Chanel Takes Us to the River

PARIS — Paris is actually a story of two cities in the intervening time: on the outskirts, livid social dysfunction, on the centre, chest-bursting municipal satisfaction, with the Seine on the coronary heart of all of it. Three bridges have been repurposed as runways over the previous few weeks of trend reveals. On Tuesday morning, Chanel settled for a riverside location, on the quai the place the well-known Bateaux Mouches are moored. Pre-Olympic Video games, the style business is clearly doing its bit to supply a heightened imaginative and prescient of Paris the place. Chanel even painted the quai’s cobblestones pink, like a Barbie-fied tackle the yellow brick highway, with the brand new couture assortment performing as Oz on the finish of all of it.

However Virginie Viard additionally engaged with Paris the way of thinking, or a minimum of its particular embodiment in la Parisienne. First to step onto the pink brick highway was Caroline de Maigret, co-author of best-selling ur-text “The right way to be Parisian: Wherever You Are”. She was carrying a full-length, double-breasted coat in navy bouclé. Robust-shouldered, military-ish, severe. That set the tone for a set that had a solidly grown-up really feel, so stable and tweedy, the truth is, that it bordered on stout right here and there. Name me coucou however I discovered that slightly charming. As soon as, it might need the wispy ingenue Lily Rose Depp who’d be known as on to catch the temper. Right here, her mom Vanessa Paradis, now 50, returned to the fold. And there was a way of nonchalant, assured, womanly dressing, within the repurposing of masculine pinstripes and waistcoats, in addition to these lengthy coats. Even the dressiest appears to be like – an embroidered shirt and hostess skirt, say – had the identical informal spirit, like Viard was celebrating a weekend in Paris. Some fashions had been to the florist. One other was strolling a canine. There have been a few quai-side bookinistes if anybody fancied a browse (all of the print on show was Paradis-related).

The surfeit of floor ornament introduced us again to Planet Couture: scatterings of sequins, lacquered gilding, fruits and flowers embroidered to the max. By the point we encountered raspberries dangling off a gilet like tiny purple baubles, it was even starting to look quite a bit like Christmas (acceptable sufficient, this being a winter assortment).

In her preamble, Viard outlined Chanel’s attract as a stability of opposites: nonchalance and magnificence, energy and delicacy. Michel Gaubert created the proper soundtrack equal. The present opened with “Promenade Sentimentale,” a beautiful Satie-like piano piece written by Vladimir Cosma to accompany an early morning stroll within the Tuileries within the 1982 cult traditional “Diva” (ripe for revival as Paris celebrates itself). It was adopted quickly sufficient by “Lower Dick”, a slice of soiled funk for a late evening in Pigalle from the ever-nonchalant Chilly Gonzales.