View As Art: Revisiting Chanel’s Most Iconic Runway Shows
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For his Spring 2027 Chanel collection, Matthieu Blazy drew on Gabrielle Chanel’s founding premise, putting forth clothes meant to liberate the women they dress. But he drew on her successor Karl Lagerfeld’s legacy to produce a show that projected the collection into the stratosphere. Blazy used birds as symbols of freedom: 95 larger-than-life white seagulls hung suspended from the ceiling of the Grand Palais as if frozen midflight. The moon, also part of the diorama, appeared to cast an after-hours light upon them. The musical selections? Camille Saint-Saëns’s “The Swan” and the Cinematic Orchestra’s “Arrival of the Birds.”
Courtesy of CHANEL, from Chanel Shows, Flammarion
Since his appointment three seasons ago, Blazy has staged the kind of high-drama Chanel shows that became associated with the French fashion house during Lagerfeld’s tenure and continued throughout Virginie Viard’s. The brand has upped the ante of fashion show decadence, establishing a standard of production across the industry. But it didn’t start out that way. When Gabrielle Chanel was working a century ago, she preferred a more modest salon-style presentation characteristic of the couture shows of the time.
A new book, Chanel Shows Fashion Mise-en-Scène, looks to catalog the evolution of the brand’s shows over the past hundred-plus years—a timeline that also encapsulates major changes in fashion and culture. The coffee-table book is both a visual retrospective of the grandeur of Chanel runways, and an in-depth look at the through-line between the first couture presentations and the larger-than-life spectacles of today.
Chanel founded her namesake label in 1909 in Paris. Around the same time, the modern concept of the fashion show with models walking a runway was taking shape. In 1918, Gabrielle moved into Number 31, Rue Cambon, establishing both a headquarters for the brand and a home for the house’s runway shows. Her atelier showed off her personal style, a characteristic mishmash of simplicity and excess. She juxtaposed elements from throughout history—set against a mirrored staircase were painted wood furnishings, nineteenth-century lacquered panels, and Eastern ceramics. A dazzling rotation of imagery reminds us that the backdrops were consistent even as the collections evolved.
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Chanel Shows, Flammarion
The book is sectioned into seven themes inspired by Gabrielle Chanel’s guiding principles, including “the future favors the bold” and “inspiration is a force of nature.” Though Lagerfeld, who took over roughly a decade after her death in 1971, at first kept with the more intimate style of shows, his visions of grandeur quickly outgrew the space. Moving into the 1990s, brand image began to equate, if not outshine, the collections themselves. With six annual shows—two ready-to-wear, two couture, cruise, and métiers d’art—and a global audience, the theatrics began to grow. When Paris’s Grand Palais reopened in 2005, Lagerfeld established a new runway home base, hosting a number of ready-to-wear and couture shows there. (Cruise and métiers d’art collections are often shown on remote location.)
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from Chanel Shows, Flammarion
For Lagerfeld’s first show at the Grand Palais Spring 2006, he staged a giant reproduction of the new iMac, which had just overtaken the tech market. This was the new precedent. “[He] had that magnificent 1948 book by André Granet, Temporary Installations: Décors éphémères – Paris 1909–1948, which he had republished as a facsimile reprint,” writes Bruno Pavlovsky, president of fashion at Chanel, in an interview in the book. “It contained photographs of Granet’s installations for large-scale exhibitions and fairs in Paris, some of which featured a locomotive, or even airplanes, under the Grand Palais dome. It all started with that book.”
This glimpse behind the curtain reminds us that it takes 12 days of prep (and something like six months of planning) for a show that lasts 15 minutes. These fantastical events transport guests to extravagant worlds they might otherwise never have access to. The Spring 2012 couture show transformed the Grand Palais into a full-size reproduction of an airplane, where guests sat on passenger seats—all first class, of course—and models used the center aisle as a runway. (Spring 2016 transformed it into an airport terminal complete with arrivals, departures, check-in counters, and baggage conveyor belts.) Fall 2014 made a supermarket, shelves stacked with the groceries you’d expect rebranded through the Chanel lens. Then, there was the famous rocket for Fall 2017 that appeared to take off courtesy of clever pyrotechnics at the close of the show, soundtracked, of course, to Elton John’s “Rocket Man.”
Per the text, Lagerfeld was always in on the joke. “‘Fashion is neither moral nor immoral but is meant to boost morale,’ Karl Lagerfeld would say.” There’s even a quick Q&A with Michel Gaubert, who famously soundtracks the Chanel shows.
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from Chanel Shows, Flammarion
You can sit for hours just leafing through the fabulous imagery of all of these productions, from Lagerfeld on through Viard and Blazy. These days, over-the-top shows are commonplace across the industry. For Louis Vuitton’s Spring 2027 men’s collection, the brand built a multistory set piece designed to look like a tidal wave and featuring real water. Haider Ackermann’s new Tom Ford comes with models in character, slinking around the room and making devilish eye contact with the audience. But a Chanel show is somehow still magical, whether you stream it on your laptop or sit beneath the glass ceiling of the Grand Palais.
“The perfect show doesn’t exist, because it’s not an exact exercise. There’s always this danger,” writes Blazy to close the book. “There is everything you can control, but there is also everything you can’t. So that’s what makes a show a moment that needs to be lived.”
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