Ee fashion show in a riding arena in the farthest corner of the Bois de Boulogne is a gamble. The Chanel name is big enough to take that risk. So on Tuesday morning, hundreds of Haute Couture week guests from downtown Paris come to the park, to the Etrier Club L’Etrier. Most can be driven, because the tailoring is smaller, more beautiful, more exclusive than the series production of Prêt-à-Porter. Only important editors come here, a few stars, the best customers. And almost all of them have a driver.
One of the show guests wears two masks one on top of the other; he has a serious horse allergy and doesn’t want to be in for a surprise like in January when Charlotte Casiraghi led the couture show on horseback. A German fashion editor without a chauffeur is also irritated when he finds himself on the way back to the subway between prostitutes who apparently also populate the Bois de Boulogne during the day. And Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of “Vogue” finally wants to leave because the way is so long, looks for her limousine and calls into the mobile phone: “Where is Hamish?” – while her editor Hamish Bowles presumably assumes that she’s coming backstage. Don’t tell anyone that life for the rich and famous is easy!
The phantom pain is only too understandable
This time, only the tailor-made designs for autumn and winter, completely allergen-free, trot through the riding hall. The “Premières” and the “Petites Mains”, the atelier bosses and their seamstresses under the roofs on the Rue Cambon, know what they are doing. Chanel chief designer Virginie Viard has known the system for decades. And they are in direct contact with the customer. In ready-to-wear fashion, the only way creative people can find out what’s going on is through sales figures. In couture, you hear it immediately: the customer comes to the fashion show to look at, to the atelier to choose – and then a seamstress visits her at home, for example in Miami, Geneva, Dubai or Shanghai, to have her fitted. This is another reason why a dress quickly costs 30,000 or 40,000 euros.
Expanded to the east: Maria Grazia Chiuri honors Ukraine for Dior.
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Image: AFP
Everything as always, but Suzy Menkes, at 78 actually a friend of moderate tones, calls the Chanel collection “plain dull”, meaning boring, dull, lackluster. Only two words, says the critic, need to be said: “Karl Lagerfeld”. The phantom pain after the death of the Chanel designer three and a half years ago is only too understandable. But even his last couture collections were not a fountain of youth. Viard certainly understands new customers better. And autumn/winter collections always come with the melancholic gesture of calf-length dresses, big boots and heavy tweed coats.
Predatory celebration
It’s a similar story at Dior, the other big couture brand. This time, head designer Maria Grazia Chiuri was inspired by Ukrainian artist Olesia Trofymenko. The variety of patterns turns it into a political declaration of solidarity and at the same time an aesthetic multicultural manifesto, namely a skilful cultural adoption of Eastern European traditions in the spirit of couture – which has been expanding to the east since Coco Chanel’s flirts with Russia and Yves Saint Laurent’s legendary Ballets Russes collection of 1976 is working.