Gone are the days when Chanel collections would riff on a singular theme, a dramatic mise-en-scène set to match. Today, Chanel shows are like entering a Parisian pâtisserie and surveying displays of sweet confections in every flavour and colour, not a nutritional staple but a joy to indulge in, even if it’s just a perusal of the menu. For SS24, Virginie Viard looked to the sweetness of la vie provençale with a collection inspired by trips to the South of France, specifically the Villa Noailles, the house in the hills near Hyères that was once the home of Coco-adjacent art patrons Charles and Marie-Laure Noailles, designed by the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens in 1923.
The villa has since become the centre for Hyères International Festival of Fashion, Photography and Accessories — sponsored by Chanel, bien sûr. Photographs of the sleepy Provençal town lined the walls of the show venue, dotted with saturated blown-up florals, a result of the house’s ongoing collaborations with photography duo Inez and Vinoodh. The villa’s outdoor spaces – “from its cubist chequered garden to its sunken flower beds” – were a particular inspiration, emerging a sartorial reflection of the strict lines of the villa’s Art Deco architecture counterposed by its brimming gardens.
This was a summery, sea-breezed collection with geometric, striped and patchwork motifs running across its various riffs on tweed tailoring and Riviera-infused beachy staples: woven beach bags, chain-strewn sunglasses, candy-striped tweed beach cover-ups, ditsy floral dresses, and vintage-looking swimsuits. For the most part, waists were low, shoes were flat and a sense of unstructured ease was explored through sportswear-inspired looks, like striped pullovers, unlined technical neoprene suiting, and the kind of athletic twinsets that might have been worn for exercise routines in the 1920s. Layers of black organza used across skirts, blouses and ruffled-collar dresses, swathes of lace and abbreviated baby doll silhouettes provided a more formal contrast. “Sophistication and informality, the tweed throughout the collection, sportswear and lace: I tried to bring one thing and its opposite together in the coolest way possible,” Virginie explained.
Chanel has always been a cultural lightning rod that can transform basics into treasures, a high-low ethos that stems all the way back to Coco Chanel, currently the subject of a blockbuster exhibition at the V&A Museum in London. As visitors to the exhibition will surely discover, she famously drew from unlikely sources — Men’s undergarments! Nun’s habits! Old-school sportswear— and irreverently paired costume jewels with real gems, creating a new kind of chic that upended the stuffy conventions of her time. You could say that Virginie is trying to do the same for the here and now. Quiet Luxury, this is certainly not, and yet there’s an artful way with which Virginie manages to lay on the hallowed Cocoisms, interlocking logos and a candy-shop assortment of accessories in a way that comes off as laidback and insouciant. Which is why, come summer, those simple pairs of black flip-flops and blue jeans — ordinary bar a few double-Cs — will whip up frenzied queues outside boutiques around the world.
