 1997, she was named the studio director of Chanel.