Chanel Resort 2021

“Advertising is saying you are good. PR is getting someone else to say you’re good.” – Jean Louis-Gassée

The constraints of Covid 19 have forced even the most technologically incompetent to move online. In the case of fashion, it has also stripped away most of the props which accompany the launch of a collection leaving the designer alone on the stage with only a nervous publicist for company.

Let me explain. Typically, the launch of any collection requires an increasing drumbeat of expectation until the clothes are finally revealed to a waiting world. A cruise collection exemplifies this. First, what is the theme of the collection and where will it be shown? Second, will I be one of the lucky people flown to the chosen location, put up in a luxury hotel, allowed to mingle with celebrities and entertained royally until the show is over? Third, will I be interviewed for my reactions to the new collection, knowing that any reaction other than awe and wonder is destined for the cutting room floor?

So, what happens when the show is cancelled, there is no all-expenses paid trip, and the most exciting prospect for the locked down press and clients is a new series on Netflix? The company’s selfless publicist has to step forward and take one for the team. The result is a little like Michael Spicer’s Room Next Door.

Let’s take a look at Suzy Menkes’ Vogue article on the recent Chanel cruise collection which took the form of an interview with Virginie Viard and Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s President of fashion. Headed ‘Virginie Viard Unveils Chanel’s New Cruise Collection With A Virtual Show’, the article breaks down as follows:

Suzy Menkes on:

The clothes – 68 words

Other – 39 words

Virginie Viard on:

Her mental state during lockdown – 50 words

Ideas contributing to the collection – 200 words

Making the collection – 54 words

The collection – 88 words

Pavlovsky on:

The shooting of the collection in a Paris studio – 37 words

Why Chanel is anti-racist – 144 words

Shows and what Chanel has done to help people during lockdown – 271 words

Virginie Viard – 142 words

The brand – 138 words

Reading the article is a little like watching David Copperfield make an elephant disappear on stage. It is a triumph of misdirection and Chanel’s publicist deserves an immediate salary increase. In an article of roughly 1200 words, only 156 are devoted to talking about the clothes themselves. You can’t help feeling that Viard and Pavlovsky were told to focus on current totems – mental health (‘I was so stressed’, corporate largesse (we made 700,000 face masks), suffering (the seamstresses had to wear masks) and the brand. There was only one subject to avoid – the clothes themselves. They just weren’t very good – again. Apparently Virginie Viard had only four weeks to pull together a collection, most of which she admits was taken from previous ideas using left over fabrics. The result – inevitably – is underwhelming but how could it have been anything else? Whose idea was it to produce a collection that was doomed from the start?  

This is the problem with the fashion industry. Nobody has the courage to call it like they see it. For too long designers and management have been allowed to pursue ill-conceived ideas knowing that however bad an idea it is, the journalists, clients, and distributors will ignore it, knowing that criticism will cost them their front row seat in Capri, Sardinia or the Hotel du Cap. The arrival of Covid 19 has removed the emperor’s clothes with the result that no amount of corporate misdirection can cover up management failure.

I leave you with Mr Pavlovsky’s ending comments on the Chanel brand. 

“I think that what is important is to be able to link what we are doing tomorrow with what has been done in the past. We can have another perspective, but at the end of the day, there is the brand and with it the past, its code.”

I studied the cruise collection for clues but I’m afraid I couldn’t crack the code. Maybe I’m just thick.