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The famous French fashion house Chanel has been around for over 100 years since its founder Coco Chanel opened her first hat shop at 160 Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris, in the same building as her lover of the day Étienne Balsan. Her genius, and that of the brand she built-up over a lifetime, has been the ability to change with the times on more than one occasion to stay relevant to succeeding generations of customers in often wildly different economic and social conditions.
Academy award winner actress Tilda Swinton is now the new face of Chanel for the the brand’s pre-autumn advertising campaign for its “Metiers d’Art Paris-Édimbourg” collection, by Karl Lagerfeld, the fashion house’s chief designer, which was first revealed in a Scottish Castle last December and advertisements for which will be hitting the fashion magazines in earnest this June.
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Tilda Swinton with Karl Lagerfeld
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An up-scale collection favoring rich tweeds and tartans from Scotland, Tilda herself lives in Scotland with her partner and two children and has Scottish parents, though she herself was born in England.
While the show was given in a Scottish Castle, photography for the collection was all made by Karl Lagerfeld in the Château d’Écouen near Chantilly in France. Not for the first time has a French Château doubled as a Scottish castle- as the history of French and Scottish nobility are thoroughly intertwined going back all the way to Mary Queen of Scots.
The link to Chanel could not be symbolized any better, either, as tweed was Coco Chanel’s fabric of choice when she introduced the Chanel jacket in the nineteen fifties – an innovation that liberated women again after the Second World War, just as she had done with jersey fabrics at the time of the First World War.
It seems every woman in the world loves Chanel; from the Chanel jacket and suit, to the little black dress, to Chanel perfumes, to watches make-up and jewelry. And the reason is in the end simple: to millions of women for decades Chanel has been simultaneously the personification of both luxury and freedom, through the voice of Coco Chanel imposing itself on the social manners of the twentieth century, and now into the twenty first, expressed through fashion and design.
However Chanel became, and is, today first and foremost an international luxury corporation based on the Chanel brand, and it has been expertly stewarded by the Wertheimer family since Parfums Chanel established in 1924 to commercialize Chanel # 5 perfume. Then she gave away control of development of the brand to Pierre Wertheimer, for perfumes were where the money was even as high fashion collections became the driver of its public image.
Academy award winner actress Tilda Swinton is now the new face of Chanel for the brand’s pre-autumn advertising campaign for its “Metiers d’Art Paris-Édimbourg” collection, by Karl Lagerfeld, the fashion house’s chief designer, which was first revealed in a Scottish Castle last December and advertisements for which will be hitting the fashion magazines in earnest this June.
An up-scale collection favoring rich tweeds and tartans from Scotland, Tilda herself lives in Scotland with her partner and two children and has Scottish parents, though she herself was born in England.
While the show was given in a Scottish Castle, photography for the collection was all made by Karl Lagerfeld in the Château d’Écouen near Chantilly in France. Not for the first time has a French Château doubled as a Scottish castle- as the history of French and Scottish nobility are thoroughly intertwined going back all the way to Mary Queen of Scots.
The link to Chanel could not be symbolized any better, either, as tweed was Coco Chanel’s fabric of choice when she introduced the Chanel jacket in the nineteen fifties – an innovation that liberated women again after the Second World War, just as she had done with jerseys at the time of the First World War.
It seems every woman in the world loves Chanel; from the Chanel jacket and suit, to the little black dress, to Chanel perfumes, to watches make-up and jewelry. And the reason is in the end simple: to millions of women for decades Chanel has been simultaneously the personification of both luxury and freedom, through the voice of Coco Chanel imposing itself on the social manners of the twentieth century expressed through fashion and design.
The famous French fashion house Chanel has been around for over 100 years since its founder Coco Chanel opened her first hat shop at 160 Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris, in the same building as her lover of the day Étienne Balsan. Her genius, and that of the brand she built-up over a lifetime, has been the ability to change with the times on more than one occasion to stay relevant to succeeding generations of customers in often wildly different economic and social conditions.
Today Alain And Gerard Wertheimer, grandsons of Pierre, are the multi-billionaire owners of an international fashion conglomerate that has managed the almost impossible task for a luxury brand of staying continuously relevant to new generations.
In 1982 when Chanel was suffering greatly from a very stodgy image at that time they took an enormous risk and brought in that slayer of icons Karl Lagerfeld to modernize the range and he has done just that. This brought younger generations into the fold and powered a prolonged international expansion that has carried on into Asia in Japan, Korea and China, where it seems like luxury for the rich is as water is for everyone else…
A very private family, the Wertheimers exemplify a number of the contradictions inherent to the fashion industry – where their brilliant organizational skills and financial acumen are certainly not the norm – not too many great fashion empires have survived and flourished for as long as Chanel. As billionaires they also possess an elevated social status in France, particularly when they exercise their passion for horse racing – one of their rare semi-public pursuits, all in a French cultural setting that is of course generally still – culturally at least – quite anti-semitic both in its upper reaches as well as on certain lower class housing estates.
And this is best exemplified by the fact that Coco Chanel was herself a known Nazi sympathizer who at one point tried during the Second World War to have Nazis force the Wertheimer’s ownership stake in her business to be handed over to her. The plan failed, as Pierre Wertheimer was too clever for her, but it was only due to the intervention of Winston Churchill himself that she was not prosecuted after the war in a country where people turned with fury upon those who had collaborated.
In fashion, according to Karl Lagerfeld “the future is six months”. For the Wertheimers the business of fashion has encompassed a much larger time frame…..
