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HOME SWEET HOME: Chanel’s love affair with Paris is going strong: the fashion house plans to unveil its next Métiers d’Art collection in the French capital on Dec. 7, it announced on Monday.
Traditionally a traveling show that has alighted in destinations including Shanghai, Rome, Edinburgh, Salzburg and Dallas, the Métiers d’Art show was held in Paris in December 2019 in the wake of the death of Chanel’s longtime creative director Karl Lagerfeld earlier in the year.
Faced with the restrictions of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the brand filmed the collection, which celebrates the craftsmanship of the suppliers and workshops in its orbit, at the Château de Chenonceau in the Loire Valley last December in front of a single VIP guest: Kristen Stewart.
The collection drew long lines outside its stores in London when it dropped in June.
With the Grand Palais undergoing renovations ahead of the Summer Olympics in Paris in 2024, it’s unclear where Chanel will hold the show next December. A temporary venue has been erected near the Eiffel Tower to host events that usually take place in the Grand Palais, including the Fiac art fair and the Saut Hermès show-jumping competition.
However, Chanel creative director Virginie Viard has indicated she prefers more intimate venues, choosing to stage her fall 2021 haute couture show earlier this month, the first with a physical audience in 18 months, at the Palais Galliera fashion museum.
Unlike some of its competitors, Chanel has not staged any major events outside of its domestic market since COVID-19 triggered the first of several rounds of lockdowns in France in March 2020.
In a recent interview with WWD, Bruno Pavlovsky, president of fashion and president of Chanel SAS, said the house plans to resume overseas events with a replica of its cruise collection, unveiled in May in the Provence region of France, though it has yet to reveal the location.
Even with larger events on the horizon, the brand – which has invested heavily in infrastructure over the last year – believes it’s too early to revert to business as usual.
“This is not a time to stage the kind of extraordinary events we did in the past,” Pavlovsky said. “We feel in our markets and among our teams the need to be closer to our customers and to do things that are more one-to-one.”
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