Sofia Coppola covers Chanel’s Cruise 2022/23 Monte-Carlo collection

Director Sofia Coppola brought her fine sense of nostalgia as well as a longstanding love of fashion to documenting Chanel’s Cruise 2022/23 Monte-Carlo collection.

Monte Carlo Beach Hotel. Photo: Chanel/Supplied

This has been the year that Top Gun Maverick smashed box office records, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck tied the knot, and TikTokers embraced noughties style. In tough times like ours, nostalgia is de rigueur. Perhaps Chanel’s artistic director, Virginie Viard, feels the same. When dreaming up the latest Chanel Cruise 2022/23 collection, Viard reminisced and riffed on the house’s longstanding affection for the Mediterranean city of Monte-Carlo and its near-mythic glamorous lifestyle. Fast boats, even faster cars, glittering nights and casino chic were all part of the mood for a collection that was both racy and fun.

“The first time I went to Monaco was with my grandparents to visit the oceanographic museum,” Viard said following the presentation of the collection there in May. Later, she returned to spend the weekend with former artistic director Karl Lagerfeld, who had moved to the municipality and set up residence in the early 20th Century villa La Vigie – a classical white edifice perched on the headland overlooking the Monte-Carlo Beach Club.

Lagerfeld threw legendary parties throughout the ’90s, frequented by the Supers and close friends such as Helmut Newton, another resident, and Caroline, Princess of Hanover, the daughter of the late Prince Rainier III of Monaco and the inimitable Grace Kelly. “It was there he photographed Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington on the balcony,” Viard says. “I’d wanted to do something in this place for a long time.”

Fittingly, Viard chose director Sofia Coppola, a long-time friend of the house, to collaborate on a film for the Cruise 2022/23 Monte-Carlo collection. The director’s use of nostalgia is a recurring feature of her oeuvre.

After the show, she said: “Being here brings up so many memories of Chanel and Karl, and I knew it would be fun to evoke the Grand Prix, the water, and that kind of fantasy.” On this day Coppola wears a long blue and white striped Chanel skirt and a black T-shirt, though she admits she just added one of the Formula 1-style and white jacket the princess wore, revisiting its shape as a midnight blue sequinned jacket worn with white guipure lace.

There were allusions to Princess Caroline in the slinky cocktail dresses, sheer tights and high heels, while white poplin shirts with pointed collars are a clear nod to Viard’s late mentor, Lagerfeld. Black satin pyjamas were pure Coco on the Riviera – as modern now as they would have been then. Far from being stuck in the past, however, these calling cards underlined a timeless appeal. Remixed with skill and just a dash of irreverence under the guidance of Viard.

Coppola’s final cut evokes happy holiday snaps of the models spliced with some of this history – black and white archival footage of Monte-Carlo beach scenes and Chanel campaigns, along with a soundtrack of the 1981 hit, This Town, by The Go-Gos. It’s pure escapism. “Cruise is always my favourite collection because it feels like an imaginary holiday; it’s not real life,” Viard says.

The daughter of the legendary US director Frances Ford Coppola and his wife, documentarian Eleanor Coppola, the director is known for her richly visual style and meticulous attention to detail. Her films are punctuated with highly curated signifiers.

There’s the contemporary soundtrack, featuring the likes of New Order and The Strokes, in her movie Marie Antoinette, and the wardrobe choices, such as the ethereal white dresses in The Virgin Suicides – all of which crystallised a pop culture moment and cemented her as an arbiter of taste. In many ways she is like a fashion designer, with that same discerning eye for spotting something before it becomes popular. Much like a designer, she works very visually, pulling together imagery, including wardrobe, to help cement her ideas.

Sofia Coppola in Monte-Carlo.

“I always love working with a costume designer, and when I am writing a script, I think about what the characters will wear because it tells you a lot about someone’s personality,” she says, adding that she sees Virginie also working similarly. “Virginie was once a costume designer, and you can see how she puts things together to create characters.”

Film-making was perhaps inevitable for Coppola, though one of her earliest interests was in fashion: she can trace her relationship with the Parisian house back to a summer internship she undertook in her teens.

“Fashion was my first love, which at the time was strange for a little kid – it is much more in the mainstream culture now,” she says. “I have lots of memories of being on rue Cambon and meeting all the people there, and I am never jaded about it,” she insists. “I mean, watching Virginie do all the fittings and put all the looks together with the accessories yesterday – that’s my childhood fantasy“.