A few months ago, Bruno Pavlovsky from Chanel said: “The ideal system for us is not to hire an art director who delivers the same thing in every house he visits. Too many art directors lose their sense of their own brand“. A sentence which seemed to many to address indirectly Hedi Slimaneas well as an unofficial denial that the designer would actually take the helm of creative direction at Chanel. Indeed, after Dior, Saint Laurent and Celine, directing Chanel would for Slimane be like reaching the top of the mountain after a long and exhausting climb – the mountain in the metaphor being French fashion. Still, according to increasingly vague rumors, the potential union would not have come to fruition for the reasons that everyone imagined: Slimane wants to control everything within a brand, without delegating anything. If it worked at Celine, who after the years of Phoebe Philo built a whole new (and very lucrative) identity for herself, the vast universe of Chanel is much more complex and it is difficult to imagine that the Wertheimer family , who owns the brand, blindly entrusts the keys to his kingdom to Slimane. And it is for this reason that several critics saw in the last collection SS25 de Celine like a dig addressed to Chanel. But in what sense?
Celine’s SS25 women’s collection, designed by Hedi Slimane, is inspired from a French summer in the 60sevoking a nostalgic and refined atmosphere. The collection is inspired by Slimane’s rereading of La Chamade by Françoise Sagan, a story of a woman who renounces a poor lover to return to her rich husbandwith the notes of Nico and the Velvet Underground in the background and various references to French icons of yesteryear like Françoise Hardy and France Gall. The majority of models wear a black silk headband with short fringe and a bob decorated with the Triomphe logo, pleated skirts abound, striped tops with sequin skirts, embroidered twin-sets sprinkled with sequins, delicate Art Deco-style skirts encrusted with crystals, wedding dresses black silk-faille evening, tweed ensembles and collarless jackets, as well as lots of layered necklaces. A type of classic elegance with unmistakably French touches that, indeed, is very reminiscent (with appropriate and conscious degrees of distinction) many of the “signatures” that the public now associates with Chanel – including a four-petal flower top which is not the famous camellia but which is very close. While the allusion is notable in black and white looks with sparkly details, Slimane’s rock legacy emerges in the women’s tuxedo, in some 60s mini dresses, in little leopard furs and leather suits. Very different from usual is the end of the video parade: the old chandeliers of the Château de Compiègne collapsing into a thousand pieces – a very unusual flight for Slimane, in which the most slanderers wanted to read an allusion to something old swept away.
Regardless, whether or not Slimane’s creative choices had any particular intention, whether Chanel considered it and then turned it down, whether or not this collection was inspired by the brand in the first place – all of this is fodder for future speculation and fashion legends. After all, we don’t see any pearls or gold chains or quilted details, just a highly decorated (and very Slimanian) version of the classic little black dress necessary for a complete copy of the Chanel style. In general, Slimane dreamed a lot of distant periods in his latest collections, abandoning the world of indie rock in favor of fantasies about the beginning of the 20th century. Analyzing the previous collections presented by Slimane, in fact, we notice a kind of retrograde movement through time: from the young and aggressive looks of the collections of two years ago, the emphasis gradually shifted towards the years 2000 with the Age of Indieness collection; he gave a nod to the 90s with the SS24 collection, full of grunge touches, then jumped right into the heart of the 60s with the FW24. But if the last collection was an ode to the 60s, the one unveiled today does not share the same clarity of lines, the same vocation so defined for this decade – it seems rather to be a reflection on a French chic type who by necessity is indebted to Chanel as the most important star in a larger firmament of which also Brigitte Bardot, Sylvie Vartan and Anouk Aimée. As always, after all, conspiracy theories appeal because they make us assume hidden stories – only time will tell whether these stories exist or not.
