I’ve wanted to like Chanel for a long time. A really long time. It’s Chanel. But maybe that was the problem. For years, it has felt like everyone has been loving Chanel blindingly. Because Chanel is Chanel. The Chanel of myth and legend, the Chanel of Gabrielle, historical arbiter of taste. The Chanel that distracts you from its same-same ready-to-wear with rockets-in-the-Palais and branded frozen peas. It doesn’t matter if it’s the same thing over and over again since the birth of Choupette, because your favorite influencers will tell you that their lifelong dreams came true when they attended the Chanel show.
Deep down, they’re not loving the tweed jackets (are they?), but loving what Chanel represents in the mainstream collective consciousness: unrivalled Parisian chic.
But for those a bit more familiar with the fashion landscape, Chanel for Chanel’s sake was never enough. To us, if you wanted Parisian, you could look to Saint Laurent. (Once upon a time, you could look to Lanvin.) These days, you can go also go to Alexandre Vauthier.
The unwavering adoration of Chanel in the past decade has felt like a quarterly re-enactment of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Emperor’s New Clothes, in which two weavers fool everyone into thinking they’ve created new clothes for the emperor, by a triggering a fear of not being accepted in the group. Spoiler alert: if you haven’t read the story, a guileless child eventually reveals that the emperor is in fact, naked.
In this re-enactment, the old guard is the crowd, pandering to Karl Lagerfeld, because, he’s Lagerfeld. And the new generation of journalists and content creators—Pierre Alexandre M'Pelé AKA Pam Boy, and Luke Meagher of Haute le Mode, among others—are the guileless children, calling out commercial butchering of creativity when they see it.
But here’s the clincher: the myth and legend of Chanel makes you want to like it. The fact that we imagined how good it could be, made us extra cynical. And so we, the guileless children who have been refusing to play along, have been waiting. Waiting, please sir, for something different.
Lagerfeld’s successor Virginie Viard had not seemed too interested in creating much change in her first few collections. But today, change came. The Chanel collection looked a lot fresher than it had in years, despite the fact that it referenced the past in a substantial way, with the Christian Lacroix elements from that 1988 Vogue cover, the first of Anna Wintour, and looks reminiscent of Madonna’s Like A Prayer. But less is more, and overall, the paring back of the usual overbranding (and yes, this is what ‘paring back’ looks like at the house), really makes one sit up and take notice. As did the sleeves on those Kaia looks.
Has Viard has been one of the guileless children all along? Probably not. But in any case, with this innovative step, it seems that we can now like Chanel—and not just because it’s Chanel. But for real.
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