Is there a designer in the house?
‘I’m sorry, Mrs de Casanova. I know I shouldn’t complain after you was nice enough to give me the ticket and pay for the train but I’m just so, so…. disappointed. I was really looking forward to it, you know I was. But when I got inside, when I saw what they had done. Well, it was a disgrace, it really was. I mean, tell me, how you can say that they’re roof tops when they are a foot off the ground? And all that guff about them being zinc. Zinc, my arse. It was linoleum, bloody linoleum, coloured to make it look like zinc. And did you see them dormer windows? What a liberty. They was all wrong. And they’re calling themselves designers? Leave it out. And them models, walking about all la-di-da as if nobody had ever heard of Health & Safety. Never seen anything like it. There was a woman come running out of the audience and I thought, here we go, .show’s over, she must be H&S and she’ll shut them down. Not a bit of it. She jumps up there and walks around like she owns the place. Turns out she’s a comedian. I don’t know how they could tell, there were so many comedians in that place.’
Perhaps it’s just as well my roofer never got around to discussing the clothes. It wasn’t just the Parisian rooftops which didn’t stand up to scrutiny
I’ve always argued for evolution over revolution at fashion houses, but I never imagined I would have to consider devolution. I’m always suspicious when a house’s public relations go into overdrive. It’s rarely a good sign. It’s also a danger signal when fashion journalists shower praise on the sets, the celebrities, or the ‘heroics’ of Gigi Hadid. It’s usually because they can’t find anything very positive to say about the clothes and would prefer to keep working. As James Carville might say: ‘It’s about the clothes, stupid.’ And if the clothes don’t do it, all the influencers and celebrities in the world can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
What struck me most about Chanel’s Spring Summer collection was the lack of imagination. I felt as if I had seen many of the pieces before – and when I checked – I found I had – they were in my wardrobe!
Virginie Viard may have stripped away the quirky, humorous Lagerfeld touches but in doing so has left exposed the frailty that the Kaiser worked so hard to hide. If you are constantly referencing a designer who died almost fifty years ago, you need a magician’s misdirection to obfuscate the fact that your clients are buying the same clothes that their grandmothers wore.
Where Virginie Viard ‘saw silhouettes walking on the roofs…[and] thought about Kristen Stewart playing Jean Seberg’, I saw only Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. In its press releases, Chanel likes to to point out how its pieces reflect its founder’s innovations but it is a two-edged sword. At some point, the clients will realise that they are being asked to pay premium prices for endless retrospectives and will demand more creativity.
It’s unfair to criticise Virginie Viard. Stepping into Karl Lagerfeld’s shoes has to be one of the toughest transitions in fashion. She deserves a chance to make her mark, but she should forget about the celebrities, the fancy sets, and the glib PR and sharpen her pencil. It’s about the clothes. It’s always been about the clothes.
