Chanel. Haute Couture 2023 - Paris Fashion Week.

The late French philosopher, Albert Camus famously said, "The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth."   We do live in extraordinary absurd times.  The pandemic that passed after two years of on and off again lockdowns, where the technocrats believed that they could print money to offset a viral outbreak, would be testament to the theorization that the economy is paramount over anything else.  Where the stock market, at the time of the pandemic, rose equally to the death count.  And now in 2024 we are all paying for our misaligned economic and social folly, inflation which is imbedded into our economies, extreme politcal discord and more alarmingly a new Cold War with Russia and China.  

To me Virginie Viard is that society influenced avant-grade designer or at least a restrained one in light of her taking the reigns form the late Karl Lagerfeld in 2019, her collection, although following the Chanel template have been tweaked and in some ways dramatically redefined through Viard's creative nouse.  But, despite referring to Viard's collections as risqué for the famous fashion house, the Parisian designer does, at times, shift her Chanel styles back to their modernist roots, which endowers the collections with a sameness in its visual temperament.  Viard's Fall 2023 couture array for Chanel, unfortunately does prescribe to that homogeneous statement.

Paris has endured its worst riots in over two decades, which comes after a teenager was shot and killed by police.  These major protests, which consisted of younger and poor Parisians turned parts of Paris into a warzone.  Yet, it was the technocrat and neoconservative French President Emmanuel Macron, who in an hyperreal and absurd comment blamed, in a partial statement for the riots, on video games that he believed had "intoxicated" the minds of teenagers of France.  And it has to be reminded that Macron believes fervently that peace though superior firepower in turning Ukraine into a push button war machine with a Nuclear armed power, that being Russia and its aggression towards the Ukrainian people.  Is the solution for peace.  And with this backdrop of social discord, confusion and violence, Paris Fashion Week occurred.  More so 2023 Couture, which only exacerbated the hyperreality of it all.   

How does chaos and turmoil affect luxury fashion brands?  In a lot of ways in can hold a significant impact, sales of items decline when consumer confidence begins to dwindle.  And it is most likely dwindling.  And I wonder if this could be the reason that Viard is reducing her avant-garde stylizations of prior seasons to its original template.  Not as a symbolism in referencing the turmoil our world, that we are currently surrounded by, but the internal battle that is always of the self.  Viard may be looking to simplify her collections, in a possible way of resetting herself within the Chanel brand name.   But, I feel she has attempted this already with prior showings for Chanel.  So, the question has to be also asked.  How far does one go back in its attempt at redefining an artistic concept?  Which in the end, Viard may end up returning back to the Karl Lagerfeld Chanel structure.    

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(A.Glass 2023)