Celebrity Life

Paris Fashion Week 2020 closed yesterday on a high note with spectacular shows from Chanel and Louis Vuitton.

Chanel went back to the timeless glamour of black and white Hollywood movies while Louis Vuitton embraced a gender neutral future.

Tinseltown galore at Chanel

[caption id="attachment_211025" align="alignnone" width="1024"] (Image: Chanel)[/caption]

At Chanel's presentation, an army of the world's top supermodels walked under a huge Hollywood-style sign spelling out the brand's name in its biggest catwalk spectacle since designer Virginie Viard took over the fabled French house from Karl Lagerfeld after his death last year. They included the body positive pin-up, Jill Kortleve, a Dutch model who is a voluptuous size 16 (US size 12).

Covid-19 restrictions may have limited the number of fashionistas allowed into the immense Grand Palais in central Paris, but like the decor, Viard wrote her ambitions large. Her collection was no less than a grand sweep through the long history of the label founded by Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, with a giant nod to Chanel's time in Tinseltown in the 1930s when she dressed stars like Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich and Gloria Swanson.

"I was thinking of actresses on the red carpet... some of whom we haven't seen in a long time... their faces a little somewhere else as the photographers call out to them," Viard said afterwards.

[caption id="attachment_211019" align="aligncenter" width="619"] (Image: Stephane de Sakutin/ AFP)[/caption]

The show — dominated by black and white interspersed with splashes of bold colour — coincides with the first-ever museum exhibition dedicated to Coco Chanel in the French capital, which opened last week to rave reviews.

Big screen glamour

Viard recreated and updated some of Coco's most beloved looks, with a nod to her predecessor Lagerfeld's more street fashion sensibility with logos a gogo.

"Gabrielle Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld dressed so many actresses in their films and in their lives," Viard added. "They made us dream."

"Without redoing clothes exactly and falling into vintage, I wanted it to be very joyous and colourful and full of life."

[caption id="attachment_211020" align="aligncenter" width="594"] (Image: Stephane de Sakutin/ AFP)[/caption]

With Paris Fashion Week 2020 forced largely online by the coronavirus, Chanel streamed the show live for fashion fans. "Lights, cameras, action!" it declared on Instagram as it aped the opening of a silent black and white film, placing a huge Chanel sign on the Hollywood Hills.

Viard kept up the theme of the brand's long association with the silver screen with video clips of models reclining in luxury hotels like movie idols about to attend premieres.

The brand's association with Hollywood began in 1930 when studio mogul Sam Goldwyn begged Coco Chanel to come to Los Angeles to give his stable of stars some "class", offering her US$1 million to come twice a year.

Gender fluidity and stiletto clogs at Louis Vuitton

While Chanel looked back, Nicolas Ghesquiere's Louis Vuitton could not be more resolutely now, with the opening look a sweater emblazoned with "Vote", a rallying call for the liberal left in the upcoming US presidential election.

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But that was as conventionally political as it got, with the highly rated French designer insisting that his eyes were set firmly on the possibilities that gender fluid clothes might offer in the future. "What cut might dissolve the masculine and the feminine?" he asked. "What wardrobe might make them come together in one?"

Ghesquiere said he wanted to bring the world's richest luxury label on a "voyage of exploration... to discover and abolish the last [gender] frontiers."

The bravura show was held in the long-closed La Samaritaine department store, which is due to reopen next year. As always with Ghesquiere, it was all in the cut, with classic business and streetwear uniforms given surprising turns.

[caption id="attachment_211022" align="aligncenter" width="509"] A model wearing Louis Vuitton's clog stilettos. (Image: Lucas Barioulet/ AFP)[/caption]

But perhaps the most eye-catching thing about his spring/summer 2021 collection were the shoes, with a line of pointed clog stilettos sending Instagram into spasms.

(Main image: Stephane de Sakutin/ AFP; Featured image: Lucas Barioulet/ AFP)

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Fifty metres underground — this is the depth that local winemakers chose when they decided to store 10,000 wine bottles in the Aven d'Orgnac caves, an underground tourist attraction located at the southern end of the limestone plateau of the Gorges de l'Ardèche.

The experiment began in March 2018, when a new storage facility was specially created in a disused access tunnel to allow wine to mature in what amounts to a highly stable and peaceful environment.

A living product that ages best in undisturbed darkness, the wine will have benefited from ideal conditions: A constant temperature of around 12°C and an all-year-long rate of humidity of over 95%.

On December 12, 1,000 bottles of Côtes du Vivarais "Grand Aven 2017" from this treasure trove will be passed from hand to hand by a chain of human volunteers who will bring them back to the surface after two years underground. Thereafter, they will go under the hammer with a range of other local vintages in an auction with modest reserve prices.

Lots on offer will include 150 magnums of Terra Helvorum 2017 starting at 30 euros, 350 bottles of 2015 Terra Helvorum for as little as 15 euros and 350 bottles of Grand Aven 2016 from just 10 euros.

On land and sea

These days, experiments to store wine deep underground are very much in vogue in France. On June 3 of this year, 500 bottles were placed in racks at a depth of 103 metres in caves in Padirac under the watchful eye of Serge Dubs, the Best Sommelier of the World in 1989.

The first of these to return to the surface will be brought up for an initial tasting in the spring of 2021. And let's not forget that this experiment is focused on a very particular wine: A Clos Triguedina Cahors, christened Cuvée Probus, which has been produced to honour the 130-year anniversary of the Padirac Chasm.

Surprisingly enough, this new approach to maturing wine was initially inspired by a find at sea. In 2010, divers in the Baltic discovered a wreck containing what turned out to be a cargo of champagne, which was probably on its way to 1840s Russia.

The wave of experimentation that is now ongoing began when the bubbly, which was made by such houses as Veuve Clicquot, Heidsieck and the now defunct Juglar, was discovered to still be delicious after some 170 years under water.

In Saint-Jean-de-Luz in the French Basque country, winemaker Emmanuel Poirmeur has registered a patent for a process that involves vinifying wine in special vats at a depth of 15 metres under water. For its part, Leclerc-Briant set a record when it vinified one of its champagnes at a depth of 60 meters under the Atlantic in 2012, not surprisingly the vintage was christened "Abyss."

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