The jacket hangs in the Palais Galliera with the same authority it had in 1954
The jacket hangs in the Palais Galliera with the same authority it had in 1954. Navy bouclé, four pockets, grosgrain trim at the cuffs. The label reads Chanel, in Gabrielle's own hand. What strikes you isn't the cut—though the armhole is higher than anything you'd find now—but the weight. This is a jacket built to move. The chain sewn into the hem keeps the front from riding up when you sit. The silk lining slides over a blouse without catching. It is, in every sense, a piece of engineering disguised as couture.
Chanel didn't invent womenswear. She simply understood that most of it didn't work.
The Founding: 1910–1939
Gabrielle Chanel opened her first shop in 1910, selling hats from a ground-floor space on rue Cambon that she rented with money from Arthur Capel. The hats were plain. This was the point. Paris millinery at the time leaned toward ostrich plumes and silk roses the size of your fist. Chanel offered boaters. Flat brims, grosgrain ribbon, nothing that required an engineering degree to wear on the Métro.
By 1913 she had moved into clothing. The early pieces—jersey day dresses, sailor blouses, wide-leg trousers—read now as almost perversely simple. Jersey was for underwear. Trousers were for men. Chanel wore both, and so did her clients, most of whom had started buying the hats and worked their way down. The logic was consistent: if a woman needed to move through the day without a maid, the clothes had to move withher.
The real shift came after the First World War. Chanel reopened her couture house in 1919 and spent the next decade dismantling the corset, the bustle, the entire baroque scaffold of Edwardian dress. The little black dress appeared in 1926. American Vogue called it "Chanel's Ford"—a uniform, democratic, intended for everyone. She meant it that way. Black had been for mourning. Chanel made it for dinner.
The interwar collections established the house codes: jersey, tweed, monochrome palettes, costume jewellery worn with evening dress. None of this was accidental. Chanel had watched her clients struggle with couture that required help to put on. She built an alternative. By 1939, she employed 4,000 people and dressed half of Paris. Then she closed the house and didn't reopen it for fifteen years.
The Comeback: 1954–1971
Chanel was seventy-one when she staged her return in February 1954. The collection was not well received. French critics called it dated. The silhouette—boxy jackets, knee-length skirts, low heels—looked nothing like Dior's New Look, which had spent the past seven years ruling Paris with a cinched waist and a wide skirt. Chanel thought the New Look was ridiculous. She said so in print. A woman, she argued, shouldn't need to remove her jacket to sit down.
The Americans disagreed with the French critics. Within six months, the suit was everywhere. Life ran it on the cover. Bergdorf Goodman couldn't keep it in stock. What Chanel understood—and what Dior, for all his talent, had missed—was that postwar women were working. They needed clothes that moved between the office and dinner without a costume change. The suit did that. The chain-weighted hem, the braided trim, the four pockets: all of it was functional. The fact that it looked like couture was beside the point.
Chanel spent the next seventeen years refining the same idea. The tweeds got lighter. The jewellery got bigger. The quilted handbag, introduced in 1955, had a chain strap because Chanel was tired of putting her bag down at parties. She died in 1971, still working, still adjusting hemlines in the atelier on a Sunday. The house she left behind was profitable, consistent, and entirely dependent on her.
The Lagerfeld Era: 1983–2019
Karl Lagerfeld's first collection for Chanel, shown in January 1983, opened with a model in a navy suit, white blouse, and a pile of costume pearls. It looked, at first glance, like something Gabrielle might have approved. Then the model turned around. The jacket had no back. Just a keyhole cut from collar to waist, held together with a single grosgrain bow.
This was the Lagerfeld method. He took the codes—tweed, braiding, the camellia, the chain, the double-C logo—and stretched them until they almost broke. A suit might be cut from denim, or PVC, or shredded into fringe. The quilted bag appeared in python, in plexiglass, in versions so small they couldn't hold a phone. The shows moved from the salons on rue Cambon to the Grand Palais, where Lagerfeld built a supermarket, a brasserie, a full-scale rocket ship. He turned Chanel into the most profitable couture house in the world by making it feel like the only place fashion was actually happening.
The trick was that none of it violated the original logic. Lagerfeld understood that Chanel had never been about restraint. Gabrielle wore ropes of pearls with a sweater. She mixed real jewels with glass. She put gold buttons on a jersey dress and called it evening wear. Lagerfeld did the same, only louder. The 2014 Métiers d'Art show in Salzburg featured dirndls cut from Lesage embroidery. The 2018 cruise collection in Paris recreated an Egyptian tomb inside the Grand Palais, complete with a sphinx and hieroglyphs rendered in tweed. It was absurd. It was also completely Chanel.
Lagerfeld died in February 2019, three weeks before his final collection showed in Paris. The house appointed Virginie Viard, his longtime deputy, as creative director the same day.
Viard and the Present
Viard's Chanel is quieter. The Grand Palais sets are gone—partly by choice, partly because the building is closed for renovations until 2025. The shows happen in smaller venues now. The Carreau du Temple. A courtyard on rue Cambon. The clothes have pulled back, too. Viard's suits are softer, cut from lighter tweeds with less structure in the shoulder. The skirts are longer. The jewellery is smaller. She has said, more than once, that she isn't interested in spectacle.
This has not been universally popular. Critics who spent the Lagerfeld years complaining about excess now complain about restraint. The collections are called boring, safe, too commercial. Viard doesn't argue. She has pointed out, correctly, that Chanel is a business, and the business is doing fine. The brand posted revenue of $17.2 billion in 2022. The waiting list for a classic flap bag runs six months in some markets. The clothes sell.
What Viard has done—whether by instinct or strategy—is return the house to something closer to its original proportion. Gabrielle's Chanel was never about the show. It was about the jacket you wore twice a week, the bag you carried until the leather went soft, the black dress you didn't have to think about. Viard makes those things. She makes them well, in quantities that keep the ateliers on rue Cambon working full-time, and she doesn't apologise for the fact that they aren't trying to break the internet.
The question isn't whether this is the right direction. The question is whether Chanel, as an idea, can survive without someone at the helm who wants to burn it down every season. Lagerfeld did that for thirty-six years. Gabrielle did it for sixty. Viard has been in the role for five. She has time.
There is a photograph from 1959, shot by Douglas Kirkland, of Gabrielle Chanel in her apartment above the boutique. She is sitting on a beige sofa, wearing a navy suit and three strands of pearls, surrounded by Coromandel screens and gilt mirrors and a small dog that appears to be asleep. She looks directly at the camera. She does not smile. The room is full of things, but the suit is plain. That was always the point.
