Life’s A Beach Chanel SS19

Every year, fashion-philes excitedly await the Chanel Paris Fashion Week Fall/Winter and Spring/Summer showings, desperate to see what Karl Lagerfeld will shock them with next. In the grand tradition of the house, Chanel continued to blow minds, this time transporting us to a literal beach at The Grand Palais des Champs-Élysées for Paris Fashion Week SS19.

Spectacle is generally used as competitive tool – it’s a way to stand out and demand attention. What is interesting about Chanel’s constant emphasis on spectacle is that its doesn’t actually need it. For this legacy fashion house, it’s not about getting attention, rather it’s about maintaining it.

Chanel is one of those rare brands that, for the most part, competes with itself, constantly having to out-do the previous season showing. Spectacle becomes a valued currency for relevance sake. For previous fashion weeks Chanel has created supermarkets, datacentres, enchanted forests and an actual rocket launch. This latest show saw Chanel set the stage with an idyllic and incredibly realistic beach scene.

Complete with a jetty (from which Karl Lagerfeld watched the finale), beach huts, sand and lapping waves, SS19 Chanel was the ultimate beach break for fashion-fatigued editors.

Accessories such as straw hats, fingerless gloves and beach ball handbags lent further levity to the proceedings where a line-up of famous current supermodels – Kendall Jenner, Adwoa Aboah, Kaia Gerber and Edie Campbell among them – skipped and played on the shoreline, shoes in hand with smiles on their faces. Life’s a real beach!