Chanel, LV close Paris Fashion Week in style

Louis Vuitton's Spring/Summer 2021 show on Tuesday was held in the long-closed La Samaritaine department store, which is due to reopen next year.
Louis Vuitton's Spring/Summer 2021 show on Tuesday was held in the long-closed La Samaritaine department store, which is due to reopen next year. PHOTO: EPA-EFE

PARIS • Chanel went back to the timeless glamour of black-and-white Hollywood movies while Louis Vuitton embraced a gender-neutral future on Tuesday, the last day of Paris Fashion Week.

Top supermodels walked under a huge Hollywood-style sign spelling out Chanel's name in its biggest catwalk spectacle since designer Virginie Viard took over the French house from Karl Lagerfeld after his death last year.

Covid-19 restrictions may have limited the number of fashionistas allowed into the Grand Palais in central Paris, but like the decor, Viard wrote her ambitions large.

Her collection was no less than a grand sweep through the long history of the label founded by Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, with a giant nod to the latter's time in Tinseltown in the 1930s, when she dressed stars like Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn and Gloria Swanson. "I was thinking of actresses on the red carpet... some of whom we haven't seen in a long time... their faces a little somewhere else as the photographers call out to them," Viard said.

The show coincides with the first museum exhibition dedicated to Coco Chanel in the French capital, which opened last week. Viard recreated and updated some of Coco's most beloved looks, with a nod to Lagerfeld's more street fashion sensibility with logos a go-go.

"Gabrielle Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld dressed so many actresses in their films and in their lives. They made us dream. Without redoing clothes exactly and falling into vintage, I wanted it to be very joyous and colourful and full of life."

With Paris Fashion Week forced largely online by the pandemic, Chanel live-streamed the show for fans. "Lights, cameras, action!" it declared on Instagram as it aped the opening of a silent black-and-white film, placing a huge Chanel sign on the Hollywood Hills. Viard kept up the theme of the brand's long association with the silver screen with video clips of models reclining in luxury hotels like movie idols about to attend premieres.

While Chanel looked back, Nicolas Ghesquiere's Louis Vuitton could not be more resolutely now - with the opening look a sweater emblazoned with "Vote", a rallying call for the liberal left in the upcoming United States presidential election.

But that was as conventionally political as it got, with the French designer insisting his eyes were set firmly on the possibilities that gender-fluid clothes might offer in the future.

"What cut might dissolve the masculine and the feminine?" he asked. "What wardrobe might make them come together in one?" He said he wanted to bring the world's richest luxury label on a "voyage of exploration... to discover and abolish the last (gender) frontiers".

The bravura show was held in the long-closed La Samaritaine department store, which is due to reopen next year. As always with Ghesquiere, it was all in the cut, with classic business and streetwear uniforms given surprising turns. But perhaps the most eye-catching thing about his Spring/Summer 2021 collection were the shoes, with a line of pointed clog stilettos sending Instagram into spasms.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on October 08, 2020, with the headline Chanel, LV close Paris Fashion Week in style. Subscribe