Chanel haute couture brings a tear to the eye
It was a feeling of pure joy – with the odd tear – to attend the Chanel show in Paris.
Here are some things I would like better words to describe: the collective noun for clutches of women dressed in head-to-toe Chanel tweed (a chic?); the slightly embarrassing rush of seeing a celebrity in the flesh and realising you do not, in fact, have any chill; and the sensation of when a collection becomes more than simply clothes but a mood, a feeling and an experience of fashion as art form, escapism and a pure joy.
Also it turns out that Canadian crooner Celine Dion is not the only one to cry at an haute couture show. Experiencing my first one as a fashion journalist with many years of sitting in unusual places for a fashion show (the best part of which is watching non-fashion people make sense of it), scurrying backstage to ask designers about their mood board and finding new colour descriptions (tomato soup red, say, or lemon curd yellow), was illuminating. I cried when I saw the first look at the Chanel autumn-winter 2022-23 haute couture show, held at the white sand stadium of the equestrian L’Étrier de Paris centre in the Bois de Boulogne. In part because I couldn’t quite believe that I was there, and travelling again and how the world felt wide. But also because the emerald green tweed skirt suit, pictured right, and the other looks that followed so easily expressed creative director Virginie Viard’s vision of women who are chic and cool and getting on with their lives. A notion that Coco Chanel, who freed women with her relaxed silhouettes and modern clothes, would surely appreciate.
Some of the looks were paired with pieces from Chanel’s new high jewellery collection, 1932. The collection pays tribute to the one and only high jewellery collection, Bijoux de Diamants, that Coco Chanel created in 1932 when hope was thin on the ground and spirits (and diamond sales) needed lifting. Of the collection, which featured shooting stars, comets and constellations as well as nods to the craftsmanship of couture, Coco Chanel said she “wanted to cover women in constellations”, and for “the jewellery to be like a ribbon on a woman’s fingers”.
The way the clothes evoke a certain spirit of effortlessness on the runway belies the hours (months!) of work the atelier spends on each of the many details and, indeed, the rigid rules of it all. Haute couture is controlled by the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture and has a strict set of “musts” around who can show.
Before leaving for Paris, I watched the French film Haute Couture, starring Nathalie Baye, who plays the head seamstress at a couture house. In the film, Baye’s character tells the protege she has taken on, under complicated circumstances, that “a dress is not alive until it is worn”.
I think about this as the line-up of fresh-faced models walk around a colourful, constructivist set created by one of Viard’s many collaborators, the artist Xavier Veilhan, and how haute couture is a ticket to dream. Even though most of us will never wear these creations.
It is at haute couture you will see throngs of people circle a car as singer Rita Ora blows a kiss before slipping inside and being driven away, a woman with her two dogs in a Chanel shopping basket bag being carried by a gentleman whose job it is to carry them and accidentally brush by Keira Knightley, who is luminous, and think for a moment that you know her.
“Couture is like Holy Week, except better! I shouldn’t say that!” enthuses one of my editors who has been coming to haute couture for 10 years, when we meet for a drink. When a French PR contact discovers I haven’t been before she says, “Ahh, you will see that it is different”.
Mainly, the sheer fortune of seeing an haute couture show reminds me of first falling in love with fashion – because of the synthesisation of ideas, the escape from the mundane, the cracking open of possibility and how beauty can be a balm.
Celine Dion, famous haute couture crier, gets this and now, so, too, do I.
Annie Brown is contributing editor for vogue.com.au.