Chanel

The mighty house of Chanel is now a double-legacy brand that carries the DNA of both Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld, fashion giants who between them shaped the way women wanted to look for a century and more. It is a giant ship to steer, and in her debut outing at the helm, Virginie Viard kept it on an even keel in tranquil waters—appropriately enough for a Cruise collection. Travel was very much on Viard’s mind, and the heft of the great Chanel machine was in evidence in the incredible evocation of a dining carriage in a pre-war train, and a Belle Epoque café (“Le Riviera”) that resembled Le Train Bleu at the Gare de Lyon perhaps, with potted palms and paintings set into elaborate boiserie and plasterwork panels suggesting the glamorous destinations the train might take you when it chugged out of the station (all of them settings for past Chanel collections).

Here, in an atmosphere that evoked the sort of ambiance Chanel herself would have been familiar with as she prepared to speed off to La Pausa (the monastic house she built for herself in Roquebrune on the French Riviera in the early 1930s), breakfast was served for guests at the first of two shows, and lunch for those at the next. The collection itself was presented downstairs in the great soaring space of the Grand Palais. Although there were train tracks here, there was no train—wisely, because who could eclipse the steaming trains of John Galliano’s sensational Fall 1998 Haute Couture show for Christian Dior, or Marc Jacobs’s no less astounding Fall 2012 presentation for Louis Vuitton. Viard instead transformed the vast space of the Grand Palais into a train platform, the audience seated on old-fashioned benches, waiting expectantly, and the building’s existing Art Nouveau architecture successfully evoking a turn-of-the-century train station for giants.

Viard worked alongside Lagerfeld at Chloé and then for more than two decades as his indispensable studio director at Chanel, and her technical savoir faire and the lessons she learned from the master were much on evidence. In place of Lagerfeld’s hard-edged geometry, however, Viard brought a new softness and ease to the Chanel silhouette, reflecting her woman’s perspective and something of the insouciance that Chanel herself believed in.

With an audience reflecting the global reach of the brand and its pan-generational clientele—including Chanel’s J12 watch ambassadors Lily-Rose Depp and Ali MacGraw, and an ageless Claudia Schiffer in a scarlet sweater blazoned with the linked Cs, and worn with second-skin jeans—this collection had to cover a lot of ground. It is of course a great challenge to be all things to all people and remain coherent, and Viard’s mood swings saw groupings of cool Parisienne girl cotton poplin looks—wide pants cropped about the ankle, frothing blouses—followed by shapely Starburst-color tweed jackets worn over leggings (printed with interlocked Cs and other house emblems), and then by kawaii miniskirted classic Chanel skirtsuits in white toweling tweed (worn with adorable matching ballerina slippers with patent toes) and then by pretty, tiered chiffon or lace dresses that evoked Coco Chanel’s late 1930s gitane looks, and Viard’s years at Chloé. There were images of Lagerfeld’s friend, the fashion-plate Princess Caroline of Monaco in her 1980s jet-set years on Viard’s inspiration board for the collection, and there was something of the flavor of that period in the bat-wing sweaters and Memphis Group pastel color-blocking that looked cool on reworked Chanel purses. A sharp scarlet or white-toed black ankle-strap shoe with a chunky cone statement heel also gave a hip styling edge to many of the looks.

Viard’s technical know-how was revealed in such touches as pale leather threaded with an open-work lattice of faggoting, and in the shells worn beneath those suits, or slender, unfussy evening dresses gleaming with embroidered bouquets of petals.

Just as the respectful opening look had suggested the way the liberated young Chanel herself might have dressed in 2020—easy black jacket with wide-leg pants cut short enough not to impede a woman on a mission, and a soft but unfussy white blouse—so the final look paid homage to Lagerfeld himself in a halter dress suspended from a stiff Edwardian collar in his trademark black and white.