The photograph is famous enough to have become wallpaper
The photograph is famous enough to have become wallpaper. Gabrielle Chanel, 1954, perched at the top of her mirrored staircase on rue Cambon, watching the audience watch her collection. She did not take a bow. She smoked, she watched, and she went back upstairs to the atelier. The runway was a means, not a theatre. What mattered happened before the lights came up.
Chanel opened her first shop in 1910. Not in Paris — in Deauville, a beach town where women wanted something other than corsets and ostrich plumes. She sold hats. Then jersey day dresses, cut like men's sweaters, which was either practical or scandalous depending on who you asked. The clothes worked because they moved. That was the signature, before there was a tweed jacket or a 2.55 bag. She made things you could walk in.
By 1921 she had an atelier on rue Cambon and a perfume named after the address. Chanel No. 5 was not the first fragrance a couturier had sold, but it was the first to smell like aldehydes instead of flowers, and the first to be marketed as though it were a dress — something you chose, not something your husband bought you. Ernest Beaux formulated it. Chanel named it, bottled it in glass that looked like a whisky decanter, and sold it to women who wanted to smell expensive without smelling sweet. It worked. The perfume funded the couture house for decades.
The tailoring came later. Chanel did not invent the boxy jacket, but she refined it in ways that still dictate how women's suiting is cut. The shoulder sits naturally. The sleeve is set high and moves forward slightly, so you can lift your arm without the whole jacket riding up. The hem skims the hip rather than cutting across it. The pockets are real. These are not radical gestures now, but in 1954 — when she reopened the house after fifteen years of exile — they read as a rebuke to Dior's New Look, which required scaffolding and immobility. Chanel's suits required a good fitter and a woman who had somewhere to be.
She worked until she died, in 1971, at the Ritz. The atelier on rue Cambon kept running. The house had been owned by the Wertheimer family since 1924, when Pierre Wertheimer bought a majority stake in the perfume business. Chanel spent much of her life trying to renegotiate that deal and never succeeded. When she died, the Wertheimers owned the name, the No. 5 formula, and the right to decide what happened next.
What happened next was a decade of stasis. The house produced handbags and perfume. The runway collections continued, but they were minor variations on the founder's work, and the press treated them as such. Chanel was heritage, not fashion. Then in 1983, Alain Wertheimer hired Karl Lagerfeld.
Lagerfeld did not revere Gabrielle Chanel. He studied her. He understood that the jacket worked because of the way it was weighted — chain sewn into the hem, so it hung correctly — and that the quilting on the 2.55 was a reference to the jackets stable boys wore at the orphanage where she grew up. He kept those details. He also put the jacket over jeans, showed it with trainers, covered it in graffiti, sent it down the runway on a rocket ship. The archive became a vocabulary, not a template.
Lagerfeld's Chanel was not Gabrielle's Chanel. It was faster, louder, more interested in spectacle. But it was coherent. He worked for the house for thirty-six years, longer than the founder herself, and by the end his shows were less about the clothes than about the performance of making them. A Chanel runway became a destination — a supermarket, a casino, a space station — and the collection became a series of variations on the same theme, executed in different materials. The tweed jacket in bouclé, in denim, in sequins, in leather. The customer knew what she was buying. She just wanted it in a new colour.
When Lagerfeld died in 2019, the house appointed Virginie Viard, who had worked beside him for decades. The decision was logical. Viard knew the atelier, knew the codes, knew how to cut a Chanel jacket. What she did not do was reinvent the house. Her collections have been quieter, more focused on the garment than the set. The tweed jacket still appears every season. So does the chain-strap bag, the camellia, the black-and-white palette. The difference is one of volume. Lagerfeld's Chanel was operatic. Viard's is conversational.
The question is whether that is enough. Chanel remains one of the most profitable luxury houses in the world, largely because of No. 5 and its descendants. The handbags sell. The shoes sell. But the runway has lost some of its authority. Other houses have moved faster, taken sharper risks, redefined what a luxury brand can say. Chanel has stayed in its lane, which is either discipline or caution depending on your view.
What remains from the founder is not the biography — the affair with the Duke of Westminster, the years in exile, the Nazi collaboration that the house spent decades trying to bury. What remains is the system. The jacket still works because the construction works. The 2.55 still functions because someone thought about where a woman keeps her keys. Chanel built a house around the idea that luxury should be useful, and that idea has outlasted every designer who has worked there since.
The risk now is that usefulness is no longer enough. Fashion moves faster than it did in 1954, and customers expect more than a well-cut jacket. They want a point of view. Gabrielle Chanel had one. Lagerfeld had one. Viard has taste and technical skill, but taste is not the same as vision. The house knows how to make a Chanel jacket. The question is whether it still knows why.
