“I was thinking about eccentric girls,” says Virginie Viard of her fall haute couture collection for Chanel. In particular, Viard was remembering Karl Lagerfeld heading off to parties with his sometime muse, the madcap Princess Diane de Beauvau-Craon, who as a teenage debutante got herself an American crewcut to give some punk edge to the pretty but detested pink dress her mother had chosen for her coming-out ball. “Life with her around is the ideal for me,” Lagerfeld said of de Beauvau-Craon when he spoke with Vogue (“The Country Girl,” June 1990), “because life must never be flat. She gives a light spirit, yet she is deeply spiritual.”
After the austerity of the spring couture, inspired by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s schoolgirl uniforms at the Aubazine convent, Viard wanted to swing to quiet opulence for fall in an edited collection of 30 looks. Because the collection will largely be seen through photography (Mikael Jansson shot the look book, and haute couture clients will also receive a portfolio of more documentary and detail images), Viard was thinking of “things that maybe I would not do in a show—punk hair, fine jewelry.” Those Chanel haute bijoux include yellow diamond lions (Chanel herself was a Leo), and Viard notes that “I adore tiaras!”
In fact, the only costume jewelry used in the collection are the cabochon stones from Goossens—the storied Paris house whose founder Robert Goossens collaborated with Chanel in the late 1950s. Viard uses those iconic, Byzantine-inspired jewels as embroidery elements on a jacket of black and white tweed. Tweed figures large in the collection for day and night: a knee-length tunic worn over boot-leg pants, for instance, or a minidress with the traditional Chanel braid trim reworked in rhinestones. There is more amazing trompe l’oeil in the allover Lesage embroidery of a lean jacket worn with an ankle-length skirt, or in the Emmanuelle Vernoux–embroidered sleeves of a decorous wool ball gown, or the Montex sequin and wool tufts of an off-the-shoulder minidress. Ten looks are made using tweeds made from fantasy yarns from Vimar 1991, another luxury fashion supplier that Chanel has recently acquired to add to its stable of such magical names as the embroiderers Lesage, Montex, and Cécile Henri, and the plumassier Lemarié.
Viard is also keen to showcase the miraculous work of the great fournisseurs of Paris, but she does it with an understatement that seems perfect for the moment.
The de Beauvau-Craon touch erupts in the form of a short frothy taffeta dress and faille ball skirts, or a full-skirted retro cocktail dress of flowering black and white lace spliced with lacquered pink lace (Viard calls it “ma poupée,” “my doll”)—and in punk feather mohawk bangs worn in the hair, and the lace-up court shoes that would have been perfect for dancing the night away in the great ’80s nightspots Les Bain Douches and Le Palace.
But Viard provides subtle elegance too, in pieces that include a sheath of inky faille with bishop sleeves or a solemn evening gown of steel gray silk velvet, discreetly dusted with embroidery at the waist and cuff, and jackets with midriffs defined by hand smocking (and worn with all-in-one stocking pant boots). Viard aptly describes the looks as “casual and grand”—and this is well-behaved couture that whispers but never shouts.
“Haute couture?” queries Viard. “It’s forever; it’s for always.”
