The silhouettes could be simple – jumpy sweaters or undershirts worn with high-waisted pants, cardigan skigan jackets and lacy satin shirts with full-length romantic ballet skirts – but the beauty is so detailed. This is haute couture, after all, and the kind of clothes we might be familiar with in our work-from-home life have been enthralled with exquisite beads from Cecile’s houses. Henri, Hurel, Montex, Emanuelle Vernoux, and Lesage, or made with ordinary lace, hand-painted by Soltiss, or strewn with artificial flowers by Lemarie. Hurel reinterpreted a sample from the Kitmir historical archive they found, the curb house created by Duchess Marie, sister of Grand Duke Dmitri of Russia who was Coco Chanel’s girlfriend in the early 1920s. Chanel was displaying Kitmir embroidery in her own paintings at the time. Using the smallest embroidery beads available, worked into the most delicate quilted diamond pattern, the Hurel Workshop single dress took several months to make – almost all the time, of course , that Viard and her dining machines were working on the collection from concept to presentation.
Look closely and you will see, for example, that the full version of a chiffon dance dress is interspersed with flowers cut with cut-out flowers and redecorated – a flower with which Chanel herself would wear some of her designs completed in the 1920s and 30s, including examples on display in the exhibition Gabrielle Chanel: Manifesto Fasan at Palais Galliera in Paris (currently closed due to French Covid protocols).
This season, Viard has also been working with photographer Anton Corbijn, whom she met when he shot her for December 2020 Vogue profile, La Vie de Virginie, and holds music industry credentials – has shot and directed videos for U2 and Depeche Mode among many others Control, the film magisterial biography of Ian Curtis at Joy Division – a claim to the rock chick in it.
The famous haute couture salons on the rue Cambon have just been repeated by the renowned decorator Jacques Grange, a project initiated by Karl Lagerfeld, who, as Viard recalls, misrepresents for Grange that both Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé died, they could eventually work together. The result, says Viard in exile, is “brilliant, solemn!” and asked Corbijn to photograph her wedding cortege in these salons. Corbijn has a package of family photos featuring ambassadors Chanel Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, and Vanessa Paradis and her daughter Lily-Rose Depp, while the bride, meanwhile, stands on the stairs Famous for its mirror-facing walls featuring the charming Lesage embroidery of pearl butterfly flights encircling her slippery ivory satin skirt, a dress that, as Viard puts it, “is a bit like something to be seen in the old paintings – ivory satin, embroidery, and a large cover, not 1920s, but that atmosphere. “