027 Paris Fashion Week Flu

Highs from fashion week, hanging on by a thread and a taste of the sublime (Blazy's Chanel).

How I want to dress forever.

Truly there is no phrase to bring one back to earth from a Paris fashion week high than a text as you land from your husband that reads “Eleanor has gastro.” Well actually he wrote “poor Eleanor was up all night with the runs and just threw up.” But this is a newsletter about nice things and this is the worst thing. Also, my poor husband who capped out a week of solo parenting with solo gastro. This man deserves a medal!

But we don’t appreciate the highs without the lows? And it’s easy to forget that behind every photo of a martini at Bar Hemingway is a woman who also has to disinfect her entire bathroom and pray everybody doesn’t get struck down with the bug.

Paris was full of highs though. The biggest was seeing Matthieu Blazy’s debut for Chanel at the Grand Palais. I actually think I should probably retire as I’m not sure I will witness such a moment again. It’s not only that the collection was beautiful but it felt like we were witnessing something seismic. Fashion history. A break!

The magical Chanel set inside the Grand Palais.

This season there’s been a lot of discourse around who gets to be a fashion critic. Is it anybody with a wifi connection? Anybody who loves fashion? Legacy media only? Do you need to see the clothes up close? I had an interesting conversation with a fashion critic and archivist I really admire (during our conversation the head of the Palais Galleria came up to say hello for e.g.) about how fashion has become part of the culture in such a different way. He thinks a shift is coming toward looking up to designers in the way we did in the McQueen/Galliano era. But he has little time for people who look at, say Blazy’s debut, and say “it’s giving Zara.” Or that it’s not Chanel. For one, it was deeply Chanel. Blazy clearly had great reverence for Chanel, and for Gabrielle Chanel. This is something that everyone I’ve spoken to from Chanel shares, but I think Blazy connected with her spiritually. Cosmically, even. “Codes” aren’t just about blinkers on doing tweed. There’s a lot of freedom in constrictions, as Chanel president of fashion Bruno Pavlovsky told me earlier this year, the best designers and creatives understand this. Blazy breathed new life into Chanel, he blew away the cobwebs, he’s building on Gabrielle and Karl and Virginie (let’s not wipe her contribution out either!) with such cleverness and appetite and curiosity. Also Gabrielle Chanel was at heart a contrarian, and as Blazy said in an interview, it’s “Chanel because we say it is.”

And because we all believe it is too.

I had so many favourite parts!

Including:

The collaboration with Charvet. Purveyors of the perfect shirt since 1838 and a favourite of Sofia Coppola and just about every fashion editor. Gabrielle Chanel was said to wear them too, which is such a clever way to approach her legacy. Just when you think there are no new angles into the story! I love the chain detail on the hemline - found in all Chanel jackets and tops too. It’s the perfect, perfect shirt.

One of my own perfect shirts.

The crumpled 2.55 bags. Blazy wanted them to look like they’d been taken out dancing and it’s such a good way to think about luxury. Wear and love your precious things to death! And going out dancing is always the cure.

The silk dresses knitted into camellias (Coco’s favourite flower).

This glorious, joyful moment of course. If this was a season for a reset, this moment embodied it. Fashion needs to make us feel something.

As I wrote in my story for the paper this week too, people were feeling a shift. There were a lot of debuts and new ideas but also I think designers realising that they need to make people want - irrationally! - the clothes.

I also liked a conversation I had with Michael Rider after his sophomore show for Celine. It was about how he thinks about making clothes people are going to wear over and again. But that aren’t basic or “quiet.” And I loved this collection for exactly this - pieces interesting enough to last forever, ones you could add to what you already have and also you should pile on jewellery. But I always think that. I can’t wait to be one of those old ladies with rings on every finger and enormous earrings.

Other Paris highlights:

Pedro Pascal practically brushing past me and me basically expiring on the spot. The charisma of this man!

So too seeing Tilda Swinton. She truly is otherworldly.

Holding this lush suede Birkin (there’s a reason Hermes has defied the luxury slowdown) and thinking about the woman I could be!

A perfect Madeleine (Proust was right!).

I actually did this when I was Paris two weeks earlier (I know, my body knows) but visiting the flea markets and finding this vintage Chanel top (it has chain in the hemline ofc).

The people watching at the Comme des Garçons show was incredible, I loved the reverence and the fandom and look at Michelle Lamy!

A visit to the Schiaparelli showroom. I love Daniel Roseberry’s mind.

Blame the eternal obsession with ‘French Girl style’ but the minute I get to Paris you cannot get me into a silk scarf fast enough! Here are two ways I wore them and you can bet I will be copying Mrs Prada in wearing one around my shoulders next.

As a bandanna.

Because I saw a girl at Copenhagen Fashion Week do this and I like how it ‘breaks’ and jazzes up a fairly plain outfit otherwise.

Anything Mrs Prada does, I will faithfully copy.

Books

I’ve done it again. By that I mean left a book I was loving in an airport :((( but I’m halfway through Gene Pressman’s They All Came to Barneys and it’s so juicy and great. Pressman is such a good storyteller and it’s a total fashion history lesson, but a fun one.

I also read a fascinating, unflattering biography of Vivienne Westwood and I love, love, loved Keith McNally’s I Regret Almost Everything. I found it surprisingly profound. I appreciate his honesty, like in a post today that how even when things are good for most of it’s all hanging on by a thread.

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I’m currently reading Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, which is delicious.

Love,

Annie xx