PARIS, Jan 21 — Virginie Viard finally put her mark on Chanel today with a beautifully restrained Paris haute couture show that summoned up the convent girl childhood of the fabled French label’s founder.

The discreet designer, Karl Lagerfeld’s righthand woman in his twilight years, shook the Kaiser’s ghost from her shoulder to produce some of the most subtle and refined clothes seen on a Chanel catwalk in quite some time.

With white sheets hung on washing lines around the spare set of a convent cloister evoking the orphanage where Coco Chanel grew up, this was a thorough spring clean.

A model presents a creation by Chanel during the Women’s Spring-Summer 2020/2021 Haute Couture collection fashion show at the Grand Palais in Paris, January 21, 2020. — AFP pic
A model presents a creation by Chanel during the Women’s Spring-Summer 2020/2021 Haute Couture collection fashion show at the Grand Palais in Paris, January 21, 2020. — AFP pic

Viard quite literally went back to the source, travelling deep into rural southwest France on a pilgrimage to the abbey at Aubazine where Chanel learned to sew, and where her little black dress had its genesis in the nuns’ habits.

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“It was a very touching and inspiring place. I felt good there,” said Viard of her time communing with Chanel’s spirit.

While Lagerfeld felled forests, reproduced rockets, ocean liners and the Eiffel Tower almost to scale inside the vast Grand Palais for his legendary Paris shows, Viard recreated the convent’s humble little garden gone to wild.

Chicly unshowy

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Rather than Cecil B DeMille sets, her clothes did the talking.

With models in white ankles socks and sensibly heeled loafers, the early looks — almost entirely white — had an Edwardian schoolgirl elegance about them.

The models had an Edwardian schoolgirl elegance about them. The Grand Palais was turned into the garden of the Cistercian abbey in Aubazine, central France, where Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel grew up. — AFP pic
The models had an Edwardian schoolgirl elegance about them. The Grand Palais was turned into the garden of the Cistercian abbey in Aubazine, central France, where Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel grew up. — AFP pic

Chanel tweed suits in black and white, dresses and pinafores with bertha collars. All appeared terribly simple, ascetic even, until you looked at the cut and sparkly sophistication of the flower detailing.

Then there was Gigi Hadid, discipline personified, as a kind of mother superior enforcer in a killer black buttoned-up habit dress with a claudine collar.

The American supermodel seemed to lap up the role, having confronted a gatecrasher who slipped onto the runway at the last Chanel show.

A model presents a creation by Chanel during the Women’s Spring-Summer 2020/2021 Haute Couture collection fashion show at the Grand Palais in Paris, January 21, 2020. — AFP pic
A model presents a creation by Chanel during the Women’s Spring-Summer 2020/2021 Haute Couture collection fashion show at the Grand Palais in Paris, January 21, 2020. — AFP pic

Then came the couture dresses assembled with a rare and restrained ethereal beauty, with their fine embroidery carrying echoes of stained glass and filtered ecclesiastical light.

Even the Paris weather seemed to have caught some of the chill of Chanel’s convent rigour, with Kaia Gerber and other models swaddled in thermal foil blankets backstage against the biting winter cold.

“The idea of a boarding school, of schoolgirls, of the children’s clothes from long ago, pleased me,” Viard said of her spring summer wardrobe.

Gabrielle Chanel — who would later restyle herself Coco — was sent to a former Cistercian abbey at Aubazine after her mother’s death in 1985.

“In that place outside time, the young Gabrielle was marked for life by a rigour, a sense of purity and a whole aesthetic that never left her, and was one of the major sources of her inspiration,” Viard added.

Haute couture shows happen only in Paris and are regarded as the pinnacle of fashion, with hundreds of hours of work going into every piece painstakingly handmade.

Only the world’s richest women can usually afford dresses from the little more than a dozen permanent haute couture houses allowed to use the label under French law. — AFP