Chanel presented its Métiers d’art collection in Paris on 7th December 2021 at a stunning new venue designed and imagined by the brand and its Artistic Director Virginie Viard to House the brand’s Métiers d’art, the highly skilled artisans who are the beating heart of the company.
The le19M space was designed by architect Rudy Ricciotti and is now the place where Chanel’s Métiers d’art will be based. Bringing together eleven Maisons who will work and hone their skills in one dedicated location. “It’s a vast, very open space, with a façade adorned with threads of white concrete, a garden, beautiful walkways, and a large gallery where exhibitions will also be held,” explains Virginie Viard.
This collection, as with all Métiers d’art collections before it is designed to celebrate the skills of Chanel’s expert craftsmen and women. An annual offering that pays tribute to the hands of fashion. Initiated by Gabrielle Chanel herself, the Métiers d’art concept brings together several hundred embroiderers, feather workers, paruriers, goldsmiths, pleaters, shoemakers, hatters, milliners, glove makers, tanners, leatherworkers, as well as silk and cashmere experts based in France, Italy, Spain and Scotland.
A celebration of Chanel’s partnerships with experts in their field, their skills and the savoir-faire that is constantly reinvented and developed to share the finest in quality and design with the world.
As early as 1985, Chanel began the process of acquiring these métiers, as a means to ensure their durability, to allow for creative research, to support their development and to train new artisans. Today, the Métiers d’art bring together some forty Maisons d’art and factories, representing more than six thousand, six hundred employees of all generations and backgrounds who work with Chanel and other great names in fashion in France and around the world.
The collection which was showcased within the new space combines modernity with tradition, old with new and the past with the future as traditional and old-age techniques are used to create fashion-forward designs for today’s stylish Chanel woman. It is “very metropolitan yet sophisticated” explained Virginie Viard. With tweed jackets with sweatshirt sleeves, graffiti-style embroidery in coloured beads, voluminous purple and royal-blue knit Bermuda short ensembles and casual coats which are worn open. Combining the traditional elements of fashion with new contemporary details and ways of styling allows the Creative Director to perfectly capture this moment in time.
“Many of the embroideries are inspired by the structure of the building itself, such as those by Montex, which are very graphic and in silver sequins,” Viard said, referring to the new le19M space.
Accessories came in the form of two-tone beige and black Mary-Janes heels and were adorned with large pearls. Long gloves in leather added a sophisticated touch and jewellery was layered and also finished with pearls and the Chanel “Double C”.
Le19M is also a living multidisciplinary space, open to the city and turned towards others, dedicated to weaving a link with its environment, notably through its gallery, la Galerie du 19M.
See more of the collection below:
