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Chanel

Spring 2022 RTW

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Properties

Date: October 5, 2021
Location: Paris, France
Looks: 71
Brand: Chanel
URL: wwd.com

Critic Reviews

By Joelle Diderich for WWD

It was flashback time for photographers at the Chanel show, which was staged in a replica of the Carrousel du Louvre, the cavernous venue that hosted many Paris Fashion Week shows in the 1980s and 1990s.

Snappers were grouped around a raised runway for a high-energy show that brought to mind late creative director Karl Lagerfeld’s supermodel extravaganzas in the ’90s. Models flipped their hair, jutted their hips and winked as they paraded in graphic swimsuits, logo-patterned dresses and tweed suits in a throwback palette of lilac, pink and yellow.

While some had a field day with the brief, others were visibly less comfortable vamping it up. The prize for Most Winning Smile went to Jill Kortleve, while Mariam de Vinzelle won for Most Dramatic Hair Toss, and Louise de Chevigny for Best Use of an Accessory, for her deft way with a chiffon stole.

With the Grand Palais undergoing renovations, Chanel switched to a temporary replacement venue near the Eiffel Tower for its first runway show with an audience in 12 months. The dark, cramped setting afforded less of a stage for peacocking Chanel clients, but gave creative director Virginie Viard an excuse to play with the show format.

Since succeeding Lagerfeld following his death in 2019, she has brought in a variety of big names to shoot the brand’s campaigns and press kits, which Lagerfeld personally lensed for more than three decades. “I’ve never taken pictures, but it’s something that fascinates me,” Viard said in a preview. “It magnifies the collection.”

The show decor, dominated by a giant image of model Vivienne Rohner holding a camera, was a tribute to those image-makers, including Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, who were positioned at the end of the podium to record the action for Chanel’s digital broadcast later in the day.

Guests entered through a room where giant screens showed black-and-white footage of brand ambassadors, including Lily-Rose Depp and Blackpink’s Jennie, picking up cameras and preening in a director’s chair. Inside, photographers jostled to get a picture of the stars in person.

Rohner was first on the runway, in a low-cut white swimsuit and black T-shirt that were a perfect foil for the accessories: two-tone flats, a black 2.55 handbag, an oversize quilted tote and oodles of necklaces, in the kind of pileup that Lagerfeld made a trademark of ‘90s Chanel.

Some looks appeared teleported from that era: a cropped T-shirt with “Chanel” spelled out in sequins was paired with a long black skirt with a thong peeking over the waistband, while a pink cardigan came with a matching crop top and shorts. Handbags shaped like bottles of No. 5 perfume, which celebrates its centenary this year, are sure to generate waiting lists.

Viard offered oversized jackets in a variety of hues, including a lilac version printed with double-C logos. Miniskirts featured extended flaps in the back, while a black leather quilted dungaree had the aura of an instant classic.

Flou tends to be Viard’s weak point, and this show was no exception, with a closing sequence of chiffon dresses in an oversized butterfly print that felt like a downer, compared to the rest of the colorful lineup.

Viard took a risk by transporting her audience back to a golden period for Chanel, running the danger of being unfavorably compared with her predecessor. While the media-shy designer will never match Lagerfeld’s bombastic presence, this was a customer-friendly outing that should keep the brand’s cash registers ringing.

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By Hamish Bowles for Vogue

Back at the turn of the 1990s, as listeners to the podcast In Vogue: The 1990s will discover, supermodels came bounding down the high, raised runways exuding joie de vivre as they twirled and vamped for the photographers who had jostled for prime position, not only in the mosh pit at the end of the runway, but all along its length. (The front-row seats were still prized in fashion’s hierarchy, but generally gave one a fantastic view of the back of a photographer or a supermodel’s nostrils.)

“I used to love the sound of flashbulbs going off at the shows in the ’80s,” designer Virginie Viard recalled in today’s Chanel show notes. “I wanted to recapture that emotion.” So this season Viard attempted to channel that energy and joy in a collection that not only referenced the era in the clothes, staging, and accessories (purses shaped like N°5 bottles; piratically flared Louis heels), but even the soundtrack: Witness George Michael’s anthemic “Freedom! ’90”—in a contemporary cover version by Christine and the Queens—getting the models in the party spirit.

While the Grand Palais, scene of so many elaborately staged Chanel spectaculars, undergoes an epic renovation (generously underwritten by Chanel), this collection was presented in a temporary space, set up in the shadow of Les Invalides, which allowed Viard to recapture the memory of the shows she had thrilled to when she was a fashion neophyte.

At the end of the raised runway, for instance, the photography duo Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, now deeply enmeshed in the Chanel world, played old-school show photographers, snapping the models who stopped to pose and preen for them and seemed to be having the time of their lives, flashing smiles and flicking hair rather than assuming the habitual look of sulky disdain. Inez & Vinoodh also provided the playful videos (presented in an anteroom before entering the show space) that depicted the stars of Chanel’s model cabal—among them Lily-Rose Depp, Alma Jodorowsky, Rebecca Dayan, and Quannah Chasinghorse—turning the camera on them. Photography, after all, is in the DNA of the brand.

The show also opened à la Karl Lagerfeld—who sent shock waves when he put Chanel-branded underwear as outerwear on the runway for spring 1993—with a black-and-white sequence of briefs, swimsuits, and sports bras, occasionally veiled in spangled black net pants or shown with above-the-knee skirts. During an accessories fitting a couple of days before the show, Viard pointed out the crocheted effects she had worked on with braid company Bacus, and the spin on the bright spring pastel tweed suits—think of Chanel-clad Naomi, Linda, and Carla, shot by Steven Meisel for Vogue, March 1994—that she had given the twist of a longer skirt or jacket flap in back, suggesting a traditional tailcoat.

“Karl was always doing fake jeans,” recalled Viard, shuddering at the memory. “In the ’90s they always seemed to be with pink tweed—ugh! For me it was horrible then, but now j’adore!”

Her own reimagined denim propositions this season included a pretty, summery deck-chair ticking stripe cut into stiff little 1960s-looking dresses with bold bands of black sequins, creating the trompe l’oeil illusion of a classic Chanel cardigan suit, and charcoal denim wafted with a butterfly print. Those butterfly wings were amplified as prints on drifting chiffon pieces that swirled as the girls twirled, providing another charming throwback to a moment that celebrated the happiness the fashion flock is feeling in a season of cautious reemergence and optimism.