There’s still a pregnant nine months to go before Matthieu Blazy unveils his vision for Chanel – in the gestating interim, the Chanel design studio is determining the in-between collections, which serve a tricky trio of purposes. On the one hand they’re a palette cleanser, a stopgap between the aesthetics of two artistic directors – Virginie Viard’s, as many have stated, was largely actually a carry-over from Lagerfeld’s, a carrying of the same flame. Since that started burning in 1983, it’s pretty entrenched. They are also a reiteration of house codes, a celebration of Chanel. And thirdly, they keep dressing clients, and keep Chanel’s expertly trained ateliers from sitting idle.
That is particularly relevant in the case of couture, seen by many as a press-satisfying loss-leader but at Chanel a viable business. “If we could not afford to do such a show, then we would not do such a show – we are not stupid,” Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion, once told me. “Business is small; it is targeted but enough to pay for what we need to do with couture … we are just trying to target the right customers.” And couture is at the heart of Chanel – it’s the oldest house still creating haute couture, a history it wears proudly. And in a moment, essentially, of retrenchment, of restating eternal Chanel values, this collection cited a timeless vision of what Chanel can mean.
It was presented in the Grand Palais, the traditional home of 21st-century Chanel shows, with two curling catwalks, designed by scenographer Willo Perron, forming abstractions of the house’s double logo. It also resembled, overhead, the lemniscate of the infinity symbol – the message being that Chanel ain’t going nowhere. And there’s an infinite quality to Chanel’s style, of course, an eternality.
The big message of this Spring/Summer 2025 Chanel haute couture show was simple: colour. If Gabrielle Chanel is renowned for her love of black and beige – the former because she grew up around nuns in a Catholic orphanage; the latter, she herself said, because it reminded her of dirt – she also experimented with extreme, even jarring hues. Her work in the 1960s verged on psychedelic, with multiple jarring hues woven to comprise a single, oddly harmonious tweed whole.
Touches of those colours peppered this collection, sometimes peeking out as linings matched to blouses (a Chanel signature), and sometimes keyed into the fabric itself. A long chiffon dress came out in a shocking slither of Chanel red – a colour she loved, and made her own for evening – and while the high-riding skirts would’ve elicited her ire (Chanel hated an exposed knee) they seemed keyed to generations of younger clients who want their Chanel to express the youthful verve and energy of Gabrielle’s greatest work. But the suit, of course, was her crowning achievement – here it emerged again and again, reengineered and reiterated with details that drew on a deep font of archival knowledge, like the fusing of a blouse to a skirt, nodding to the buttons that Chanel added to attach those two garments together and prevent wrinkling, and the faux shirt-cuffs sewn into the sleeves of her jackets, giving a polished look to the ensemble while the blouse itself was sleeveless, for comfort.
Colour was the easy connecting thread in this collection, which roamed through Chanel-isms explicit and implicit – attenuated 30s evening wear, 60s suiting, a big dollop of the kind of historicism Chanel occasionally indulged in herself, like a fat profiterole of a blue taffeta cape tied with a flourish of a bow. In larger, it offered a wardrobe for everyone, and any occasion. The overwhelming impression – a true trope of Chanel – was a lightness, dancing chiffons, frosting feathers, supple tweeds. Everything moved with and against the body, nothing stuck. That was, of course, the hallmark of Chanel – her tailoring, after all, was so light it had to be anchored by a gilt chain. It was also a valuable expression of craft, in exercising the collective muscle of Chanel’s petit mains, and keeping the flame burning for the arrival of Blazy. Their expertise was well displayed – it was an exquisite collection.
And, of course, this interim Chanel show also ensured very rich women – those “right customers” – still have something to wear while they play the same waiting game as the rest of us.
