At the fall couture 2024 collections recently, Chanel presented its best collection in five years. Elegantly styled, and severely edited of all its jangly and clumsy bits, the artisans of the couture atelier had prevailed: The capes swooped majestically, the bows swept back in triumph, and the beaded jackets marched resolutely on. Except that no designer took the bow at the top of the cold marble stairs.
Virginie Viard, the creative director of Chanel, had left the building , just three weeks before the couture show, in a surprise announcement by the house confirming “the departure of Virginie Viard after a rich collaboration of five years as artistic director of fashion collections.” The role remains vacant at Chanel. In the same week, Dries Van Noten, bowed out with a beautiful last show, his men’s spring 2025 collection.
It was a showing that capped 38 years of graceful, sensual, and cerebral fashion from his eponymous label. How Spanish luxury conglomerate Puig, which bought the brand from Van Noten in 2018, will bring the brand forward is now in question. How does one fill such enormous, specific, and creative shoes? How does one fill a role created by a once-in-an-epoch talent? The short answer is: You can’t.
Part of the problem that constitutes the vacancy at Chanel, is that it is a vacancy created when its lifetime creative director Karl Lagerfeld died at 85, in 2019. You could say that the iconic Lagerfeld, an absolute master of the metier, created the genre .
