600 hours, three fittings and a sheaf of gilded wheat: model Apolline Rocco Fohrer details the emotional weight of being the couture bride in the final collection by Chanel’s Creative Studio
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Fashion & Beauty: In haute couture, the bride is kind of what everything’s all about. On the one hand, it’s down to simple economics: if a woman is going to spend a literal fortune on a dress, it’s probably going to be for her wedding, and there are always a bunch in production whenever you visit any Maison’s ateliers. But there’s a deeper meaning. Traditionally, couture shows close with a bride: it’s a position of hushed reverence, the climax of the show and, theoretically, summarises the mood of the collection, the spirit of a couturier’s vision, or indeed of their time. The most extreme example? Cristobal Balenciaga’s 1967 bridal gown, held together with a single seam beneath a ‘coal scuttle’ headdress, that has become an avatar of sculptural modernism, held up as the apotheosis of his genius. Interestingly, the one couturier who consistently bucked this convention was the resolutely unconventional Gabrielle Chanel, a confirmed bachelorette, who never showed a wedding dress in her lifetime.
The model chosen as bride also has significance. At Chanel, it was often the ‘face’ of the house at any specific time – that idealised Chanel woman who stared out from advertising campaigns for clothes and perfume. In the 1980s, that was usually Ines de La Fressange, made up as a Coco doppelgänger; in the 1990s, Claudia Schiffer took the title for much of the decade, alongside unexpected names like Guinevere van Seenus or Devon Aoki. Recently, the actress Margaret Qualley took a turn. The bride at the Autumn/Winter 2025 Chanel haute couture show was, for the first time, the 22-year-old French model Apolline Rocco Fohrer.
In a world of ever heightened and increasingly elaborate ready-to-wear, you wonder what differentiation remains between that and haute couture. “The biggest difference is the fittings,” said Fohrer, backstage between the two shows Chanel stages each couture season to be able to fit all their clients and press in. “Usually when you do ready-to-wear, the outfit is complete, you just put it on. This dress was not ready – the process is much longer.” She had three fittings, over a period of two weeks, for this dress, mimicking the process of creation for an haute couture client, although condensed to ready the look for the show.
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Chanel Autumn/Winter 2025 Haute Couture Photography by Jora Zaria
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And there is an innate intimacy with couture. “The women who created the dress – you get closer,” Fohrer says. The dress was created by one of Chanel’s two flou ateliers, helmed by Olivia Douchez, a premiere who has worked at the house for a decade. “You understand how it works, you ask how many hours it takes – they said it was around 600 hours, this dress. When you realise you’re wearing something that is so important, for those people, there’s a lot of feeling. There’s more responsibility.” And, Fohrer allows, it feels different. “There’s a lot of emotion – it’s moving, to wear something like this. To know all the people who are behind it. It’s very heavy – emotionally heavy. But in a good way.”
Focusing on the bride feels fitting: designed by the Creative Studio, the final collection shown before new artistic director Matthieu Blazy debuts, this was a Chanel haute couture collection about the art of haute couture, nodding to traditions, embracing heritage. The bride gown is, as Fohrer says, a weighted thing. Still today, unmarried petite mains – the ‘tiny hands’ who meticulously sew these dresses together – will wind a piece of their hair around their thread and sew it into the dress, as a good luck charm to ensure love and marriage.
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Chanel Autumn/Winter 2025 Haute Couture Photography by Jora Zaria
…Chanel Autumn/Winter 2025 Haute Couture Photography by Jora Zaria
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Charms and superstitions run amok in haute couture. This Chanel show took, as an emblem, the wheat sheaf, a symbol of plentitude beloved by Chanel (she had it wound into lamp bases and gilded onto little tables), of new beginnings and circularity, chiming with the house’s constant self-reference. Ears of wheat were embroidered in crystal around the neckline of the wedding dress, and Fohrer carried a sheaf of the stuff sprayed gold. “Always but never the same” was a refrain coined by Karl Lagerfeld, about the reiteration of Chanel’s codified identity – the braided tweed suit, the camellia, the quilted 2.55 handbag. Yet also, there’s the lesser-known Chanel – this collection riffed on her ‘rich peasant’ looks of the 1930s, an odd reflection of the strictures of Chanel’s own upbringing made deluxe. There was a focus on beige, a colour Chanel said she liked because it looked like dirt, and the rusticity of her hardy tweeds, here unravelled at the edges. But perfectly done.
