Chanel FW2024: Un homme et une femme by Chanel

The world of Chanel is a world of fixed ideas, with very few variables and a number of constants, and this gives it extreme stability and phenomenal level of recognition. At any Chanel show, there will always be tweed, there will always be camellias, there will always be pearls, chain belts, and beige shoes with a black toe-cap. Far from every Parisian fashion house, or indeed any luxury brand, has such a perfectly cataloged and systematized archive, where everything is laid out in its own boxes and shelves. Chanel, under the leadership of Karl Lagerfeld, had worked for decades on the construction of this perfect temple and when it comes to interaction with what is commonly known as heritage and DNA the brand is practically unmatched. Virginie Viard, who succeeded Karl as the creative director, was also extremely successful in this and found her own way of working with Chanel’s heritage.

Another constant in the world of Chanel is travel: all the places marked in one way or another in the history of Maison Chanel have regularly become the theme for collections and fashion shows. Riviera, Biarritz, Venice, Great Britain — all of them have been processed one way or another in all departments, from metier d’art or cruise shows to perfumes. But Chanelknows how to find fresh new ways to work with its geography. In the FW2024 season, this is once again Deauville, about which we all know that it was there that Gabrielle Chanel, who started as a milliner, opened her first hat shop. Karl Lagerfeld even had a short film on this topic, where Chanel was played by Keira Knightley. But this time Virginie Viard recalled not Mademoiselle herself, but the seemingly unrelated Claude Lelouch’s  film, Un homme et une femme. As we know, some of its most famous scenes take place in Deauville. And she also made her own film — inviting Inez and Vinoodh to make a mini-remake of the original Deauville scenes of Un homme et une femme, starring Brad Pitt and Penelope Cruz.

She had already done something similar not so long ago with Alain Resnais's L’année dernière à Marienbad, for which Gabrielle Chanel created the costumes and which was restored with Chanel's support, but there was no short film then, and this time the concept was more complex. And so, black-and-white Pitt and Cruz wander along a giant Deauville beach at low tide, stroll along the legendary wooden boardwalk with the names of Hollywood stars on the railings of changing cabins, dine at the restaurant of Le Normandy hotel, a Chanel 2.55 bag sitting on the table between them — exactly as it sat between Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimee in the original Un homme et une femme. This is Virginie Viard’s personal way of adopting Chanel heritage.

As for the collection, this time there really was a lot of tweed, as a pleasant sign of seasonality, which at some point almost deserted the runways, but not at Chanel. There was a lot of knitwear, such as the sweaters and cardigans in Deauville seagull prints, black knit sets with wide trousers and a buttoned-down cardigan with beige trim, and a beautiful combination of an ecru-colored fisherman’s sweater with a shaggy knit skirt of a similar color and a brown leather belt to accentuate the waist.

But the most striking looks of this collection involved hats — in honor of Chanel the milliner, and these hats, large, with wide brims, were reminiscent of the ones in Lagerfeld’s film about young Chanel and her first boutique.. They were worn not only with tweed suits and silk dresses, but also with long fitted tweed coats in silhouettes reminiscent of the best examples of the 1970s, and this combination — a long coat and a light summer wide-brimmed hat — became not just the highlight of entire collection, but a generally fresh feature. Well, even in the perfectly organized world of tweed and camellias unpredictable things happen.

Text: Elena Stafyeva