What do you do if you are a fashion house possessed of the most coveted open designer job in the business, the subject of manic rumors and speculation, with the world watching every move you make for a hint of announcements to come?
If you are Chanel, you hold the first mega-show of a European luxury brand in Hangzhou, China, invite about 1,100 guests, including Tilda Swinton, Lupita Nyong’o, Liu Wen and about 600 local V.I.C.s — very important clients — and get on with business as usual.
Meaning, in this case, you offer a bit of glamorous outreach to a customer segment that, after years of explosive growth, has been very publicly slowing down, sending the fortunes of many global fashion brands dropping. Chanel, the second largest luxury brand in the world, with 2023 revenues of almost $20 billion, has not been immune.
And if the V.I.C.s — which is to say, clients who spend at least $20,000, and possibly up to $500,000, a year with the company — won’t go to the brand, the brand will go to them.
“To come to China after Covid was one of our top priorities,” said Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president for fashion. “We started seriously to plan it nine months ago. It’s the right time to focus on our Chinese customers.”
After all, he acknowledged: “At the moment, we have less customers in our boutiques. We have less what they call one-timers. But we are still very powerful and very successful with our V.I.C.s. And what we are doing here is trying to create a unique experience and a bond.”
The show, Chanel’s annual Métiers d’Art production, was its second big event in greater China this fall. Last month, the company held a “replica show” of its May cruise collection, originally held in Marseille (and the show that immediately preceded the departure of Chanel’s artistic director, Virginie Viard), in Hong Kong. It was also Chanel’s first show since 2009 in mainland China, where it has 20 boutiques.
Chanel decided to go to Hangzhou rather than, say, Shanghai or Beijing, a move that Mr. Pavlovsky said “surprised” pretty much everyone (including the authorities), because Hangzhou is one of the centers of craft and silk in China. The Métiers d’Art is specifically staged to celebrate the numerous artisanal houses — the embroiderer Lesage and the milliner Maison Michel, among them — that Chanel owns and supports. And because Coco Chanel was a collector of Coromandel lacquered screens, displaying them around her apartment on Rue Cambon.
Among her pieces was a screen that featured a scene depicting West Lake in Hangzhou. Though Chanel herself never went to China, she kept the screen in her office, where it remains. That screen provided the inspiration not just for the show, but also for its site: the foggy, romantic setting of the lake.
As for the Métiers d’Art collection, which was created by the Chanel studio team working in conjunction with the various specialty ateliers, it included some classic Chanelisms: long-line bouclé coats and a camellia or two, as well as some nods to the Coromandels. Those came in the form of floral motifs taken from the screens and translated onto bodysuits and worn under cropped bouclé jackets and miniskirts. There were also fluffy knits in jade, mother-of-pearl and pink.
Local silks were made into ersatz denim worn under long tweed jackets or pleated skirts that swept the floor and were paired with what looked inexplicably like feather-tufted bed jackets. There was some gold, some soignée pleating and a lot of awkward looking shapes.
If anyone has wondered why an artistic director is even necessary for a fashion label — why all the hoo-ha about who will be Chanel’s Next Great Designer? — these clothes were the answer.
The day after the show, Chanel hosted an event to showcase the Métiers d’Art craftsmanship, the better to allow the V.I.C.s to experience the work up close and, Mr. Pavlovsky said, “to reconnect, or connect, with these clients.”
No matter how effective the event, however, it was hard not to think that the best way to connect with clients of any kind is to hire a designer who can make the sort of unexpected, exciting clothes that make people sit up in their seats with surprise and spark desire. That really would be a shot — or a show — heard ’round the world.
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