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Chanel has a fresh-faced, avant garde new designer but it still stands for classic glamour. This was the loud and clear messaging at the first Chanel show since Matthieu Blazy took up his role. The show was held at Villa d’Este, the Lake Como palace hotel where Elizabeth Taylor, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich holidayed and which Alfred Hitchcock, who filmed The Pleasure Garden there, pronounced the most beautiful place on earth.
The location, booked a year in advance, provided the theme: life in a grand hotel. Think White Lotus on Lake Como, art directed by Slim Aarons. First on to the pebbled catwalk weaving through the hotel’s terrace was a white bathrobe-style coat. Then there were capri pants in the butter yellow of the hotel parasols, and a lilac tweed suit to match the wisteria trailing overhead. Models swung tote bags big enough for pool towels, while gold lamé cover-ups glinted as dazzling as sun on the lake.
“To me, Como is about the light,” said Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion. “Life is cinematic here.” Famous faces including the actors Keira Knightley and Sarah Catherine Hook were dotted among a 900-strong audience mostly made up of Chanel’s biggest-spending clients.
The Cruise season of catwalk shows, named for a time when Caribbean cruises requiring trunks of glitzy loungewear were in vogue among the rich, has evolved to stand for holiday glamour in general. Spending on holiday wardrobes has increased exponentially across all price brackets: consumers spend less on dressing smartly for work, and more on looking good on holiday for Instagram. Brands drop serious money on Cruise shows, because a slice of this lucrative holiday market is worth a lot in sunglasses. (There was a pair of shades to go with most looks in this show.)
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Pavlovsky describes Chanel as being in a moment of “generational handover”. Blazy, who took up his role at the beginning of April, did not work on this collection or attend the show, which was credited to the design studio. Holding the fort as figurehead for the event in his absence was the Chanel ambassador Sofia Coppola, who made a short film on location at Villa d’Este to accompany the event, which she described as “about that version of yourself when you get away, when you may be different from how you are in real life”.
Chanel has doubled revenue and headcount in the past decade to become the world’s second-largest luxury brand behind Louis Vuitton, with 36,500 employees at the end of 2023. It is more than 10 times the size of Bottega Veneta, from where Blazy arrives. His October debut is hotly awaited but Pavlovsky is “not so interested in what happens in October”. Rather, he is “interested in a future which begins in October. We work on Chanel time. We don’t rush.” Pavlovsky has said he will wait two years before judging whether Blazy is the right fit.
Pavlovsky dismissed any suggestion of moving production to the US as a strategy to avoid tariffs. He said Chanel intended to maintain its current policy of price harmonisation, in which prices are consistent in every country in the world, adding that they would “find a way to cover the cost” of keeping prices low in US boutiques if tariffs were levied.
Pavlovsky told Womenswear Daily that it was “the great admiration and respect for the heritage and the work done by Mademoiselle Chanel, by Karl and by Virginie”, which he sensed in Blazy, which clinched the recruitment. “That was important to me, because it wasn’t about a kind of competition over image and size. It was about the depth of what the brand stands for, and how we could build on that to continue telling our story.” Blazy has begun to make changes, including the hiring of the seasoned British haute couture specialist Andrew Heather, who has worked under designers including Alexander McQueen and John Galliano.
Silk scarves made in Como featured as ankle straps for heeled sandals on the catwalk. Chanel has recently taken a 35% stake in the Como-based manufacturer Mantero, which has been producing silk for Chanel blouses and printed scarves for more than 50 years. Under the terms of the deal, Mantero will continue to produce clothes for rival luxury clients including Dior, Saint Laurent and Versace, but Chanel believes that protecting key players in its supply chain is a sound investment, at a time when global economic pressures are putting many specialist producers out of business.
