Updated: Does Chanel’s Virginie Viard See the Bigger Picture?
Written not a take-down but as a study in creativity and changing roles, the embroiderer-turned-production guru stood by Karl Lagerfeld for 30 years. What are we learning about her as a creative director?
Chanel creative director Virginie Viard and her son, Robinson Fyot. Image: Anton Corbijn for Vogue
Virginie Viard’s 2019 appointment to creative director at Chanel wasn’t necessarily surprising by French standards. She’d been the star member of Karl’s essential creative team for over thirty years, advancing ranks from an embroidery intern in 1987 to leading Chanel's Fashion Creation Studio, the group responsible for bringing the garments of Chanel’s gigantic fashion shows to life. She wandered around with Karl to the fashion house Chloé then back to Chanel, entering the world of ready-to-wear in 2000.
UPDATE from 6 JUNE, 2024
On Wednesday, June 5th, 2024, Business of Fashion reported Virginie Viard would step down from her role as Creative Director at Chanel. Chanel confirmed this news and issued a statement: “Chanel confirms the departure of Virginie Viard after a rich collaboration of five years as Artistic Director of Fashion collections, during which she was able to renew the codes of the House while respecting the creative heritage of Chanel, and almost thirty years within the House.”
Karl’s Secret Weapon: The Production Manager as Artist
Regarded as his “right hand”, countless interviews present Viard as a willing receptacle for Karl’s brain dumps; a coordinator who could be relied upon to find a way. While Karl’s mind stayed in the stratosphere, dreaming the unthinkable, Viard was tasked with transforming sketches into samples and garments for runway shows. She did this for the better part of 30 years.
With time (and her own back-pocket experience as a costume designer) Viard helped move Chanel to become one of the most efficient fashion productions in the world, creating tons of highly-detailed, show-stopping works season after season. Usually presenting at least one hundred garments at a time, the scale and volume of Chanel shows could only be enabled by someone who knows how things get made.
Pulling from within
This isn’t the first time a “right hand” has been appointed a leading role at a fashion house. The equally-quiet and skilled Bill Gaytten worked alongside John Galliano at Dior before become the creative director. Reviews were mixed.
Described as quiet, self-effacing and so on, research shows Viard was always fully aware of her strengths as an operations whiz. From a Hamish Bowles Vogue interview in 2020:
“Viard soon saw an opportunity that appealed to her training in costume design and her meticulous organizational skills.” Later in the story, she remarks, “‘My chance was that nobody was in charge of the embroidery,’ she says, and so she would be dispatched to work with the formidable François Lesage of the storied embroidery workshop.“
While the fantastical set design has changed since Karl’s passing— Viard prefers skipping ski chalets and grocery stores for more stoic columns and house codes— shows are just as jam-packed with stunning wares as before, clear evidence of Viard’s technical contribution and achievement of operational perfection at Chanel. She runs that workshop like the Navy, but it forces some tough questions around taste and awareness now that she is Creative Director of the iconic house.
Even coworkers such as Eric Wright could attest: “‘Virginie loves luxury in clothing—the craftsmanship, the beauty,’ Wright says. ‘But she’s always been incredibly practical.’” This is a challenging intersection. Practicality was the necessary foil to bringing Lagerfeld’s cloudy visions to life, but now she’s on her own, with no visions to support but her own. At the time of her appointment to Creative Director, fashion enthusiasts and insiders alike speculated that Viard was a temporary stand-in given her deep technical awareness but minimal brand experience. But five years on, she’s still here and we are now far enough away from Karl’s shadow that we can finally started to understand Virginie’s eye for what it is.
“I Adore Dopey Things!”
This quote came from a 1993 Vogue interview between Charla Carter and Viard and still feels relevant today. Describing Viard’s personal taste, it serves is a rare nugget of perspective from a woman who is, by nature, very private. We see the passion for the misused and unusual season after season.
When I think of dopey, I first start to think about Middle Earth and the fashions of the Shrek franchise. These are ensconced in the past, informed by myth and superstitions and manufactured with what is readily available. Literal burlap sacks. Lace. Often menswear and workwear, repurposed for attending the grand gala. Glass slippers and so on.
Literal examples of Dopey. Image: Google
Bring this personal perspective to Chanel, and dopey seems to lend itself to an absentmindedness and personal styling that isn’t aligned with any real aesthetic. It is almost outsider art in its collectedness. It is a vagabond-oriented passion for an otherwise bookish bohemia. Casting all matters of perception to the wind, dopeyness may be fashion at its most personal and carefree and what Viard is squarely focused on. This is for the 👉👈 girls. It is the product of years of being a shut-in; unaware and unconcerned with what should be embarrassing. A pride in the cluelessness and ultimately, quite childish. A shared style for the introverted who have been forced to participate in this particular reality. Fashionable clothing is the last thing on these minds. It feels almost computer-generated in its genuine randomness, like a Sims 3 default outfit.
Dopey, as abstract as that is, can be done extremely well as a collection theme. Recent Miu Miu comes to mind vaguely, where the weird corporate glamour of a Post-2008 economic aesthetic rule— think bored sales associates on the floor of a big box store. Nerds having sex in the library. Mortgage lenders and real estate agents. The connection between Miuccia’s and Virginie’s work is the layering and styling.
Does Virginie Viard Have Taste?
While dopeyness isn’t a horrible concept to hinge a philosophy of style upon (it’s somewhat compelling), soon comes the matter of taste in its application. Taste has been a major question in the story of Viard’s role as creative director of Chanel. Perhaps the biggest challenge and shock to Chanel under Viard is that Viard, known and celebrated for being a technical genius and coordinator, can’t seem to bring any coordination to her collections. This problem feels even more oppressive when you consider Chanel’s legacy as a tastemaker and establishing force in trendsetting.
Regardless of theme and the ideas of dopeyness (applied unevenly), we’ve seen season after season of ready-to-wear in which Viard’s pattern choices are alarming, cuts unforgiving, and her elections of accessories often pointless or painfully out of place. Some choices are so strange they seem to be the performative interpretation of what a creative director is suppose to do. Sadly, this performance verges on parody— it is extremely hard to take seriously.
Chanel Spring 2023. Image: Isidore Montag / Gorunway.com
The opening look for Spring 2023 involved a youthful print sweater (and to Virginie’s credit, probably the most marvelously-crafted print sweater ever), marred by a bizarre floor-length sheer cape with an unnecessary camilla flower closure in black. In light of Viard’s enthusiasm for practicality, trying to replicate the logic to supports the claim this heavy, warm sweater would be paired with this windy cape strains the mind. The other challenge is around the tastefulness and rationale is the use of textures and patterns in inappropriate ways.
Even as Viard abandons the whimsy and fantasy of Lager runways (which she is fully entitled to do), the void is filled with vain attempts at normalizing the brand with a sense of relevant and realistic luxury. At the detriment to the finished collection, the clothes often don’t match the scale or ideas of the set design, the themes barely apply to the clothes, and there seems to be a microscopic level of peripheral awareness in all respects.
Seeing Craftsmanship from the Front Row
In the past and now, Viard enjoys the privilege of encountering every garment up close; allowing her to luxuriate, critique, and perfect each and every detail. Meanwhile, the general public can only imagine them. The fact Chanel is synonymous with quality has always been a matter of rich brand storytelling and word-of-mouth, not first-hand encounters with the pieces.
As proof of her costume and embroidery past, Viard’s rubric of what makes a successful garment seems to be satisfied once a garment is technically perfect on a by-part basis. Rather than asking the question of “How’s it look all together?”, Viard’s approach seems more elemental. She asks: “How does the sleeve look?” and “How does the waist look?” without checking how each part look together as a single garment. That’s without mentioning how each finished garment works as part of a whole collection.
These tiers of awareness and perception should be top of mind for a creative director. In fact, the last two are usually the central concerns of a creative director— they certainly were for Karl. For Viard, it seems she cannot move on from the technicalities of each individual part of a single garment. Instead of any sense of ratio or distribution, the result is an obsessively detailed, stroke-inducing cacophony of technical magic tricks and contradicting ideas all sent down the runway with no regard for taste.
Here we see hallmarks of Virginie’s practice: extremely shocking applications of completely unflattering and purposeless appendages on otherwise reasonable explorations of classic Chanel codes. It goes beyond any conceptual contributions. The gloves wouldn’t be flattering in any scenario and we cannot identify what the black wings on the breast of the coat are meant to represent or do. They’re so insignificant in the grand scheme of the garment that they lose any presence and look like a mistake. If not a mistake, these follies are often interesting conceptual ideas cut short— half-efforts in exploration.
Another tendency of Viard is to “remix” common garments with new and novel ideas in a very performative way. The strong example is this unusual coat-dress (remarkably layered over a feather skirt) with a completely nonfunctional double breasted closure. The application of the idea would be convincing and creative if it weren’t for the slit up the center of the dress, destroying the functional charade of the garment in the first place.
The use of the pleated leather, a staple treatment of the Chanel handbag, is an experiment gone wrong when applied to entire garments, suggesting some sort of distorted imagination of a human purse. The charm and delicacy of the leather is survived only by the un-pleated pant, but the puffy satin pleat has appeared as pants and skirts to disappointing affect as well, suggesting a bedazzled blanket you’d find Eastern European living room rather than a substantial piece of clothing.
Viard’s Best Work is Not Dopey
Viard is not a failure. If anything, she is completely reconsidering what Chanel stands for, and this we must applaud. Viard’s friends recognize her as an intellectual with precise focuses. From the aforementioned Vogue Interview by Bowles: “[A]s her friend the model and music producer Caroline de Maigret says, ‘[…]is the opposite of small talk. She doesn’t know how to fake it.’” Even her Instagram is private and only has two posts.
We can sense that Viard is deeply motivated by reality and realism, joining a class of increasingly rare designers who truly trade in quality clothing rather than temporary theatrics.
Perhaps counter to this entire theory, Virginie Viard is at her best performs when presented with scenario she resonates with personally, or allows some tempering of the accessories and follies. Despite her apparent preference of wearability and relatability over concept and theme, her landmark accomplishments thus far have been highly conceptual communication.
Chanel Fall 2023. Image: Isidore Montag / Gorunway.com
This look from Fall 2023 is a great example of Viard applying her essences in a well-distributed and meaningful way. It still has an arcane Victorian and Medieval charm that Viard no doubt adores, but with thoughtful use of accessories and a modern cut, it feels completely of today.
Chanel Spring 2023 Couture. Image: Isidore Montag / Gorunway.com
This dramatic garment, though tilted by its questionable inclusion of a bowtie is otherwise a sign of life and an example of Viard going all the way with a folly, in this case, interesting applications of color and sheer materials. The scale of the idea is completely under control and applied evenly, even in this collage-esque manner. It feels upscale and interesting, while still having the fleeting whispers of a shut-in trying her best.
Chanel Spring 2024. Image: Isidore Montag / Gorunway.com
Another bold and wholly-Viard creation is this piece from a recent show. The materials are slightly novel, but the overall scale and concept is intact. It’s somewhat puritan, but very modern. It also pushes Chanel into new creative territory where sculpture seems to reign.
Chanel Resort 2024. Image: Andrea Adriani / Gorunway.com
Applying Instances of Perfection to the Whole
As we can see from these examples, Virginie does have a vision and reoccurring inspirations. But we’ve had to dive deep to examine them. Every collection has a few standout pieces with which we can see the stars align. Seeing the bigger picture refers to not only the garments, but the conversation they have with the space they’re presented in, the relationship to the wearer, and the brand itself.
The Pre-Fall 2023/Métiers d’Art show, staged in Dakar, Senegal, was rife with symbolism, regional relevancy, and cohesion. Completely sensitive toward the political implication of a French brand showing in a former French colony, the show stands as one of Virginie’s most original and consistent efforts. Unlike several of the shows which have paid strict homage to past successes (Spring and Fall 2022 looked straight out of 1994), Dakar was only influenced by Chanel’s globetrotting tendencies. Dakar was completely and totally Virginie’s.
As for the clothes, Dakar showed Viard at her most emotionally charged and creatively centered. She still slipped in some Virginie-isms (the menswear ties, the countless pieces of jewelry, and the unsettlingly bespoke cut-in pattern clashes) but the collection communicated a new form of maturity for Viard, in which she, for the first time, showed immense control over scale and respect to the garment’s parts in respect to their whole, and the whole garment in respect to a collection of them. There was a serious show of restraint and even taste, but no less quality or detail. It was, finally, the whole package.
Ultimately, it is Viard’s personal enthusiasm for ideas- ideas important to her— that actually reveal the single biggest difference between her and Karl. Karl was concerned with what he wanted to dream about. Viard is squarely focused on what she is actually able to make.
