CHANEL - How do you make an elephant disappear?

The answer, as any stage magician will tell you, is misdirection. However, when the proverbial elephant in the room is the clothes and the event is a fashion show, it all becomes a little harder. But luckily, the doughty spin doctors at Chanel once again rose to the occasion by producing a horse out of a hat, a ‘celebrity’ rider, and just in case those didn’t work, eye make-up that was either a paean to pandas, or proof that there is indeed a Fight Club for models.

But it worked – up to a point.  Just look at the following paragraphs from The Times.

‘It’s hard to make heads turn on a fashion front row, but in Paris Chanel pulled off just that. It was not that the opening look of its couture show — a black tweed jacket decorated with sequins — was that remarkable. The LBJ — or little black jacket — has been as much a part of the brand’s success story as the LBD that Coco Chanel first advocated to her wealthy clients in the 1920s. (Prior to that black was for mourning and maids.)

However, the horse that jacket came accessorised with — yes, a real, live horse — was something different. The usual seen-it-all ennui of the fashion pack switched to oh-my-goodness with the appearance on the sand-covered catwalk of Charlotte Casiraghi, the eldest daughter of Princess Caroline of Monaco and a Chanel ambassador, on an eight-year-old bay by the name of Cousco.’

Celebrity’s name – check; celebrity’s mother’s name -check; Chanel ambassador – check; age of horse – check; name of horse – check. David Copperfield, the illusionist not the orphan, would have been very proud to have pulled off a trick like this.

The Chanel PR Department can surely count on a generous end-of-year bonus for demonstrating a degree of creativity notably absent in their designer colleagues even if The Times did go on to say that: ‘The collection itself was inevitably less dramatic.’

Indeed. Sadly, it is only the latest in a series of collections, each one ‘less dramatic’ than its predecessor. But no matter. There may well be a huge untapped market of wealthy customers anxious to buy over-priced ready-to-wear pretending to be couture. If there is, then it’s the death of couture and it’s very sad.