LA VIE DE VIRGINIE

After years working alongside Karl Lagerfeld, Virginie Viard is quietly and confidently reimagining Chanel for the house’s next chapter. By Hamish Bowles. Photographed by Anton Corbijn.

Virginie Viard, the quiet, creative force behind a stealthy reimagining of Chanel, may be a woman of few words, but she doesn’t mince them. Her conversation, as her friend the model and music producer Caroline de Maigret says, “is the opposite of small talk. She doesn’t know how to fake it.”

Viard vividly remembers her first Chanel show, a campy Karl Lagerfeld haute couture extravaganza staged in the late 1980s that she was taken to as a treat by the father of a family friend. The collection was all hats and gloves and models, including Inès de la Fressange and Marpessa Hennink, vamping for the runway photographers. What did Viard make of the collection? “Horrible!” she says now, matter-of-factly. “So old.”

Viard’s trajectory has taken her from Lagerfeld’s invaluable Chanel studio director – he famously described her as “my right arm … and my left arm” – to, following his death in February 2019, the creative director for the brand, in a transition of such seamless elegance that it might have been constructed in the house’s fabled haute couture workrooms. If fashion’s chattering classes were expecting the famously private Wertheimer family, who own Chanel, to install another bold-face name to replace Lagerfeld, there were plenty of clues to indicate that they would opt for continuity and reward experience and expertise instead – not least that Lagerfeld himself brought Viard, who had worked for him since 1987, out to share the applause at the last two collections where he took a bow.

Standing in the long shadows cast by Lagerfeld and Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel – two of the most formidable creative forces of the 20th and 21st centuries – Viard, 58, who might be the least famous designer in fashion at its most famous house, is shy and almost self-effacing in comparison. “She’s action versus talk,” says the actress and Chanel brand ambassador Kristen Stewart, who adds that Viard “embraces otherness – she herself is quite strange in a beautiful way.”

Born in Lyon, France’s storied textile centre, to parents who were both doctors, Viard moved to the small regional city of Dijon when her father was appointed to the city’s hospital. As a child, Viard would sometimes dress up as a nurse or doctor and accompany him to the hospital to cheer up some of his patients, but she never intended to follow her parents into medicine. “I love meeting doctors; I love speaking with them,” she says now, but she long ago decided that “fashion is easier!”

At 20, Viard, who was taught to sew by her mother, established a label, Nirvana, with a friend, making clothing using fabrics produced in her grandfather’s textile factory. Like the young Gabrielle Chanel, Viard preferred working with jersey “because you don’t need a special cut – the body gives it the shape”, but later honed her pattern-cutting game at a local fashion school. (She also worked as a Saturday girl at a local costume-jewellery store, though “I was never actually selling anything,” Viard recalls. “I was afraid of the customers! But I was redoing the shop and the windows all the time – red one week, green the next.”)

Paris eventually beckoned, where – through her well-connected Lyonnais roommate – Viard found an internship with Jacqueline de Ribes, the city’s queen-bee socialite, who had recently decided to parlay her consummate taste and flair for fashion into a brand of her own. “We were working in her house,” Viard recalls, “all the fabrics were laid out on the bed, and the photocopy machine was in the bathroom. I was the assistant to three people – we were four in total.”

Soon she moved on to become an assistant to the costume designer Dominique Borg, acclaimed for her work on such movies as Bruno Nuytten’s Camille Claudel and Claude Lelouch’s Les Misérables, and discovered what she felt was her true calling. Her family, meanwhile, had long since moved to a country house in Burgundy, where their neighbour – the aide de camp of Monaco’s Prince Rainier – soon met Karl Lagerfeld, a Monégasque resident and intimate of Princess Caroline, the prince’s daughter, and boldly asked him whether he needed an intern. Fatefully, he did. Viard duly went to rue Cambon to meet Lagerfeld’s aide de camp, the patrician Gilles Dufour, who hired her on the spot.

“Immediately Karl was asking me: ‘What do you think of this?’ ‘What do you think of that colour?’ I was so embarrassed,” Viard recalls. Her internship soon morphed into a full-time job. “Karl clicked with Virginie immediately,” says Eric Wright, another pillar of Lagerfeld’s design team. “There’s always been this calmness