Caged paradise by Creation Studio

No news about a new designer at Chanel, but a perfectly fine collection that won a strikingly large applause at the end of the house’s latest show inside Grand Palais on Tuesday morning.

Created by an in-house ‘Creation Studio’, the sheer professionalism of the clothes suggested whoever is calling the shots is clearly no slouch. For the second Chanel show in a row, since Virginie Viard’s abrupt departure in June, nobody took a bow at the finale.
 
The show also marked Chanel’s return to the Palais Royal after several years, while the famed 19th-century exhibition space was being restored for the Paris Olympics.

Instead of an elaborate set, an audience of 2,200 sat on simple white foldable chairs. Making it the largest show of Paris Fashion Week, which ends today. Under the nave and its giant glass verrière, a 20-meter-high all-white bird cage, through which the cast marched. Coco Chanel, legend has it, was gifted a birdcage by one of her seamstresses, later leading to a famous 1991 ad campaign for the scent Coco, where Vanessa Paradis played a Tweety Bird inside one.
 
Quite a different cast, and notably more inclusive – certainly, in terms of body shape – than any Chanel show to date.
 
Plus, the studio was courageous – taking plenty of risks, most of which they pulled off. Beginning with the Chanel suits, with a new jacket with Peter Pan collars, surprising side-split skirts or even hotpants. There was even a wool bouclé bomber jacket which shouldn’t have worked but did. Like many jackets, it was trimmed in white feathers.
 
Pants suits with huge trousers and leather aviator jerkins were rather formulaic, even if they symbolized the aviatrixes of the Roaring Twenties, when Coco made Chanel world famous. But then, the show re-found momentum at cocktail hour, with a long series of veiled creations – mixes of bouclé boleros or waistcoats topped by chiffon capes; or very elegant bouclé sleeveless coat-dresses with chopped cock feather collar that any woman would love to wear. Plus, Chanel tapped into the current mega trend of semi-sheer evening looks – breezily made in sherbet hues, just like the lingerie one could see beneath. A sense of liberation, and escaping the cage, which Coco would have liked.

See catwalk

“People have always wanted to put me in cages; cages with cushions puffed with promises, gilded cages, cages that I’ve touched looking away from. I never wanted any other than the one I would build myself,” said Gabrielle Chanel in a note left on each seat, taken from ‘Memoires de Coco’ by Louise de Vilmorin.

 
To be frank, one was not entirely impressed with some rather clunky knits; far too loosely made crochet dresses; nor by the back-toed platforms. Plus seeing, Vanessa Paradis and a nervous gang of flunkies hurriedly escorted into a second row after 20 looks did seem very daft. The Tweety Bird returning to the coop late.
 
But, again, the show gained momentum with a clever set of trilogies – three looks in the same fabric. Best of all – a black-and-white ice-cube print seen in pants suit, gown and cocktail.
 
At the finale, singer Riley Keough strolled out all in black, microphone in hand, singing ‘When Doves Cry’, circling the cage before carefully attaching herself to its seat and rising high into the air. The cast eventually forming around her in a circle.
 
These past days, there has been much Instagram speculation by junior commentators that the house was allegedly “in communication lock-down” with the announcement of new designer imminent.
 
But when asked about Chanel’s future plans, the house’s fashion and accessories president Bruno Pavlovsky responded with a smile: “One day at a time, today’s it’s about this show.”
 
At the finale, Prince’s classic song boomed out as the cast exited, before then falling silent. At which point a deluge of applause, in what felt like a palpable expression of support for the house by French editors and writers, along with hundreds of well-heeled clients. 
 
It would be hard to exaggerate how much Chanel – the crown jewel of French luxury – means to a certain sort of French person. And the fact that – without a creative director in charge – the house could whip up such a smart professional collection was greeted with a collective cheer.
 
Leaving everyone at this show in an ebullient mood, including Chanel’s owners, the legendarily silent Alain and Gerard Wertheimer. Queried about the future design direction, Gerald responded: “No news,” before Alain added, “and everything going very well.”