Chanel Fashion Manifesto show coming to Australia for NGV summer blockbuster
Most Australians are likely to be familiar with Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, or at least with the luxury fashion empire that bears her name. But the National Gallery of Victoria’s major summer exhibition for 2021, Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto, aims to throw that familiarity into doubt.
That is exactly what the show did last year when it made its debut at the Palais Galliera in Paris. Fashion Manifesto was the first pandemic-era exhibition for the venerable fashion museum, which had reopened after extensive renovations. It was also the first large-scale retrospective of Chanel’s work in the city she mostly called home.
A Gabrielle Chanel haute couture suit comprising jacket, skirt and blouse for spring/summer 1966, featuring overpainted wool, raw silk and gilt-gold metal. Photograph: Narelle Wilson/NGV
The Melbourne iteration, opening 5 December, will be the exhibition’s first outside Paris – and also marks the first time the designer has received the museum treatment in Australia.
All these firsts, about such a well-known name, made pulling the show together a high-stakes proposition for Miren Arzalluz, director of the Palais Galliera and the exhibition’s co-curator. “It is a challenge … because it’s doing a retrospective about a legend,” she says. “We didn’t want to do just a spectacular.”
Whipping up a confection of pearls, pink tweed and white camellias would have been a disservice to a creator whose essential qualities were rigour, subtlety and practicality – not just beauty.
So instead the exhibition is about “really respecting the universe and the vision and the design … in the largest sense of the word”.
It will feature hundreds of garments, jewels and objects spanning Chanel’s work in the 1920s and 30s, her re-emergence in the 50s right through to her death in 1971.
Pieces include a jersey dress made in 1916 (a time when the comfortable and forgiving fabric was only being used for underwear), romantic 30s evening gowns, and plenty of the suits and black dresses for which she is best known.
What the exhibition does not touch on, says Arzalluz, is Coco Chanel’s life story.
“This is what everyone everybody knows about … I mean, there are over 100 biographies,” she says.
The only biographic detail included – a fact “too sensitive to not mention” – is Chanel’s 1944 arrest after the liberation of Paris, and her interrogation as a Nazi collaborator.
‘At the end of the day she invented different versions of herself and it is always difficult to get the right facts,’ Miren Arzalluz says of Gabrielle Chanel, pictured here in the 1930s. Photograph: Courtesy of the NGV
Chanel’s history with the Nazi party may surprise many Australian museum goers, but Arzalluz says: “In Paris we have been talking for six years only about the war and the occupation. As a public museum we thought we couldn’t ignore this fact. But this was the only exception.
“At the end of the day she invented different versions of herself and it is always difficult to get the right facts.”
Arzalluz says excluding all but that single detail of Chanel’s life, from her traumatic childhood to her many lovers, “was not a way to avoid problems, because we haven’t”.
Instead, the show “is really about her work”. It is the story of this work, not the woman, that Arzalluz hopes will yield the real surprises.
“We feel, even ourselves, that most people have a very superficial knowledge of her work. And we sort of repeat the same cliches … there is a black dress and suit. But it’s so much more than that, and so much more diverse and sophisticated and beautiful.”
Arzalluz expects the designer’s jewellery, for instance, to be particularly novel. Social media is littered with the Chanel quote, “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off,” so to see that, as Arzalluz says, “even when she wore jewellery, there’s not one piece, it was like, five, you know, she wore it in accumulation” might raise eyebrows.
“She’s someone who’s not interested in history,” Arzalluz says. Unlike her 50s peers Christian Dior and Hubert de Givenchy, “she never looked back for inspiration … she was not inspired by the 18th century, the 19th century … But her jewellery pieces went completely the opposite way, with such a sharp contrast.”
A Chanel brooch from 1937. Photograph: Julien T Hamon
They drew from the Byzantine empire, from medieval religious ornamentation: “She combined the austerity and the rigour of the black dresses with this almost baroque style of jewellery, which is very impressive.”
As for the clothes, a technical prowess “where every element has a function” comes through. Arzalluz gives the example of Chanel’s suits, which will be on ample display. Chanel laboured to ensure the cut was just-so, so that when the wearer raised her arm, the jacket would remain still.
“The idea of that focus on comfort and mobility, particularly in that very … early period of her work was really a radical departure for women’s wear, and sort of continued to be one.”
Chanel’s sharp adherence to codes throughout her career, in a fashion world obsessed with constant change, is also notable.
Those codes can be challenging to articulate, because many of her signatures have become commonplace. The designer established a language that persists, even dominates, to this day.
Chanel’s 2.55 bag, a design from the 50s still sold in stores today. Photograph: Julien T Hamon
“This is always the hardest thing when you’re talking about an avant-garde designer who has made a radical, alternative way or proposition that has impacted fashion …it’s always difficult to convey this idea of practicality,” Arzalluz says.
Whether Chanel’s precision, pragmatism and futuristic outlook will be interpreted as an emancipatory project for women more used to clothes that confine; as a flirtation with fascist principles articulated in cloth; or something altogether more complex than either of those stories will be left to museum goers to decide.
In staging Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto, Arzalluz says: “It is the objects that tell the story.”
The NGV announces a huge Coco Chanel exhibition
An exhibition of one of the world’s most influential fashion designers will land in Melbourne this summer. Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto is the first exhibition in Australia to solely focus on the fashion contributions of 20th-century French designer Gabrielle (aka Coco) Chanel.
The exhibition is coming to the NGV in partnership with Paris’s leading fashion museum, the Palais Galliera, which launched this significant exhibition in autumn 2020. Melbourne will be the first city outside of France to host the exhibit, with the gallery presenting more than 100 Chanel garments from the Palais Galliera, Patrimoine de Chanel (Chanel’s archives), as well as from additional public and private collections. The NGV will also be drawing from its own holdings, bringing out some never-before-seen acquisitions such as a white lace ‘Evening dress’ (spring-summer 1933) and a shirred red silk velvet and marabou-lined ‘Evening cape’ (circa 1924-26).
Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto presents Chanel’s work across a series of thematic and chronological sections, exploring her enduring influence on fashion, as well as in perfume, jewellery and accessory design. Importantly for Melbourne audiences, the exhibition features some of Chanel’s earliest use of black to connote modernity, as well as her lace gowns, tweed suits (made famous by the likes of Jacqueline Kennedy and Princess Grace of Monaco) and beaded garments. Chanel was pivotal in redefining fashion for women in the 20th century, creating garments that offered a sense of luxury alongside comfort, even championing the longstanding fashion staple that is the little black dress.
It gets better though. The official opening of Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto on December 4 also coincides with the return of one of Melbourne’s hottest events – the NGV Gala. It is the first time the black-tie event has run since 2019 when the gallery hosted Salt-N-Pepa alongside its Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kaws exhibitions.
Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto runs from December 5 to April 25, with tickets for both the exhibition and gala on sale now.
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