Chanel’s fall 2024 high fashion present at present on the grand Nineteenth-century Parisian opera home Palais Garnier felt like getting into Within the Loge, impressionist artist Mary Cassatt’s well-known 1874 portray of a bourgeois girl on the opera trying by means of her opera glasses, whereas a person within the background seems at her. Company had been seated within the balustraded corridors surrounding the auditorium, in crimson velvet opera containers designed particularly for the event by French director Christophe Honoré. The spectators gazed on the fashions rustling previous in velvet, taffeta, and duchesse satin—and at one another. The staging ingeniously highlighted {that a} trend present is rarely simply in regards to the motion on the runway.
This was the primary Chanel assortment offered since former inventive director Virginie Viard’s sudden departure simply weeks in the past. Internet hosting couture inside a theater the place the nationwide opera and ballet firms carry out was a becoming venue to have fun the maison’s lengthy connection to French arts and tradition. It additionally despatched a message of aesthetic continuity. Chanel is a patron of each the Opéra nationwide de Paris and the Ballet de l’Opéra, and Viard’s pink-and-white aquarelle dreamscape of a remaining high fashion assortment for spring 2024 was impressed by costumes that founder Gabrielle Chanel herself designed for the 1924 Bronislava Nijinska ballet Le Practice Bleu.
The colour palette was darker this season, with a number of black, gold, silver, and wealthy jewel tones. There have been traditional Chanel bouclé fits in spades, most lower simply above the knee, with or with out field pleats. Many featured tassels, cabochons, braids, and different glamorous gildings. Little black attire—or, extra precisely—lengthy black attire additionally featured prominently. Numerous seems had been topped with lengthy coats and opera capes which wouldn’t have appeared misplaced at Palais Garnier when it opened almost 150 years in the past. However there was nonetheless pores and skin on show: the opening look featured a billowing, floor-length cape over a bodysuit, a glance that felt very Gen Z and harking back to the sportswear costumes Chanel designed for the Nijinska ballet.
Nods to the wardrobe of opera divas and prima ballerinas had been threaded all through the gathering. A number of the stage references had been fairly literal, as in a pair of tulle tutus lower to classical (brief) and romantic (full) lengths, and black swan feathers that danced throughout the shoulders of fitted jackets. Others had been a bit extra indirect, like a white shirt with ruffles on the collar and cuffs, and a white peplum prime with buttons down the entrance worn with cuffed pantaloons that referred to as to thoughts the pantomime character Pierrot. The bride, Chanel’s annual nearer for its couture reveals, wore a dreamy ballgown with puffed sleeves, an extended practice, and a bodice embroidered with the home’s signature camellias, match for Madama Butterfly or Lucia di Lammermoor.
