Renaissance Meets ’80s Rock Chicks at Chanel

7 min readDec 6, 2020

Kristen Stewart performed audience of one as the French brand held its Métiers d’Art show in a chateau in the Loire. It was no laughing matter.

The 1980s were the renaissance years of Chanel: the decade Karl Lagerfeld took the helm of the house and began knocking the camellias and pearls and bouclé off their pedestals, dosing the classic with the healthy sense of amused disregard that became a new signature for the brand.

Their signifiers — the shoulder pads, red ties, gold chains and buttons — have been weirdly present again, in fashion, pop culture and politics alike, ever since that avatar from the decade, Donald J. Trump, started taking up all the air in the room.

So it is little wonder, really, that when Virginie Viard, Chanel’s current creative director, decided to have her Métiers d’Art show in the Château de Chenonceau, the Loire Valley castle that was once home to Catherine de Medici, the renaissance patron, both periods got spliced together in her mind. Not to mention the always present history of Gabrielle Chanel herself.

That’s how it goes in fashion: The designer imagination leaps from one connection to another, pulling pennies out of the air, and then adds them up into an unexpectedly alluring new whole. That’s how it works.

In the vaulted black-and-white checked hallway of the chateau, in front of a coronavirus-dictated guest of one (the actress and Chanel ambassador Kristen Stewart), Ms. Viard offered black-and-white checked miniskirts under bouclé blazers and over footless Jane Fonda aerobic tights. Sweeping velvet greatcoats atop white bouclé playsuits trimmed in gold chain. A silvery unitard beneath a shell pink miniskirt suit embroidered in elaborate gold leaf (also beneath a bouclé shorts suit).

There was a high-low strapless black gown cinched with a trompe l’oeil belt with a portrait of the castle itself picked out in rhinestones, and a lovely ruffled white blouse paired with a full black skirt, that same belt — and a triangular black toque, sprouting tulle. There were embroidered page boy tunics and fringe-trimmed rocker vests and country intarsia floral denim dresses and slithery black second-skin trousers with harlequin diamonds cut out at the calves.

There were some great pieces amid the costumes, most notably a glinting gray tweed coatdress, and the workmanship was, as always with Métiers d’Art, eye-popping. The collection was originally conceived, after all, as a celebration of the skills of the specialty artisans and manufacturers that support the couture industry, and that Chanel began acquiring in 1985. Next year, 11 of them will move into a new, Chanel-created centralized site in Paris.

And holding the show in a historic building built to honor women, shaped by strong women (the site is also known as the Château des Dames), was smart at a time when women are demanding their due. The collection came accompanied by a limited-edition book of photographs from Juergen Teller immortalizing the castle. (As shows have become digital, companion books have become a thing. Proenza Schouler created one for its ready-to-wear collection, a way to keep the experience special, and concrete.)

But the Métiers d’Art experience has also traditionally been accompanied — sometimes almost overshadowed — by lavish sets and extravaganzas rife with celebrities, bejeweled customers and Champagne.

Given the pandemic, that was not possible this season, and as a result, the clothes alone had to carry the moment. Ms. Stewart, herself draped in pearls à la Coco, performed rapt attention with aplomb, but she couldn’t hide the fact that amid all the attention to detail and past-meets-present power posturing, one crucial element was missing: irony.

Ms. Viard has talent, and a vision of sorts for where all of this is going, but seemingly no sense of the absurdity of our own kitschy bombast and dreams. No leavening raised eyebrow at all of the references.

The result, like the rhinestone belt and the checkerboard skirts that mimicked the floor, is just too literal. And this is a time when, in fact, the one thing we could really use is a light-handed perspective on both past and present, and a bit of a laugh.

Natacha Ramsay-Levi, the cool French girl who brought a cool-French-girl chic to Chloé that proved … well, perhaps a bit too cool, announced on Thursday that she was stepping down after four years as creative director. No successor was named.

Though her departure had been rumored for months — since the chief executive who hired her, Geoffroy de la Bourdonnaye, left almost exactly a year ago amid talk of falling sales at the brand, owned by Compagnie Financière Richemont — Ms. Ramsay-Levi said in a statement that leaving had been her decision.

And though Chloé’s transition under her leadership from the Provençal windswept romanticism established by the founder Gaby Aghion to a harder edged, more complicated hipness, was often uncomfortable, her departure was framed as a response to the pandemic and the state of the world (rather than a push, though whispers suggest that was also a part of it).

“Over the last months of health, social and economic turmoil, I have thought about the changes I want to see in our industry and how to better align them with my own creative, intellectual and emotional values,” Ms. Ramsay-Levi said in her statement. “It is this reflection that makes me consider my future differently and desire to pursue new opportunities.”

The news is also an opportunity for Richemont to consider the future of the brand differently, and who may be the best person to realize that future. It is a chance to turn the now familiar “talented designer who lasted only one contract at a big brand because vision and reality didn’t mesh” narrative into something altogether more significant and compelling.

Fashion has been locked in a paroxysm of change since March. First, the coronavirus closed stores and factories and drove shows online. Then the social justice movement forced a hard reckoning with the industry’s legacy of racism, and the still very white nature of its leadership.

Yet for all the talk of change and efforts to establish diversity and inclusion departments and executives, for all the scholarships created and listening tours and admissions of fault, giant visible leaps forward, aside from notably more diverse ad campaigns, have yet to occur.

And nothing is more visible in fashion than the designer at the top of a great and storied house.

The two biggest designer appointments since the twin crises began — at Givenchy and Fendi — went to white men: Matthew Williams and Kim Jones. When Antoine Arnault, the group head of communications of LVMH, the conglomerate that owns both brands, was asked in September if the group had considered a designer of color for the Fendi job, he said, “frankly, no.” He added the caveat that discussions had been underway with Mr. Jones (already well known to the conglomerate thanks to his position as artistic director of Dior Men) for several months, potentially beginning before the world changed.

Such an excuse, however, will not work with Chloé. Interesting as Ms. Ramsay-Levi’s work was, different as it was from the designers who came before her — Karl Lagerfeld, Martine Sitbon, Stella McCartney, Phoebe Philo, Hannah MacGibbon and Clare Waight Keller — and focused as she was on leavening the sweetness with more hardware and a tinge of desert hedonism (she liked an arm band, asymmetry and some complicated bindings along with a nightie), she had one thing in common with most of them. As Riccardo Bellini, the Chloé chief executive said, “She is an important member of that proud tradition of women who have designed at Chloé.”

Even more than that, she is one in a line of young white women minted in the crucible of the European fashion tradition (Ms. Ramsay-Levi spent 15 years working with Nicolas Ghesquière at Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton) and fragrant with a whiff of the bohemian, who designed at Chloé. Her departure has now given the almost 70-year-old brand a chance to demonstrate its commitment to moving forward in a new direction: one that, perhaps, speaks to the changing composition of its consumer base, and the changing face of the world.

It would be a real statement of intent were Chloé to look beyond the usual parameters of the fashion world toward talent in countries or areas further afield; to engage with designers who bring different backgrounds and experiences to the table. To not revert to the safety of a proven name, or a familiar profile, or someone trained in the rhythms of the old system, but rather to embrace someone willing to question all received orthodoxies and conventions.

Not to abandon its foundational virtues of a certain girlish, soft-focus whimsy, but to recast them. For the long-term, not the next three seasons.

Renaissance Meets ’80s Rock Chicks at Chanel

Written by Cibix