Celebrity Life

On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the designer's first fashion show, retrospectives of his work will go on display in six Parisian museums. It's an ambitious program of exhibitions that will revisit the work of the great couturier born in Oran.

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Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was the greatest style icon of the 20th century, and her designs continue to shape what we wear today.

Yet the Coco Chanel who emerges from the first exhibition ever dedicated to her work in Paris will come as a shock to fans of her brand's bling.

The creator of the little black dress, tweed suits, two-tone shoes and quilted handbags that are synonymous with French elegance was a very different animal to Karl "the Kaiser" Lagerfeld, who turned her label into a $100 billion business.

While the flamboyant German impressario had a magpie eye for street fashion, the Coco Chanel presented at the new show at the city's fashion museum, the Palais Galliera, was a futurist visionary of almost spartan refinement.

[caption id="attachment_210949" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Creations by French designer Gabrielle Chanel displayed during the exhibition "Gabrielle Chanel, Fashion Manifesto" at the Galliera Palais fashion museum. (Image: Stephane de Sakutin/ AFP)[/caption]

Many of the dresses she designed and wore a century ago are so startlingly modern they could grace the catwalk now. The cliche is that Chanel freed women from the tyranny of Victorian corsetry, borrowing liberally from men's wardrobes to do so.

But for the curators of "Gabrielle Chanel, Fashion Manifesto", an ongoing exhibition at Paris' Palais Galliera that runs till March 14, was only the tip of the iceberg.

Style revolution

Chanel created so much of modern style's DNA that her radicalism has been hiding in plain sight, said the museum's director Miren Arzalluz.

[caption id="attachment_210950" align="alignnone" width="1024"] (Image: Stephane de Sakutin/ AFP)[/caption]

"Even for us it was a surprise how much even we didn't really know her work in depth," she told AFP. "Her style is so timeless and present in our lives... and so ingrained in our collective memory that no one thought it necessary to do a retrospective, because we all thought we knew it."

From her striped "mariniere" sailor top in 1916, to making black the colour of cool, letting women move freely in their clothes and being the first to see the potential of sportswear, her influence is utterly pervasive, Arzalluz argued.

Her Chanel No. 5 perfume, sold in simple square bottles with utilitarian black and ivory labels, was minimalist before minimalism was even a thing. "And her Chanel suits of the 1950s and 1960s were the uniform of modern women," she added.

[caption id="attachment_210953" align="alignnone" width="1024"] (Image: Stephane de Sakutin/ AFP)[/caption]

But it is the breathtaking elegance of her cut and silhouettes which will come as the biggest surprise for those raised on Lagerfeld's showy 36-year reign.

What is also striking, Arzalluz insisted, was how Chanel stuck to her revolutionary guns despite the arrival of Christian Dior's New Look after World War II, with its return to wasp-waist corseted looks. "There's a coherence in her style from the beginning to end," Arzalluz said, in a span that goes from 1912 to her death in 1971.

That this is not shouted from the rooftops more often is partly because of what Chanel did during the war, and her subsequent flight to Switzerland after the liberation.

Don't mention the war

[caption id="attachment_210952" align="alignnone" width="1024"] (Image: Stephane de Sakutin/ AFP)[/caption]

Arzalluz acknowledged her "complex personality", a reference to her "horizontal collaboration" with France's Nazi occupiers, and her attempts to use their anti-Jewish laws to prise back control of Chanel No. 5 from the Wertheimer family who had fled for their lives to the US.

Whole shelves full of biographies have dealt with how Coco spent the war tucked up in The Ritz with her German intelligence officer lover, Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage.

Which was why Arzalluz said the museum — whose newly opened galleries have been partly funded by Chanel — took the "radical decision to concentrate on her work" rather than her private life. That was best "left to scholars and biographers", she said.

[caption id="attachment_210951" align="alignnone" width="1024"] (Image: Stephane de Sakutin/ AFP)[/caption]

However, Arzalluz was at pains to point out that Chanel was never in thrall to men, a lesson she learned early when he father put her in an orphanage. "I don't like the idea that she discovered everything thanks to the men in her life — that she only used tweeds because of the Duke of Westminster... or her Russian-influenced period was because of (another of her affairs with) Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich," the last Russian tsar's cousin, and one of the men who killed Rasputin.

"It is just not true," the curator insisted.

Arzalluz said Chanel was "an avant-gardiste", far ahead of her time pioneering things "we all do now, mixing the ordinary with the chic, the masculine and the feminine, costume jewellery with the real thing.

"The way we dress today, wearing tailored jackets with jeans, or men's shirts, or trainers with airy chiffon dresses" is directly down to her influence, she said.

(All images: Stephane de Sakutin/ AFP)

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The French Maison has released a virtual tour of their landmark exhibition for their ardent patrons who may have missed the show at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the V&A Museum in London. While de-containment has already started in several countries, to soften the confinement by awakening your senses, Dior makes its ground-breaking […]

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On a freezing Wednesday morning in February 1947, a line of immaculately dressed women huddled in their thick furs outside Dior's Avenue Montaigne boutique in Paris. Inside, one of the greatest couturiers of the 20th century was putting the final touches to his new collection, refusing to open the doors to the aristocrats and actresses shivering outside until every last detail was perfect.

More than 70 years later, a similar queue formed outside the Victoria & Albert Museum on an equally bone-chilling day in London. Only this time, it was made up of couture lovers hoping to see the fruits of the groundbreaking 1947 collection in the exhibition Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams.

Oriole Cullen, fashion and textiles curator at the V&A, traces both Dior’s work and his enduring legacy in this delicious visual story made up of 200 pieces of haute-couture clothing, which are exhibited alongside shoes, handbags, perfume, illustrations, make-up and magazines. It’s the museum’s largest fashion exhibition since the epic Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, which was visited by 493,043 people during its 21-week run in 2015.

[caption id="attachment_134320" align="alignnone" width="1609"] Bar Suit, Haute Couture, Spring Summer 1947, Corolle Line.[/caption]

A single mannequin opens the show in the Sainsbury Gallery of the museum’s new Exhibition Road Quarter, dressed in a two-piece suit that defines both the joyful femininity of the post-war period and Dior himself. The Bar suit was deemed wasteful and extravagant in an era of rationing, but women flocked to this “New Look” for its opulent swathes of fabric and nipped-in waist, which suggested a future filled with glamour and sex.

It sits sultrily under a facade modelled on Dior’s first store at 30 Avenue Montaigne, through which you walk to find a replica of Blenheim Palace containing an off-the-shoulder sequin, pearl and raffia gown made for Princess Margaret’s 21st birthday.

“We wanted to explore the notions of dreams and aspirations,” says Cullen over coffee in The Lanesborough hotel. “Princess Margaret was a dream-like figure in the 1950s. We think of celebrity culture as being a contemporary thing, but the press and the public were obsessed with her -- she was young and beautiful and glamorous, and represented a future after the war. She embodied the concept of dreaming and transporting us far away, and this Dior dress, with its colours and effects, was designed to heighten that sensation.”

This ethereal exhibition is a reimagining of last year’s critically acclaimed show at Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which documented Dior’s 70 years of fairy-tale-like appeal. But this being London, Cullen has also dedicated a significant part of the show to the designer’s love for Britain. And at a time when the country is grappling with its relationship to Europe, there’s something particularly joyful about the delight this quintessential Parisian took in England.

“There is no other country in the world, beside my own, whose way of life I like so much,” Dior swooned in his memoir. A self-described royalist, he was enamoured with the stately homes of England, the two princesses and their aristocratic friends. Nancy Mitford, after trying on his New Look suits, wrote in her diary, “My life has been made a desert of gloom by a collection which at one stroke renders all one’s clothes unwearable.”

Dior’s love of post-war England roots the entire exhibition. “It’s a fascinating history,” Cullen says. “He was a real Anglophile and had a wonderfully romantic notion of Britain. He loved English women in tweeds and ball gowns, and had a series of shows all over the country in different grand houses. It was the opposite of the glamorous sophistication of Paris -- the British thing is more about a charming elegance.”

[caption id="attachment_134324" align="alignnone" width="1737"] Christian Dior by Maria Grazia Chiuri. Haute Couture, Spring Summer 2018.[/caption]

Dior today is so much more than Christian, and the exhibition is careful to celebrate the work of the six creative directors who have been at the helm since Dior’s death in 1957. From his then 21-year-old assistant-turned-successor, Yves Saint Laurent, to Maria Grazia Chiuri today, each designer’s work is displayed with equal weighting.

One of the most visually sumptuous displays belongs to the travels room -- an ornate chamber dedicated to the countries the house has been inspired by, including China, Japan, India and Egypt. Through this exhibition, Cullen hopes to appeal to a global audience. “The Paris show had such a big impact around the world,” she says. “With the kind of international audience we get here in London that should be repeated. Yes, it’s partly about Dior in Britain, but the ethos is also about looking outwards.”

For unbridled prettiness, the garden room reigns supreme. Bathed in light, where many of the other displays are dark, it shows a series of floral dresses in ever-more edible colours sitting under a ceiling of pale mauve paper petals. A beautiful array of gowns in an ethereal setting such as this one illustrates to what extent couture truly is an art form. And these hand-stitched pieces of wearable beauty feel like a much-needed antidote to the cheap highs of fast fashion outside.

“It’s so wonderful to see these dresses up close,” says Cullen. “There are so many details that you can’t always get from a photograph -- like those super-light layers of tulle. There’s almost nothing to them, as if you could blow them away. People yearn for something like this in the modern world. I think, by showing haute couture, it allows us to reflecton the value of clothing and the idea of sustainability. We need to look at these amazing things that make you dream.”

From the airy light of the sumptuous garden room, we move to the Designers for Dior display, which meticulously shows how each of the brand’s six creative directors shaped the maison. “What I loved most about this exhibition was seeing the moments of great change every time a new designer came in,” says Cullen. “Each was very reflective of the times they were working in.

“Marc Bowan is often overlooked but he had some truly beautiful pieces and brought the house through a difficult period in the 1960s, when ready-to-wear began,” she continues. “Galliano is an example of how imagination and creativity come together in an excessive explosion of fashion I don’t think we will see again. Raf [Simons] is so of his time, so relevant and so modern, and now Maria Grazia is very connected with what is going on culturally.”

I’m lucky enough to visit the exhibition during the press preview and Chiuri -- Dior’s first female creative director -- is there, dressed entirely in black and laughing uproariously with the journalists from Milan, making me wish I’d paid a little more attention in Italian class at school. Unlike during the Paris exhibition last year, Chiuri now has a strong body of work for Dior, and her thoughtful, beautifully made pieces are an important addition.

From there, we move through to the arresting ateliers room -- stark surgical white, showing the tireless nature of handcrafted work -- to a kaleidoscopic display of make-up, perfume, illustrations and shoes. Part of the wow factor of this exhibition must go to the immersive sets designed by Nathalie Crinière, particularly the pure fantasy walk the exhibition ends on. This ballroom evokes the lavish interiors of the great houses of Britain and shows off the skill needed to create these fairy-tale-like gowns.

On my way out of the museum, I wander past haughty stone statues, expensive Dutch vases and rows of bored schoolchildren, and realise thatnot even these priceless objets d’art can hold a candle to the unabashed celebration of Christian Dior I’ve just witnessed. But then again, very little beats the joie de vivre of haute couture at its most opulent.

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