UNBROKEN SPELL
A year on from the death of Karl Lagerfeld, Virginie Viard’s latest couture show for Chanel carries forth a larger-than-life legacy and, more than that, captures the founding spirit of the French house. By Julia Frank.
A year on from the passing of Karl Lagerfeld, Virginie Viard’s latest couture show for Chanel carries forth a larger-than-life legacy.
Rows of white sheets drip-drying on washing lines in the sun, gravel below sprinkled with water marks and a soapy scent wafting through the air – this may seem like an incongruous setting for a Chanel haute couture show. And yet it was the scene that greeted guests as they filed into the Grand Palais in Paris for the house’s haute couture spring/summer ’20 show. In the centre of the space was a romantically overgrown garden, a replica of the cloister grounds at Aubazine, the ancient Cistercian abbey in south-western France where Gabrielle Chanel and her sisters were sent by their father after their mother’s death in 1895. The purity and rigour of Aubazine became ever-present in Chanel’s aesthetic – even shaping her interlocking C logo, which is said to originate from the geometric interlacing patterns of the abbey’s stained-glass windows – and became, more than a century later, the source of inspiration for Virginie Viard’s latest haute couture collection.
It has been over a year since Viard succeeded the late Karl Lagerfeld as artistic director of Chanel’s fashion collections, meaning that for the first time since Gabrielle Chanel, a woman is at the helm of the largest and longestsurviving haute couture house in France. Having spent 32 years working under Lagerfeld, Viard is his natural successor and there has been no seismic shift or mass staff turnover since her appointment. ‘Continuity’ is how a number of employees within the walls of Rue Cambon describe the first year without Lagerfeld.
While Viard’s solo collections in the past 12 months have been undeniably ‘Chanel’, she has introduced a softness and simplicity to her silhouettes that clearly belong to the hand of a woman designing for women, or even designing for herself. Some may argue it only appears as such in contrast to Lagerfeld’s showmanship, which was beloved by clients, press and anyone with a social media feed, however, the same audiences have fallen for Viard’s more wearable and accessible take on haute couture. “I like that you can feel waists and hips and the woman’s body now,” said Caroline de Maigret, a long-time Chanel ambassador and dear friend to both Lagerfeld and Viard, after the house’s haute couture show in January. “It embodies our personality rather than swallowing us … yet [Viard is] very precise in the fact that Chanel is something very special and it has to be extraordinary. So it’s still really strong and elegant.” This collection, with its strict suiting followed by diaphanous dresses, delivered this message loud and clear.
The first half of the show consisted of mostly black-andwhite looks borrowed from Aubazine’s schoolgirl uniforms and nuns’ habits. Bertha collars and pelerine capes were embroidered to resemble the abbey’s cobblestone pavements, inlaid with the celestial motifs of its coat of arms, while supermodel Gigi Hadid emerged as the star pupil in a black button-down dress with Peter Pan collar, sequined belt, white stockings and socked booties. Colour was introduced with skirt suits in ecru tweed or made entirely of hand-painted matt pastel sequins.
The collection then softened into tulle petticoats and twotoned ankle-grazing dresses, lending a deceptively light flounce to the weighty craftsmanship. Despite the transparency of the fabrics, most details were invisible, even to the eyes on the front row: hand-painted feathers and dried wildflowers were sewn between two layers of sheer organza on skirts, while wisteria branches were embroidered onto the bridal veil, in subtle tribute to Aubazine’s gardens.
The day before the haute couture show, the ateliers above Rue Cambon in Paris are calm and quiet. Jacqueline Mercier, head of one of the two ateliers for tailleur (tailoring), oversees the collection as final touches are made by the 48 seamstresses under her supervision. “With couture, it looks simple, but actually it’s not, because you don’t see the sewing. Everything is perfectly aligned so you don’t even see the pocket,” she says.
As an atelier worker is finalising a skirt suit that becomes look 33, Madame Jacqueline says: “Here, the fabric is totally embroidered with painted sequins. It’s like the stained-glass windows of the [Aubazine] abbey.” The worker deftly pulls out a string of sequins from a small sample of fabric, passing it over: it’s perhaps the closest a casual observer can come to ever owning haute couture.
At Lemarié, the Metiers d’Art plumassier – the atelier, founded in 1880, that produces flowers, ruffles, ruching and other textile manipulations – we witness one craftswoman hand-moulding petals for the famous Chanel camellias using a hot iron boulé. “It takes years to have the right hand,” says Sophie Waintraub, director of the atelier, of the patience and skill required for this job. Another woman is sifting out imperfect feathers, while yet another is fluffing the perfect ones. These feathers are then hand-painted and glued or stitched onto fabrics.
In 1987, four years after Karl Lagerfeld was appointed artistic director of Chanel, Viard joined the house to work alongside the designer, first in haute couture embroideries, and eventually as his right-hand woman, until his passing in February 2019. “Virginie is the most important person, not only for me but also for the atelier, for everything,” Lagerfeld said in an episode of the 2018 documentary series 7 Days Out. Processes and relationships between Viard and the ateliers remain as they always were, eliminating the disruption a change in leadership and vision has caused at other fashion houses. Aska Yamashita, artistic director of Montex embroidery workshop, which has been a member of Chanel’s Métiers d’Art since 2011, has worked with Viard for almost three decades. “Even if I need a courier, I still call Virginie,” says Yamashita.
And though the haute couture tradition may still be out of reach for most of us, continuing to command six-figure price tags, 12-month-long wait lists and employing made-tomeasure mannequins, the way it is now presided over by Viard is a reminder the medium can be a platform for far more. The designer’s disciplined, austere and refined approach may have brought Gabrielle Chanel’s formative time at Aubazine back into focus, but with it Viard has also carefully crafted her own version of a living, moving legacy, through which the spirit of Chanel can go on.