Chanel’s Winter Wardrobe is Quiet But Powerful
We’ll be the first to admit there are things we don’t miss about fashion week: the rigid, never-ending itinerary; midnight deadlines; frantically searching for a bathroom between shows; the guilt associated with being tired, annoyed and overworked while being part of such a beautiful industry. But one thing we do miss is the fanfare of the Chanel runway. A highlight of every season, the French fashion house knows how to put on a show. While the opulence of a catwalk now feels cloyingly amiss in times of crisis and isolation, there’s magic in those memories, like being a kid at a carnival (or an adult at Chanel’s 2008 show, complete with a merry-go-round). For now, we’ve lost the rocket ship displays, indoor beaches, and Gigi Hadid strong-arming runway crashers, but there’s still much to be said about Chanel’s fall-winter collection.
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Virtual shows, at the very least, offer more contextualized storytelling and intimacy than a runway ever could. For creative director Virginie Viard, it allowed her the chance to explore the world of Karl Lagerfeld and Chanel’s heyday. “I imagined the models doing a show for themselves, going from room to room, crossing each other in staircases, piling their coats up in the cloakroom and going up to the next floor to get changed,” she said in the collection notes. “I thought of the shows that Karl would tell me about, back in the day, a long time ago, when the models would dress themselves and do their own make-up,”
The clothes of Chanel have always been reliably strong, but without the opulent backdrop, you can focus on the details. For winter, it’s a mashup of moody tweeds, après ski salopettes layered over delicate lace tops, and metallic party dresses dressed down with shaggy boots but accessorized with costumed garter belts. They invite you to your next wintry vacation in the French alps, because what is Chanel if not a far-flung fantasy? Just slightly more wearable than collections past.
And some things don’t change at all, like Chanel’s buzzy front row. This time, in portrait mode, Jennie of Blackpink, model Blesnya Minher, and Belgian singer Angele were all in attendance, shot by Inez & Vinoodh.
How you like that? Courtesy of Chanel / Inez & Vinoodh
As the world gets vaccinated and we take one step closer to a return to real life, we’re starting to sense fashion’s lifeblood returning. For now, the quiet strength of Chanel’s fall-winter collection is reminiscent of that fuzzy feeling, and we’re finally allowing ourselves to get excited for next season. It will be spring, after all.
Justine Carreon Justine Carreon is the market editor at ELLE.com covering fashion, Dutch ovens, and fashion again.
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Chanel Fall 2021 Ready-to-Wear Collection
After years of epic Chanel show spectacles in the vast Grand Palais, now closed for renovations, the brand’s artistic director Virginie Viard felt that the time was right for a totally different ambiance to showcase her playful Coco Neige collection. “I wanted to show in a small place, a club,” Viard explained during a Zoom preview. “I don’t like big rave venues; I prefer that kind of place that is more intimate. Karl was always telling me about the shows he staged in the ’70s with the girls getting dressed on their own in a restaurant in Paris,” she added.
Viard lighted on the legendary Left Bank nightclub Chez Castel that has been the epitome of cool for generations of party animals since Jean Castel first opened the club in the 1960s. Cozily arranged on different levels in an 18th-century building or two, the dimly lit boîte on the rue Princesse attracted the likes of Françoise Hardy, Françoise Sagan, Amanda Lear, and Mick Jagger at the time, and has never gone out of fashion. “I love Castel because it’s like a house and very English,” said Viard who was amused by the idea of the Chanel girls coming down the club’s famously narrow stairs in their giant après-ski coats and then leaving them in the coatroom to reveal the skimpy little chiffon numbers underneath. Even Viard’s shaggy Moon Boots turn out to be double layered so that the voluminous shearling can be removed to reveal a sleeker boot beneath.
Viard played with the marriage of sturdy tweed and fragile chiffon throughout the collection, inspired, as she explained, by the legendary style of the late Stella Tennant, a Chanel icon for so many years, and a woman who embodied the chic of a certain school of aristocratic negligence as she shrugged a hefty tweed coat, built for the Scottish moors, over a delicate evening dress.
The collection is infused with “ski spirit”: Norwegian sweaters, quilted salopettes, voluminous puffers, and ski pants worn with short cropped jackets that Viard has styled either with the midriff bared or with the nightclub-friendly flowered black lace camisoles that also crop up under fluid knit suits or paired with a 2/55 quilted satin miniskirt. There are midi-length crochet skirts, and suits shined with panels of sequin fabric and layers of fringing at the cuff.
Viard was also inspired by Chanel’s fall 1994 collection, which featured conspicuously fake-fur suits and coats, and reimagined the pieces in black, white, and hot pink shearling. She said that she had been watching Jean-Baptiste Mondino’s iconic 1985 video for Bryan Ferry’s “Slave to Love,” featuring the fabulous models Christine Bergström, Marpessa Hennink, and Laurence Treil—she even cast the young French model Lola for her resemblance to the wonderful, wide-mouthed Treil—and her last look, a gold trench coat, styled with a felt fedora (with shearling flaps), might have stepped right out of it.
The soundtrack, mixed by Michel Gaubert, also featured Diana Ross’s “Do You Know Where You’re Going To?—a song that Viard considers singularly apt for this moment. “Your own pajama party?” posited Viard as an answer. “As we can’t do anything else!”
Chanel Fall-Winter 2021: Fuzzy Moon Boots and More Hits From the Show
I imagined the models doing a show for themselves, going from room to room, crossing each other in staircases, piling their coats up in the cloakroom and going up to the next floor to get changed. And I thought of the shows that Karl would tell me about, back in the day, a long time ago, when the models would dress themselves and do their own make-up.
That’s not to say the collection didn’t have a healthy dose of wit and fun—the more corporate-looking outfits were paired with fuzzy moon boots (a sure hit of the upcoming season), and luxe takes on casual items like tweed overalls in a luscious raspberry pink on model Jill Kortleve, light-wash jeans printed with silver double C monograms, and elevated basics studded with irreverent Chanel-isms (the camellia and the iconic monogram in a variety of holographic colours).
(Related: Sotheyby’s to Auction Karl Lagerfeld’s Monaco Estate in Late 2021)
Click through our gallery to see all the best looks from Chanel FW21.